https://hiddenpalace.org/w/api.php?action=feedcontributions&feedformat=atom&user=CartridgeCultureHidden Palace - User contributions [en]2026-10-12T09:37:26ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.43.9https://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28_interview)&diff=177408Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28 interview)2026-10-12T02:41:45Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=DanHess.png<br />
|image2=WesHoffman.png<br />
|name=Dan Hess<br />
|name2=Wes Hoffman<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Nintendo 64<br />
|date=2026-05-28<br />
}}<br />
<br />
:''Part 1 conducted on 2026-03-25''<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Dan. This is Ashley. How you doing?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Hi! How are you?<br />
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<br />
'''Good! Doing good over here.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate you giving me your time today.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Hey, no problem.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. ''Pilotwings'' was one of my earliest gaming memories, I think. I loved that. Your music had a big part of that.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That looks good, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Do you hear that a lot?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I did a little bit of research.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It'll go down as historically notable, which it is. Absolutely. Speaking as a historian.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Thanks, Ashley. Appreciate that, man.<br />
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<br />
'''Absolutely. Just to get started here, could you tell us a little bit about growing up in Michigan, I believe?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Sure. What do you want to know about it?<br />
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<br />
'''I guess your musical background and how you first got into music, and your early inspirations.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When were you - oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Real funk.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''No, that whole world is pretty much gone.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Yeah, so sad.<br />
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<br />
'''I always like to say that the interviews are a good way to preserve some of that.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah, maybe, maybe. You hope.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: We hope. Yeah, Detroit was a place to grow up. It really was.<br />
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<br />
'''What was your first introduction to, I guess, synthesizers and/or electronic music?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's incredible that you're largely self-taught. You had the piano training.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. What other kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up, like influences?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's normal to you.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the cultural zeitgeist used to be a little smaller, and everyone was on the same page about it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, you had to be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was also regional.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''With the socks.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
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<br />
'''Especially at the age that you were at.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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."<br />
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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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Skeleton Crew. Okay, gotcha. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pretty persuasive.'''<br />
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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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beyoncé.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Yeah, before that, though - her band.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: It was Destiny's Child.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child. Yeah. Oh my god. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, right. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Baddest of Blues."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Oh my gosh.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Oh, no way.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Of all songs, we recorded our version of "If I Were a Boy."<br />
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'''Man, I would love to see her react to that. I'm sure she'd have a pretty good -'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I would too.<br />
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'''Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: It was later than that.<br />
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'''Was that around the rise of YouTube, when you could start sharing this music easily again, you think?'''<br />
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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."<br />
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'''That's so cool.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''The game magazines and stuff?'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''That's like an email.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: One email. That's the entire game. All the graphics, all the code, all the sound effects -<br />
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'''Right, and to get that all sounding nice and not compress your samples into bit-crush.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Which they crushed the crap out of, because they only gave me 800K.<br />
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'''Yeah, that's nuts.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Right. No, they're really - as you said that, I was like, I wonder if I can think of any examples.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I can think of one.<br />
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'''One. Yeah. What's yours?'''<br />
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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 -<br />
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'''Oh, it's great.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Unbelievable in the groove. Oh my god. When you add the fact that they did that on a Sega Genesis - mind-blowing.<br />
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'''You later worked with Greg, right? Later on.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''It's so good.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Do you have some other ones you would say are groove-based that would come to mind?<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Oh, I remember -<br />
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'''Martin Iveson.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: You remember his name? I don't. I'm horrible at that. That's great.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: A little "funhouse".<br />
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'''A little funhouse, yeah.'''<br />
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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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''No objective. Yeah.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''They actually went down to Texas.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: They moved there.<br />
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'''Whoa.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Oyagi, and I'm going to - I can't remember the other guy's name.<br />
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'''I'm sorry, can you give those two names again? You said Wada and someone else.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Only because my best friends were running the company, right?<br />
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'''Right. That was Paradigm Simulation, that split, and then it was Paradigm.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''You're working remotely.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''The purple box that cost a billion dollars.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Ridiculous. Then in six years they're worth $100 on eBay.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''The software licenses.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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."<br />
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'''They're all scrolling games.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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 -<br />
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'''Like a development software?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''It wasn't just audio software or audio work, it was all kinds of code for the - oh, that's crazy.'''<br />
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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."<br />
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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.<br />
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'''In '94? Oh my gosh. Yeah, no wonder. No one would've been familiar with 3D at all.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No.<br />
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''''94 was super early.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''SGI built the dream team list? SGI was the one that suggested -'''<br />
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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?<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Not really, no.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Original ''Pilotwings'' on Super Nintendo. Yes.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I had a Super Nintendo -<br />
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'''That's crazy, because they're very similar.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Oh, that's all right. All of this feeds into the same story anyways.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
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'''You were working remotely throughout the entire ''Pilotwings'' project. Is that true?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No.<br />
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<br />
'''Oh no, you moved to Texas for the last six weeks.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''Building your libraries.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''Right. There's a date.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah. Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
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'''Oh, that's the Rocket Belt demo.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''From the initial concept art?'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''An hour.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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."<br />
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'''Floaty, fluffy, yeah.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''It is.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
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'''That's smart. Was Birdman the one with something like 20 rejected drafts?'''<br />
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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 -<br />
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<br />
'''Because you were the only ones that could actually -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Modes?'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Yeah, this is the same.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Yeah, that's the menu, I think.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: The real synthy thing that really pops.<br />
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'''Talk about that.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: One second, let me see. I'll find this stuff.<br />
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'''I'm actually going to pull up the ''Pilotwings'' soundtrack on my side.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Number one.<br />
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'''That's the intro. It's the opening theme. Then there's the title demo, which is 20 seconds. Game menu.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Game menu. Which game menu?<br />
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'''That's it. Yeah. Oh, because that one - yeah, that's the menu.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Groove-based in a different way. It's not funky, it's synthy. It's funky, but it's not -<br />
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'''It is a little funky.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Replay.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: The replay one. I get a lot of comments on that.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: ''Wave Race''.<br />
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'''''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 -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Right. They're not overlapping either, a lot of times.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Right. You're not even playing the game at that point.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No. Replay, and the one we talked about - whatever that -<br />
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'''Menu.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''I think that comes across. I think you can hear that.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''You weren't actually mailing anything, because you kept saying "came down with." You were working on your demos -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Good point.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''I hear that.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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''.<br />
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'''That's so cool.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No software. No.<br />
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<br />
'''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?'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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'''Gosh.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Wow.<br />
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'''That's Minoru Arakawa, I'm assuming you're referencing.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
<br />
By the way, this is a 30-year reunion, a 30-year anniversary. Did you know that?<br />
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'''Oh, wow. Really? 30 years? Yeah, 1996. Oh, wow. Okay. That's why I'm doing this interview.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: There you go.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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'''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 -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: You're very good with your questions, brother.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: What do you got?<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Absolutely. Sure.<br />
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<br />
'''Okay, perfect.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I never know. We're just kind of going off the cuff here.<br />
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'''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 -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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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?<br />
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<br />
'''I tend to space too.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Dang it. What were we talking about?<br />
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<br />
'''I'm sorry, that's on me. I'm the interviewer, I shouldn't - remembering where we are in the -'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I'm just saying that I got lucky that I was able to -<br />
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<br />
'''Oh yeah, all the Birdman.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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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?<br />
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<br />
'''Which one?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Birdman?<br />
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<br />
'''Outside of what you already told me?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an incredible story. The 20 or so conservative demos that were rejected - was that before that point or after that point?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you still have any of these old demos, or any of this old material?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: [shakes head] I'm so mad at myself.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
Okay, I got it. Yeah, here it is. Yep, that's it. Isn't that funny?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I like how they made it. It looks so vintage.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's hilarious. Let me see if there's anything I forgot. Oh my god, Cannonball. I forgot about Cannonball.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It happens.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Live and learn.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Just like the Star Search thing, I'm sure no one's actually reading - people don't read these interviews.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. Exactly.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall shipping ''Pilotwings'', or knowing that it shipped? Or was there a launch party or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's super cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, we need to find that out, because he was great. I feel guilty, but remember, it's been 30 years.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yamashiro. Shigeki Yamashiro.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yamashiro. Yes. There you go. It was Yamashiro, Wada-san, and Oyagi-san.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You've talked a lot about Wada. What was working with Oyagi like?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is a little hard. Yeah. It doesn't let up on the simulation aspect at all.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, good point. Yeah. If you're an actual pilot, you have a big old yoke that you can do -'''<br />
<br />
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]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're like, "Ugh."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's not forgiving, man. It's not forgiving at all.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All my hard drive songs, and I have no idea what I did with them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, those ones.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. We're buds. We are forever friends, us three.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Awesome. Sounds great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like every note.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Very much.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Acoustics, and balancing, and all of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Crazy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. That'll be super fun.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, thanks, man. It was a great time for me too. Awesome. Reach out and we'll figure it out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right, I will.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thanks, Dan.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
:''Part 2 conducted on 2026-03-28''<br />
<br />
'''Hey Dan. Sorry for being late. I just got in the door about two minutes ago.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sat down. I get it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. I've got all the questions in chronological order, and I marked where we left off.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would imagine that the impact you had was more widespread than you would imagine. I think we did talk about this last time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We created the emulation software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Possible.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What was possible. The sound system was nonexistent. Hold on one second.<br />
<br />
Franci, going in or out? You going out? Okay. It's a beautiful day here, 82 and just a spectacular evening.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty nice here too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nice.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's only 109 out here. We're okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, geez, dude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's dry heat, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Dry heat. Not a lot of wind sometimes, or too much wind.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We tease all you guys out there for that. "Oh, but it's dry heat."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right. No, trust me, I'd still take Orange County.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It really only feels like 103. Good for you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, pretty much. You really do get used to it after a little while.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I had a lab in Santa Fe for several years where we were making holograms for a 3D display system we invented.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was another thing I was going to ask about. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Figure it out.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''At least it's something you're familiar with.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like origami.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wada-san sounds super cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please. That was going to be one of my questions - just anecdotes about cross-cultural differences.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, yeah. The sound system - I realized, okay, they gave me 800K. Do you even know what K is?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's 1,000 bytes. You had to fit that in 800,000 bytes.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's just for fitting it in the box, guys. You still have to make it and then compress it.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god, it's so bad now. I don't know if you still use it, but it's so bad now.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, exactly.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You shouldn't take that much resource. Google Chrome takes an enormous amount of resources.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Chrome is ridiculous, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's a freaking browser.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no examples.'''<br />
<br />
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. We're like, okay. 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 emulator development systems. Up pop the first screens for ''Super Mario 64''.<br />
<br />
There was not a word said. We were just spellbound. I remember seeing the intro 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was solid.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Give them all the support - we have only one left.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Merit?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On why you guys co-founded Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very dynamic.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes. It's very, very tough to do that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, like a song, and the speech.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A bed.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Fade it out really quick.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I got to get that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back in the studio.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You told me to. You guys had me - yeah, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To do it on the beat.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which could be immediate, or it could be three seconds later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Isn't that the whole point of what they asked you?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He asked me, but she didn't -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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''?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We had sold the company, I think.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Infogrames?'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Boy, we got diverted. I can't even remember whatever -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I asked you about the impact of seeing ''Super Mario 64''.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right, seeing and hearing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes. You could hear what it's capable of when you play ''ToeJam & Earl''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Sure.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It would do a lot more for me, but they didn't. Whatever.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The N64 doesn't have any kind of non-sample capabilities?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's no PSG equivalent? Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Those are just samples?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's interesting. I'm listening.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you end up writing any of the N64's audio documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It seems like you would've been a good fit for that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was he also responsible for the sound recording for the voices?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You know what? I have no idea who did that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?"'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if that's a pit boss.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.'"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
'''[Microsoft SAM voice] One cheese pizza, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, I like that a lot.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Then he was able to fill in the blanks. We had to choose three or four emphases, three or four modes...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Tones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Tones, yeah, emotions, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like excited, bummed.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's crazy.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I thought they were full samples too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, you get to hide it in the walkie-talkie.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. That's what it sounded like. It worked out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On F1, did you interact with Video System very frequently?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm way below all that stuff, but I can tell you some stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was just going to ask.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shoot-'em-ups, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think this was new to them too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way, really?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He went to all these places, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wish I had.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How do you get away with a company vacation that nice? That's my next question.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Aero Fighters Assault''. Oh my god, yeah, that was -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes considers that the worst game they ever worked on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty rough.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Aero Fighters''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you involved in that one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I don't think so.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nope. Different developer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There were some rumors - actually, I was going to ask about it - that Video System -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It is. It's Video System.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this for ''Aero Fighters Assault'' or something?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, god forbid, no. Don't even put my name in the same sentence.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sorry. [laughs]'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, like a milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How long did they give you?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Plus -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Plus I'm hourly, so bring it on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right, absolutely. Take that triple time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think he was producer on that, and director, I think.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They just wanted to push you guys?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Except Wes. Wes wasn't having an amazing time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, really?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like a sound ID list or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''He's literally seeing him every night.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, the freaking co-founder's waiting for you.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You already know where the conversation's going.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Before I could even say anything, Jason tried to blame me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes is behind him.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's in front of me. I saw blood, dude. I saw red.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Everybody's like, "Oh my god."'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You had LaserDisc. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As you're calming down.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back then, hundreds of dollars was a lot more.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
I should probably put a light on here. Hold on, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's so nice. The crickets are chirping.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I love the nature in the background.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can you hear it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I did for a second there. Mostly just seeing the tree in the background is nice.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can we bring him in?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got his voicemail. [texting] He's like, "Can I call you later?" I'm like, "No, interview time."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hey, if he can't make it, no worries. I'm sure he'd be okay with meeting with me individually.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It'd be fun having him here, though.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I was going to say, then I can pit you guys against one another.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, we did, yes.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Marvin Gaye.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned a couple other ones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sly and the Family Stone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've never actually seen Taxi.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Hey, Ashley.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks so much for hopping on.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Check you out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're at an ourdoor plaza... Wow. Oh, I love it. Where are you?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm in Puerto Rico.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beautiful. Gorgeous.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, it's gorgeous. Hey, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much for joining us.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What are we doing here?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Questions I can't answer, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Harrier 2000''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''After that, I couldn't blame you.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They still owe me a lot of money.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez. Yeah, that you'll never get back. I don't think Video System is around anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't think so.<br />
<br />
No, I think that was around the same time they were going through financial troubles. Maybe that was it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about the fake milestone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh gosh, that was really crappy. The fake milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes, yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: This is what happens when you lie in business.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Rude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, just before that was even a thing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Big purple ones.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Big purple ones. Now you can probably put about six of them in your phone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh. What was it, like $20,000 licensing per computer, something like that?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, per seat for a site license, or per-seat license.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Eight years later, all that's outdated. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, we worry about the sound engine last, we just kind of find a way to fit it in.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. Yeah, there was some audio in there too, I think. We'll do the sound first.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got a guy. Got a guy.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Really? No documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You're dealing with assembly code, and there's no debugging system, there's no anything, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was there a developer support line? Could you call someone at Nintendo to be like -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No. We were the developers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's terrifying.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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..."<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. After a month, I'd be partying too.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We were just trying to see a polygon. One polygon. One triangle. Anything, to do something.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my gosh.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that one? I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Makes sense.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. They were the ones that came to you with the idea for a flight simulator game in the first place?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. It was basically a reboot of the original ''Pilotwings''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes, did your SDK get used by all the other companies that were building their games?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, that was all internal.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Everybody did their own SDK?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We didn't sell our technology.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The military's a whole different world when it comes to scale.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. That was cheap. We took out all the competition because we were like a third of their price.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. I'm just imagining a $100,000 seat license too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, I don't even know if we actually gave it a name.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The system before that was AudioWorks and VisionWorks.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: VisionWorks turned into Vega, and Vega turned into - yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it wasn't Fusion 64, was it?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was later. That was a commercial one, right?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That was the one we used to do the commercial stuff. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. You were talking about the -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: In any case -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, continue, I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no wonder they liked you so much.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. That was 120 hours a week of me sleeping under my desk.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my god.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Smelling like - I'm starting to smell myself. That's not good.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would that have been running on an SGI Onyx or something?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. We had to have the - was it the Onyx, or wasn't it the smaller one after that?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The Indigo.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Indigo? I think it was the Onyx. I think it had to be back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Was it the SkyWriter?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would love to see a single screenshot of that egg with a mohawk. That sounds hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Beetle Adventure''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love ''Beetle Adventure''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sent you the ''Egghead Shred'' link, by the way.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, perfect. Oh, look, yes, they're calling it an N64 game, which I wouldn't -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Which it definitely was not.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, gotcha. Whoa. Oh my. Okay.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: 1993, maybe.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We had the motion trackers on the hands, so you could kind of steer with -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. That's so fascinating. Those T-poses.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They actually had the motion trackers on them, and then you just stand in front.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, someone's preserved it. They've got it running. If you wanted to - ooh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That's got to be Aaron Hightower. Probably is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I'll have to look into that a little later. That's hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Nobody did that back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, they were in mono. Fortunately, mono.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. I guess - oh, sorry, go ahead - this is the 30th anniversary of ''Pilotwings''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, it is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. '96, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We're not that old.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no, no. Not at all. You guys are young forever.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You weren't even born when we wrote that game, were you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Fair enough.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think so too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The cars lining up on the road.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think the amount of technology we packed into that game at that time was incredible for what we had to use.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about Jason Rice, and I told him about -<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, did you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I did hear about that. Yeah, that good story.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: He actually blew out his eyeballs, he was screaming so loud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, he did. Yeah, he was like - oh, they can hear me from down the hall.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm still pissed. He had the audacity to try to blame me. What an idiot.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What an idiot.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that's rough. You've got to take responsibility for your actions.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Did you tell him about John Vitale and all the audio?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Some stupid amount of memory. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him we got Gordon, the producer of the studio, to be our vocal talent.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The Scottish guy?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, she did a double role.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: The key thing is -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: She worked for Paradigm.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A hundred percent. "No, I'm just filtering it out for you."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Blow the engine.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I bought a video game. I didn't buy a real-life F1 car driving experience.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does it actually do that in the final game?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, no. They decided that wasn't such a smart idea.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, they backed off really quick on that one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the second year, like, "Okay, I'll make this other company do it and then you can deal with them."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That sounds so fun, to be placing all that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah. Wes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you have any cowboy hats? Oh, I already know the answer. You guys have one.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They did manage to total three cars.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because they weren't used to driving in America?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Driving in general, I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Remember we were supposed to meet them at the sushi restaurant?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, their favorite restaurant, Tokyo or whatever.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Where are they? Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I bet. Oh my god, all the pre-washed, pre-cooked rice we have.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. This is coming from the Japanese grocery store.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the name of that flight simulator?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think it was just called Magic Edge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, it was just Magic Edge. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the company that - I'm sorry, did that ever actually get put into Wonder Eggs, or was that just a proposal?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, good point.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wait, why were they stopping you from leaving?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Because we weren't done yet. We'd only been working for 16 hours.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, they were stopping you from leaving to go back to the hotel?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. Blocking the door?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''These were Namco guys?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Namco guys, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're probably just trying to be helpful.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They were trying to act like they were contributing something to the equation, I guess.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, true, true. Yeah, got to be useful.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I could just see them all going back to the boardroom and doing their reports, flipping through their English-to-Japanese dictionary.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. From 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "He's pulling his pickle."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. In some official logbook somewhere from 1994, "jerking the gherkin."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't really want to tell that story.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's my favorite thing you did to them. It's evil.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this a psychological test? Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, it was, yeah. That was probably the meanest thing we did to them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All in good fun, right? It's an amusement system, it's a ride, you're having fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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"?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no. You're dealing with Americans now. We're a meritocracy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the lawsuit about, if you don't mind? If you're not able to tell, or if you need to speak generally -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, I probably shouldn't be talking about that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That's a good comparison.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. By like 1998, everyone's computers could do half of what SGI machines could anyway, and give it another 10 years.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh wow, I didn't know that. Thank you, I appreciate the insight there.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. I probably should have invested in that company back when they started.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: ''Skies''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't remember ''Skies'' either. What is that?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That might've been after we sold the company.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually, I think - Paradigm. ''Skies'' is an unreleased online - Michael Layne Turner, comics. No, maybe...'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't recognize that.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, we got halfway through a Dreamcast game and then they shut down the Dreamcast.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa, what game was that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you know what staff member I would be able to ask more about that Dreamcast project?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Mike might remember that, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha. Yeah, this would've been '99-ish. I'll ask Mike.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You do another interview with Mike and you've done three of the founders.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, him or maybe Dave Gatchel.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dave Gatchel.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, Dave would know.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We actually had a development Dreamcast, and then they ended up shutting down the hardware before our game came out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, like 2001, I think. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You mean - were you over there? We did a French version, a German version, a Spanish version, and a Japanese version.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were those games - your N64 games - bug-tested by Mario Club in Japan, or did you have local Western bug testers?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No one's ever going to do that.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "I just made five bucks, and now it's a bug."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We couldn't do what they do now.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Triaging.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dude, oh, I'm so glad you brought that up.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Do you remember this? It was the ice cave.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It was a mirror texture thing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, just a random texture. It just happened to look like Jesus. During development they actually saw that it looked like Jesus.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They saw Jesus. Yeah, that was one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Baby Jesus.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did they catch that right away, or did that take a little while?'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It sounds very Hawaiian.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What do you remember about that one, if you don't mind me asking?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They brought in an American team that time. The guy that interfaced was an American. Do you remember him? Tall guy.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That sounds right. He had reddish hair, brownish-blond hair.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren was kind of like their handler when he was in America.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The guy I dealt with told me he wanted the soundtrack to be modeled after - oh god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Guitars?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, yes and no. Who did "Ants Marching"?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Teddy Bears' Picnic"? No.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, not that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You said "Ants Marching," I thought "Teddy Bears' Picnic."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: '90s song. Huge '90s artist. He's from Australia or something.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Dave Matthews.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, right. You'll never get the '90s again. It really was a special time.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you treated your staff well.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We hired good people. Yeah, they were all very talented except for one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very good talent. I got that story. Unless you're talking about Dan.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: All right, guys.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Okay, Ashley, we'll see you.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Bye, bud.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, bud. What do you think of my hair? It's getting kind of crazy, isn't it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love it. It's freaking awesome, dude.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm going with everything. I'm chilling. I'm going with the Big Lebowski look.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Down there it rains randomly, so you never know, right?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, yes. All right, guys, we'll talk to you soon.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, thanks so much.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, that was great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that was cool. Thank you so much for bringing him on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They do. More than music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''My pilot school?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All that stuff. I get hundreds of people telling me that. Literally crazy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so freaking cool.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You're telling me he was a nice guy, right?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super, and super shy. Then we beat Beyoncé. My band beat Beyoncé.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa. Okay, I got the right one then.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''14 songs.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A couple. You had a few. You had ''Spy Hunter'' and -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You should ask Wes about ''Spy Hunter''. Oh my god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, you did. [pulls out Dan's YouTube page] Is it ''Pilotwings 64'' Rocket Belt Demo? No...'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That funky little piece.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Every note.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The "Funky Little Fusion Thing," yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, absolutely. Right off the bat. Yeah, with the pianos and just that really funky bass.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So powering, keeping the beat going. I like that picture of you too. That's a good one.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I like it. That's a good photo. ''Spy Hunter'' on the PS2 - why didn't those tracks get used?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, maybe. I apologize, I should have had the original interview printed up next to me.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow. Good stuff.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Back in the day, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay, we appreciate it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I said, "Dak, I'm thinking of doing it." He's like, "No way, let's do it." I reached out to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're a legend.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's been years, and I haven't done it, so I'm going to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'll be huge. Shoot. When is MAGFest this year?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar. I don't know him personally.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What's his name? Ian?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Ian Cowell, C-O-W-E-L-L. He does all remakes of video game music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, okay, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's a great guy. A ton of fun. He'd be good at it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Please. You'd make a lot of people happy that way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That's funny, man. That's crazy stuff. Really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You literally are a legend.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's nuts.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, man. Thank you, I appreciate that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It might still be on the Wayback Machine.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're part of this planet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, there's no origami anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, there's not. There's no more of this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Hey, you know what? Maybe with this interview, people start paying attention to the pit boss system more.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I doubt it, but it's cool talking about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'll also lean on you for that for Mike and Dave. That'd be pretty cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Dan. This was a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, whenever, whenever. All good. A pleasure, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Have a good night.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You too.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28_interview)&diff=177406Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28 interview)2026-10-12T02:30:08Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=DanHess.png<br />
|image2=WesHoffman.png<br />
|name=Dan Hess<br />
|name2=Wes Hoffman<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Nintendo 64<br />
|date=2026-05-28<br />
}}<br />
<br />
:''Part 1 conducted on 2026-03-25''<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Dan. This is Ashley. How you doing?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hi! How are you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Good! Doing good over here.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate you giving me your time today.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, no problem.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. ''Pilotwings'' was one of my earliest gaming memories, I think. I loved that. Your music had a big part of that.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That looks good, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Do you hear that a lot?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I did a little bit of research.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It'll go down as historically notable, which it is. Absolutely. Speaking as a historian.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, Ashley. Appreciate that, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. Just to get started here, could you tell us a little bit about growing up in Michigan, I believe?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sure. What do you want to know about it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I guess your musical background and how you first got into music, and your early inspirations.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When were you - oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Real funk.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that whole world is pretty much gone.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, so sad.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I always like to say that the interviews are a good way to preserve some of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, maybe, maybe. You hope.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We hope. Yeah, Detroit was a place to grow up. It really was.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was your first introduction to, I guess, synthesizers and/or electronic music?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's incredible that you're largely self-taught. You had the piano training.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. What other kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up, like influences?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's normal to you.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the cultural zeitgeist used to be a little smaller, and everyone was on the same page about it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, you had to be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was also regional.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''With the socks.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Especially at the age that you were at.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Skeleton Crew. Okay, gotcha. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pretty persuasive.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beyoncé.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, before that, though - her band.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It was Destiny's Child.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child. Yeah. Oh my god. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, right. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Baddest of Blues."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Of all songs, we recorded our version of "If I Were a Boy."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man, I would love to see her react to that. I'm sure she'd have a pretty good -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I would too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It was later than that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was that around the rise of YouTube, when you could start sharing this music easily again, you think?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The game magazines and stuff?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's like an email.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: One email. That's the entire game. All the graphics, all the code, all the sound effects -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, and to get that all sounding nice and not compress your samples into bit-crush.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which they crushed the crap out of, because they only gave me 800K.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's nuts.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. No, they're really - as you said that, I was like, I wonder if I can think of any examples.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I can think of one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One. Yeah. What's yours?'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it's great.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Unbelievable in the groove. Oh my god. When you add the fact that they did that on a Sega Genesis - mind-blowing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You later worked with Greg, right? Later on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's so good.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Do you have some other ones you would say are groove-based that would come to mind?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, I remember -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Martin Iveson.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You remember his name? I don't. I'm horrible at that. That's great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: A little "funhouse".<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A little funhouse, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No objective. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They actually went down to Texas.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They moved there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oyagi, and I'm going to - I can't remember the other guy's name.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, can you give those two names again? You said Wada and someone else.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Only because my best friends were running the company, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That was Paradigm Simulation, that split, and then it was Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're working remotely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The purple box that cost a billion dollars.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ridiculous. Then in six years they're worth $100 on eBay.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The software licenses.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're all scrolling games.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like a development software?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It wasn't just audio software or audio work, it was all kinds of code for the - oh, that's crazy.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''In '94? Oh my gosh. Yeah, no wonder. No one would've been familiar with 3D at all.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
''''94 was super early.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''SGI built the dream team list? SGI was the one that suggested -'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Not really, no.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Original ''Pilotwings'' on Super Nintendo. Yes.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I had a Super Nintendo -<br />
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<br />
'''That's crazy, because they're very similar.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Oh, that's all right. All of this feeds into the same story anyways.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
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'''You were working remotely throughout the entire ''Pilotwings'' project. Is that true?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No.<br />
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<br />
'''Oh no, you moved to Texas for the last six weeks.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Building your libraries.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Right. There's a date.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Yeah. Oh, wow.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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?'''<br />
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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?<br />
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'''Oh, that's the Rocket Belt demo.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''From the initial concept art?'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''An hour.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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'''Floaty, fluffy, yeah.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''It is.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
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<br />
'''That's smart. Was Birdman the one with something like 20 rejected drafts?'''<br />
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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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because you were the only ones that could actually -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Modes?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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'''Yeah, this is the same.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Yeah, that's the menu, I think.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: The real synthy thing that really pops.<br />
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'''Talk about that.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: One second, let me see. I'll find this stuff.<br />
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'''I'm actually going to pull up the ''Pilotwings'' soundtrack on my side.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Number one.<br />
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'''That's the intro. It's the opening theme. Then there's the title demo, which is 20 seconds. Game menu.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Game menu. Which game menu?<br />
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'''That's it. Yeah. Oh, because that one - yeah, that's the menu.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Groove-based in a different way. It's not funky, it's synthy. It's funky, but it's not -<br />
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'''It is a little funky.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''Replay.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: The replay one. I get a lot of comments on that.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: ''Wave Race''.<br />
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<br />
'''''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 -'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''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?'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Right. They're not overlapping either, a lot of times.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''Right. You're not even playing the game at that point.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No. Replay, and the one we talked about - whatever that -<br />
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'''Menu.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''I think that comes across. I think you can hear that.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You weren't actually mailing anything, because you kept saying "came down with." You were working on your demos -'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''Good point.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''I hear that.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
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<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No software. No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's Minoru Arakawa, I'm assuming you're referencing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
By the way, this is a 30-year reunion, a 30-year anniversary. Did you know that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow. Really? 30 years? Yeah, 1996. Oh, wow. Okay. That's why I'm doing this interview.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: There you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
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'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You're very good with your questions, brother.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What do you got?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. Sure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, perfect.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I never know. We're just kind of going off the cuff here.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I tend to space too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Dang it. What were we talking about?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, that's on me. I'm the interviewer, I shouldn't - remembering where we are in the -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm just saying that I got lucky that I was able to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, all the Birdman.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Which one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Birdman?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Outside of what you already told me?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an incredible story. The 20 or so conservative demos that were rejected - was that before that point or after that point?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you still have any of these old demos, or any of this old material?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: [shakes head] I'm so mad at myself.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
Okay, I got it. Yeah, here it is. Yep, that's it. Isn't that funny?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I like how they made it. It looks so vintage.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's hilarious. Let me see if there's anything I forgot. Oh my god, Cannonball. I forgot about Cannonball.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It happens.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Live and learn.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Just like the Star Search thing, I'm sure no one's actually reading - people don't read these interviews.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. Exactly.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall shipping ''Pilotwings'', or knowing that it shipped? Or was there a launch party or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's super cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, we need to find that out, because he was great. I feel guilty, but remember, it's been 30 years.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yamashiro. Shigeki Yamashiro.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yamashiro. Yes. There you go. It was Yamashiro, Wada-san, and Oyagi-san.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You've talked a lot about Wada. What was working with Oyagi like?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is a little hard. Yeah. It doesn't let up on the simulation aspect at all.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, good point. Yeah. If you're an actual pilot, you have a big old yoke that you can do -'''<br />
<br />
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]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're like, "Ugh."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's not forgiving, man. It's not forgiving at all.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All my hard drive songs, and I have no idea what I did with them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, those ones.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. We're buds. We are forever friends, us three.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Awesome. Sounds great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like every note.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Very much.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Acoustics, and balancing, and all of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Crazy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. That'll be super fun.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, thanks, man. It was a great time for me too. Awesome. Reach out and we'll figure it out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right, I will.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thanks, Dan.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
:''Part 2 conducted on 2026-03-28''<br />
<br />
'''Hey Dan. Sorry for being late. I just got in the door about two minutes ago.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sat down. I get it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. I've got all the questions in chronological order, and I marked where we left off.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would imagine that the impact you had was more widespread than you would imagine. I think we did talk about this last time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We created the emulation software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Possible.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What was possible. The sound system was nonexistent. Hold on one second.<br />
<br />
Franci, going in or out? You going out? Okay. It's a beautiful day here, 82 and just a spectacular evening.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty nice here too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nice.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's only 109 out here. We're okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, geez, dude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's dry heat, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Dry heat. Not a lot of wind sometimes, or too much wind.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We tease all you guys out there for that. "Oh, but it's dry heat."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right. No, trust me, I'd still take Orange County.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It really only feels like 103. Good for you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, pretty much. You really do get used to it after a little while.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I had a lab in Santa Fe for several years where we were making holograms for a 3D display system we invented.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was another thing I was going to ask about. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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<br />
'''Figure it out.'''<br />
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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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''At least it's something you're familiar with.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like origami.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wada-san sounds super cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please. That was going to be one of my questions - just anecdotes about cross-cultural differences.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, yeah. The sound system - I realized, okay, they gave me 800K. Do you even know what K is?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's 1,000 bytes. You had to fit that in 800,000 bytes.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's just for fitting it in the box, guys. You still have to make it and then compress it.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god, it's so bad now. I don't know if you still use it, but it's so bad now.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, exactly.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You shouldn't take that much resource. Google Chrome takes an enormous amount of resources.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Chrome is ridiculous, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's a freaking browser.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no examples.'''<br />
<br />
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. We're like, okay. 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 emulator development systems. Up pop the first screens for ''Super Mario 64''.<br />
<br />
There was not a word said. We were just spellbound. I remember seeing the intro 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was solid.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Give them all the support - we have only one left.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Merit?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On why you guys co-founded Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very dynamic.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes. It's very, very tough to do that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, like a song, and the speech.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A bed.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Fade it out really quick.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I got to get that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
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<br />
'''Back in the studio.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You told me to. You guys had me - yeah, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To do it on the beat.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which could be immediate, or it could be three seconds later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Isn't that the whole point of what they asked you?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He asked me, but she didn't -<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah, of course.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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''?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: We had sold the company, I think.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Infogrames?'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Boy, we got diverted. I can't even remember whatever -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I asked you about the impact of seeing ''Super Mario 64''.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right, seeing and hearing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes. You could hear what it's capable of when you play ''ToeJam & Earl''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Sure.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It would do a lot more for me, but they didn't. Whatever.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The N64 doesn't have any kind of non-sample capabilities?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's no PSG equivalent? Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Those are just samples?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's interesting. I'm listening.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you end up writing any of the N64's audio documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It seems like you would've been a good fit for that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was he also responsible for the sound recording for the voices?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You know what? I have no idea who did that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?"'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if that's a pit boss.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.'"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
'''[Microsoft SAM voice] One cheese pizza, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, I like that a lot.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Then he was able to fill in the blanks. We had to choose three or four emphases, three or four modes...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Tones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Tones, yeah, emotions, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like excited, bummed.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's crazy.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I thought they were full samples too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, you get to hide it in the walkie-talkie.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. That's what it sounded like. It worked out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On F1, did you interact with Video System very frequently?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm way below all that stuff, but I can tell you some stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was just going to ask.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shoot-'em-ups, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think this was new to them too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way, really?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He went to all these places, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wish I had.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How do you get away with a company vacation that nice? That's my next question.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Aero Fighters Assault''. Oh my god, yeah, that was -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes considers that the worst game they ever worked on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty rough.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Aero Fighters''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you involved in that one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I don't think so.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nope. Different developer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There were some rumors - actually, I was going to ask about it - that Video System -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It is. It's Video System.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this for ''Aero Fighters Assault'' or something?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, god forbid, no. Don't even put my name in the same sentence.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sorry. [laughs]'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, like a milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How long did they give you?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Plus -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Plus I'm hourly, so bring it on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right, absolutely. Take that triple time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think he was producer on that, and director, I think.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They just wanted to push you guys?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Except Wes. Wes wasn't having an amazing time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, really?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like a sound ID list or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''He's literally seeing him every night.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, the freaking co-founder's waiting for you.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You already know where the conversation's going.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Before I could even say anything, Jason tried to blame me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes is behind him.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's in front of me. I saw blood, dude. I saw red.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Everybody's like, "Oh my god."'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''We had LaserDisc. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As you're calming down.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back then, hundreds of dollars was a lot more.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
I should probably put a light on here. Hold on, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's so nice. The crickets are chirping.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I love the nature in the background.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can you hear it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I did for a second there. Mostly just seeing the tree in the background is nice.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can we bring him in?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got his voicemail. [texting] He's like, "Can I call you later?" I'm like, "No, interview time."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hey, if he can't make it, no worries. I'm sure he'd be okay with meeting with me individually.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It'd be fun having him here, though.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I was going to say, then I can pit you guys against one another.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, we did, yes.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Marvin Gaye.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned a couple other ones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sly and the Family Stone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've never actually seen Taxi.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Hey, Ashley.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks so much for hopping on.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Check you out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're at an ourdoor plaza... Wow. Oh, I love it. Where are you?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm in Puerto Rico.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beautiful. Gorgeous.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, it's gorgeous. Hey, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much for joining us.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What are we doing here?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Questions I can't answer, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Harrier 2000''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''After that, I couldn't blame you.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They still owe me a lot of money.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez. Yeah, that you'll never get back. I don't think Video System is around anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't think so.<br />
<br />
No, I think that was around the same time they were going through financial troubles. Maybe that was it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about the fake milestone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh gosh, that was really crappy. The fake milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes, yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: This is what happens when you lie in business.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Rude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, just before that was even a thing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Big purple ones.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Big purple ones. Now you can probably put about six of them in your phone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh. What was it, like $20,000 licensing per computer, something like that?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, per seat for a site license, or per-seat license.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Eight years later, all that's outdated. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, we worry about the sound engine last, we just kind of find a way to fit it in.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. Yeah, there was some audio in there too, I think. We'll do the sound first.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got a guy. Got a guy.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Really? No documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You're dealing with assembly code, and there's no debugging system, there's no anything, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was there a developer support line? Could you call someone at Nintendo to be like -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No. We were the developers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's terrifying.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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..."<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. After a month, I'd be partying too.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We were just trying to see a polygon. One polygon. One triangle. Anything, to do something.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my gosh.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that one? I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Makes sense.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. They were the ones that came to you with the idea for a flight simulator game in the first place?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. It was basically a reboot of the original ''Pilotwings''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes, did your SDK get used by all the other companies that were building their games?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, that was all internal.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Everybody did their own SDK?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We didn't sell our technology.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The military's a whole different world when it comes to scale.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. That was cheap. We took out all the competition because we were like a third of their price.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. I'm just imagining a $100,000 seat license too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, I don't even know if we actually gave it a name.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The system before that was AudioWorks and VisionWorks.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: VisionWorks turned into Vega, and Vega turned into - yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it wasn't Fusion 64, was it?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was later. That was a commercial one, right?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That was the one we used to do the commercial stuff. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. You were talking about the -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: In any case -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, continue, I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no wonder they liked you so much.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. That was 120 hours a week of me sleeping under my desk.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my god.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Smelling like - I'm starting to smell myself. That's not good.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would that have been running on an SGI Onyx or something?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. We had to have the - was it the Onyx, or wasn't it the smaller one after that?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The Indigo.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Indigo? I think it was the Onyx. I think it had to be back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Was it the SkyWriter?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would love to see a single screenshot of that egg with a mohawk. That sounds hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Beetle Adventure''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love ''Beetle Adventure''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sent you the ''Egghead Shred'' link, by the way.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, perfect. Oh, look, yes, they're calling it an N64 game, which I wouldn't -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Which it definitely was not.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, gotcha. Whoa. Oh my. Okay.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: 1993, maybe.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We had the motion trackers on the hands, so you could kind of steer with -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. That's so fascinating. Those T-poses.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They actually had the motion trackers on them, and then you just stand in front.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, someone's preserved it. They've got it running. If you wanted to - ooh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That's got to be Aaron Hightower. Probably is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I'll have to look into that a little later. That's hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Nobody did that back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, they were in mono. Fortunately, mono.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. I guess - oh, sorry, go ahead - this is the 30th anniversary of ''Pilotwings''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, it is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. '96, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We're not that old.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no, no. Not at all. You guys are young forever.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You weren't even born when we wrote that game, were you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Fair enough.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think so too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The cars lining up on the road.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think the amount of technology we packed into that game at that time was incredible for what we had to use.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about Jason Rice, and I told him about -<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, did you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I did hear about that. Yeah, that good story.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: He actually blew out his eyeballs, he was screaming so loud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, he did. Yeah, he was like - oh, they can hear me from down the hall.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm still pissed. He had the audacity to try to blame me. What an idiot.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What an idiot.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that's rough. You've got to take responsibility for your actions.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Did you tell him about John Vitale and all the audio?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Some stupid amount of memory. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him we got Gordon, the producer of the studio, to be our vocal talent.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The Scottish guy?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, she did a double role.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: The key thing is -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: She worked for Paradigm.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A hundred percent. "No, I'm just filtering it out for you."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Blow the engine.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I bought a video game. I didn't buy a real-life F1 car driving experience.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does it actually do that in the final game?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, no. They decided that wasn't such a smart idea.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, they backed off really quick on that one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the second year, like, "Okay, I'll make this other company do it and then you can deal with them."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That sounds so fun, to be placing all that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah. Wes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you have any cowboy hats? Oh, I already know the answer. You guys have one.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They did manage to total three cars.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because they weren't used to driving in America?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Driving in general, I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Remember we were supposed to meet them at the sushi restaurant?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, their favorite restaurant, Tokyo or whatever.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Where are they? Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I bet. Oh my god, all the pre-washed, pre-cooked rice we have.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. This is coming from the Japanese grocery store.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the name of that flight simulator?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think it was just called Magic Edge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, it was just Magic Edge. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the company that - I'm sorry, did that ever actually get put into Wonder Eggs, or was that just a proposal?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, good point.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wait, why were they stopping you from leaving?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Because we weren't done yet. We'd only been working for 16 hours.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, they were stopping you from leaving to go back to the hotel?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. Blocking the door?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''These were Namco guys?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Namco guys, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're probably just trying to be helpful.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They were trying to act like they were contributing something to the equation, I guess.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, true, true. Yeah, got to be useful.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I could just see them all going back to the boardroom and doing their reports, flipping through their English-to-Japanese dictionary.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. From 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "He's pulling his pickle."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. In some official logbook somewhere from 1994, "jerking the gherkin."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't really want to tell that story.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's my favorite thing you did to them. It's evil.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this a psychological test? Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, it was, yeah. That was probably the meanest thing we did to them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All in good fun, right? It's an amusement system, it's a ride, you're having fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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"?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no. You're dealing with Americans now. We're a meritocracy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the lawsuit about, if you don't mind? If you're not able to tell, or if you need to speak generally -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, I probably shouldn't be talking about that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That's a good comparison.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. By like 1998, everyone's computers could do half of what SGI machines could anyway, and give it another 10 years.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh wow, I didn't know that. Thank you, I appreciate the insight there.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. I probably should have invested in that company back when they started.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: ''Skies''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't remember ''Skies'' either. What is that?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That might've been after we sold the company.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually, I think - Paradigm. ''Skies'' is an unreleased online - Michael Layne Turner, comics. No, maybe...'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't recognize that.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, we got halfway through a Dreamcast game and then they shut down the Dreamcast.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa, what game was that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you know what staff member I would be able to ask more about that Dreamcast project?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Mike might remember that, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha. Yeah, this would've been '99-ish. I'll ask Mike.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You do another interview with Mike and you've done three of the founders.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, him or maybe Dave Gatchel.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dave Gatchel.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, Dave would know.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We actually had a development Dreamcast, and then they ended up shutting down the hardware before our game came out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, like 2001, I think. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You mean - were you over there? We did a French version, a German version, a Spanish version, and a Japanese version.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were those games - your N64 games - bug-tested by Mario Club in Japan, or did you have local Western bug testers?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No one's ever going to do that.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "I just made five bucks, and now it's a bug."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We couldn't do what they do now.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Triaging.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dude, oh, I'm so glad you brought that up.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Do you remember this? It was the ice cave.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It was a mirror texture thing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, just a random texture. It just happened to look like Jesus. During development they actually saw that it looked like Jesus.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They saw Jesus. Yeah, that was one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Baby Jesus.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did they catch that right away, or did that take a little while?'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It sounds very Hawaiian.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What do you remember about that one, if you don't mind me asking?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They brought in an American team that time. The guy that interfaced was an American. Do you remember him? Tall guy.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That sounds right. He had reddish hair, brownish-blond hair.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren was kind of like their handler when he was in America.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The guy I dealt with told me he wanted the soundtrack to be modeled after - oh god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Guitars?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, yes and no. Who did "Ants Marching"?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Teddy Bears' Picnic"? No.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, not that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You said "Ants Marching," I thought "Teddy Bears' Picnic."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: '90s song. Huge '90s artist. He's from Australia or something.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Dave Matthews.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, right. You'll never get the '90s again. It really was a special time.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you treated your staff well.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We hired good people. Yeah, they were all very talented except for one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very good talent. I got that story. Unless you're talking about Dan.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: All right, guys.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Okay, Ashley, we'll see you.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Bye, bud.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, bud. What do you think of my hair? It's getting kind of crazy, isn't it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love it. It's freaking awesome, dude.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm going with everything. I'm chilling. I'm going with the Big Lebowski look.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Down there it rains randomly, so you never know, right?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, yes. All right, guys, we'll talk to you soon.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, thanks so much.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, that was great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that was cool. Thank you so much for bringing him on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They do. More than music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''My pilot school?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All that stuff. I get hundreds of people telling me that. Literally crazy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so freaking cool.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You're telling me he was a nice guy, right?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super, and super shy. Then we beat Beyoncé. My band beat Beyoncé.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa. Okay, I got the right one then.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''14 songs.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A couple. You had a few. You had ''Spy Hunter'' and -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You should ask Wes about ''Spy Hunter''. Oh my god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, you did. [pulls out Dan's YouTube page] Is it ''Pilotwings 64'' Rocket Belt Demo? No...'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That funky little piece.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Every note.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The "Funky Little Fusion Thing," yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, absolutely. Right off the bat. Yeah, with the pianos and just that really funky bass.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So powering, keeping the beat going. I like that picture of you too. That's a good one.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I like it. That's a good photo. ''Spy Hunter'' on the PS2 - why didn't those tracks get used?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, maybe. I apologize, I should have had the original interview printed up next to me.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow. Good stuff.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Back in the day, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay, we appreciate it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I said, "Dak, I'm thinking of doing it." He's like, "No way, let's do it." I reached out to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're a legend.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's been years, and I haven't done it, so I'm going to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'll be huge. Shoot. When is MAGFest this year?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar. I don't know him personally.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What's his name? Ian?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Ian Cowell, C-O-W-E-L-L. He does all remakes of video game music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, okay, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's a great guy. A ton of fun. He'd be good at it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Please. You'd make a lot of people happy that way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That's funny, man. That's crazy stuff. Really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You literally are a legend.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's nuts.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, man. Thank you, I appreciate that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It might still be on the Wayback Machine.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're part of this planet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, there's no origami anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, there's not. There's no more of this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Hey, you know what? Maybe with this interview, people start paying attention to the pit boss system more.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I doubt it, but it's cool talking about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'll also lean on you for that for Mike and Dave. That'd be pretty cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Dan. This was a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, whenever, whenever. All good. A pleasure, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Have a good night.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You too.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28_interview)&diff=177403Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28 interview)2026-10-12T02:24:35Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=DanHess.png<br />
|image2=WesHoffman.png<br />
|name=Dan Hess<br />
|name2=Wes Hoffman<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Nintendo 64<br />
|date=2026-05-28<br />
}}<br />
<br />
:''Part 1 conducted on 2026-03-25''<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Dan. This is Ashley. How you doing?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hi! How are you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Good! Doing good over here.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate you giving me your time today.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, no problem.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. ''Pilotwings'' was one of my earliest gaming memories, I think. I loved that. Your music had a big part of that.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That looks good, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Do you hear that a lot?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I did a little bit of research.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It'll go down as historically notable, which it is. Absolutely. Speaking as a historian.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, Ashley. Appreciate that, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. Just to get started here, could you tell us a little bit about growing up in Michigan, I believe?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sure. What do you want to know about it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I guess your musical background and how you first got into music, and your early inspirations.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When were you - oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Real funk.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that whole world is pretty much gone.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, so sad.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I always like to say that the interviews are a good way to preserve some of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, maybe, maybe. You hope.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We hope. Yeah, Detroit was a place to grow up. It really was.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was your first introduction to, I guess, synthesizers and/or electronic music?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's incredible that you're largely self-taught. You had the piano training.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. What other kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up, like influences?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's normal to you.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the cultural zeitgeist used to be a little smaller, and everyone was on the same page about it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, you had to be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was also regional.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''With the socks.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Especially at the age that you were at.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Skeleton Crew. Okay, gotcha. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pretty persuasive.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beyoncé.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, before that, though - her band.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It was Destiny's Child.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child. Yeah. Oh my god. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, right. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Baddest of Blues."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Of all songs, we recorded our version of "If I Were a Boy."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man, I would love to see her react to that. I'm sure she'd have a pretty good -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I would too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It was later than that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was that around the rise of YouTube, when you could start sharing this music easily again, you think?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The game magazines and stuff?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's like an email.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: One email. That's the entire game. All the graphics, all the code, all the sound effects -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, and to get that all sounding nice and not compress your samples into bit-crush.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which they crushed the crap out of, because they only gave me 800K.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's nuts.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. No, they're really - as you said that, I was like, I wonder if I can think of any examples.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I can think of one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One. Yeah. What's yours?'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it's great.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Unbelievable in the groove. Oh my god. When you add the fact that they did that on a Sega Genesis - mind-blowing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You later worked with Greg, right? Later on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's so good.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Do you have some other ones you would say are groove-based that would come to mind?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, I remember -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Martin Iveson.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You remember his name? I don't. I'm horrible at that. That's great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: A little "funhouse".<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A little funhouse, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No objective. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They actually went down to Texas.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They moved there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oyagi, and I'm going to - I can't remember the other guy's name.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, can you give those two names again? You said Wada and someone else.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Only because my best friends were running the company, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That was Paradigm Simulation, that split, and then it was Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're working remotely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The purple box that cost a billion dollars.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ridiculous. Then in six years they're worth $100 on eBay.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The software licenses.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're all scrolling games.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like a development software?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It wasn't just audio software or audio work, it was all kinds of code for the - oh, that's crazy.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''In '94? Oh my gosh. Yeah, no wonder. No one would've been familiar with 3D at all.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
''''94 was super early.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''SGI built the dream team list? SGI was the one that suggested -'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Not really, no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Original ''Pilotwings'' on Super Nintendo. Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I had a Super Nintendo -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's crazy, because they're very similar.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's all right. All of this feeds into the same story anyways.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You were working remotely throughout the entire ''Pilotwings'' project. Is that true?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, you moved to Texas for the last six weeks.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Building your libraries.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. There's a date.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's the Rocket Belt demo.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''From the initial concept art?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''An hour.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Floaty, fluffy, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's smart. Was Birdman the one with something like 20 rejected drafts?'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because you were the only ones that could actually -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Modes?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, this is the same.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's the menu, I think.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The real synthy thing that really pops.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Talk about that.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: One second, let me see. I'll find this stuff.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm actually going to pull up the ''Pilotwings'' soundtrack on my side.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Number one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's the intro. It's the opening theme. Then there's the title demo, which is 20 seconds. Game menu.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Game menu. Which game menu?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's it. Yeah. Oh, because that one - yeah, that's the menu.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Groove-based in a different way. It's not funky, it's synthy. It's funky, but it's not -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is a little funky.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Replay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The replay one. I get a lot of comments on that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Wave Race''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. They're not overlapping either, a lot of times.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You're not even playing the game at that point.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No. Replay, and the one we talked about - whatever that -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Menu.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think that comes across. I think you can hear that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You weren't actually mailing anything, because you kept saying "came down with." You were working on your demos -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Good point.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I hear that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No software. No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's Minoru Arakawa, I'm assuming you're referencing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
By the way, this is a 30-year reunion, a 30-year anniversary. Did you know that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow. Really? 30 years? Yeah, 1996. Oh, wow. Okay. That's why I'm doing this interview.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: There you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You're very good with your questions, brother.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What do you got?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. Sure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, perfect.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I never know. We're just kind of going off the cuff here.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I tend to space too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Dang it. What were we talking about?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, that's on me. I'm the interviewer, I shouldn't - remembering where we are in the -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm just saying that I got lucky that I was able to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, all the Birdman.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Which one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Birdman?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Outside of what you already told me?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an incredible story. The 20 or so conservative demos that were rejected - was that before that point or after that point?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you still have any of these old demos, or any of this old material?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: [shakes head] I'm so mad at myself.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
Okay, I got it. Yeah, here it is. Yep, that's it. Isn't that funny?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I like how they made it. It looks so vintage.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's hilarious. Let me see if there's anything I forgot. Oh my god, Cannonball. I forgot about Cannonball.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It happens.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Live and learn.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Just like the Star Search thing, I'm sure no one's actually reading - people don't read these interviews.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. Exactly.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall shipping ''Pilotwings'', or knowing that it shipped? Or was there a launch party or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's super cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, we need to find that out, because he was great. I feel guilty, but remember, it's been 30 years.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yamashiro. Shigeki Yamashiro.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yamashiro. Yes. There you go. It was Yamashiro, Wada-san, and Oyagi-san.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You've talked a lot about Wada. What was working with Oyagi like?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is a little hard. Yeah. It doesn't let up on the simulation aspect at all.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, good point. Yeah. If you're an actual pilot, you have a big old yoke that you can do -'''<br />
<br />
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]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're like, "Ugh."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's not forgiving, man. It's not forgiving at all.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All my hard drive songs, and I have no idea what I did with them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, those ones.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. We're buds. We are forever friends, us three.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Awesome. Sounds great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like every note.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Very much.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Acoustics, and balancing, and all of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Crazy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. That'll be super fun.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, thanks, man. It was a great time for me too. Awesome. Reach out and we'll figure it out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right, I will.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thanks, Dan.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
:''Part 2 conducted on 2026-03-28''<br />
<br />
'''Hey Dan. Sorry for being late. I just got in the door about two minutes ago.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sat down. I get it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. I've got all the questions in chronological order, and I marked where we left off.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would imagine that the impact you had was more widespread than you would imagine. I think we did talk about this last time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We created the emulation software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Possible.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What was possible. The sound system was nonexistent. Hold on one second.<br />
<br />
Franci, going in or out? You going out? Okay. It's a beautiful day here, 82 and just a spectacular evening.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty nice here too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nice.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's only 109 out here. We're okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, geez, dude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's dry heat, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Dry heat. Not a lot of wind sometimes, or too much wind.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We tease all you guys out there for that. "Oh, but it's dry heat."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right. No, trust me, I'd still take Orange County.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It really only feels like 103. Good for you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, pretty much. You really do get used to it after a little while.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I had a lab in Santa Fe for several years where we were making holograms for a 3D display system we invented.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was another thing I was going to ask about. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Figure it out.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''At least it's something you're familiar with.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like origami.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wada-san sounds super cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please. That was going to be one of my questions - just anecdotes about cross-cultural differences.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, yeah. The sound system - I realized, okay, they gave me 800K. Do you even know what K is?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's 1,000 bytes. You had to fit that in 800,000 bytes.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's just for fitting it in the box, guys. You still have to make it and then compress it.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god, it's so bad now. I don't know if you still use it, but it's so bad now.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, exactly.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You shouldn't take that much resource. Google Chrome takes an enormous amount of resources.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Chrome is ridiculous, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's a freaking browser.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no examples.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We're like, okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like it's a bomb.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Development systems.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was solid.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Give them all the support - we have only one left.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Merit?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On why you guys co-founded Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very dynamic.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes. It's very, very tough to do that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, like a song, and the speech.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A bed.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Fade it out really quick.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I got to get that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back in the studio.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You told me to. You guys had me - yeah, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To do it on the beat.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which could be immediate, or it could be three seconds later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Isn't that the whole point of what they asked you?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He asked me, but she didn't -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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''?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We had sold the company, I think.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Infogrames?'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Boy, we got diverted. I can't even remember whatever -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I asked you about the impact of seeing ''Super Mario 64''.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right, seeing and hearing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes. You could hear what it's capable of when you play ''ToeJam & Earl''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Sure.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It would do a lot more for me, but they didn't. Whatever.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The N64 doesn't have any kind of non-sample capabilities?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's no PSG equivalent? Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Those are just samples?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's interesting. I'm listening.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you end up writing any of the N64's audio documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It seems like you would've been a good fit for that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was he also responsible for the sound recording for the voices?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You know what? I have no idea who did that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?"'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if that's a pit boss.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.'"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
'''[Microsoft SAM voice] One cheese pizza, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, I like that a lot.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Then he was able to fill in the blanks. We had to choose three or four emphases, three or four modes...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Tones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Tones, yeah, emotions, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like excited, bummed.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's crazy.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I thought they were full samples too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, you get to hide it in the walkie-talkie.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. That's what it sounded like. It worked out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On F1, did you interact with Video System very frequently?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm way below all that stuff, but I can tell you some stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was just going to ask.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shoot-'em-ups, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think this was new to them too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way, really?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He went to all these places, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wish I had.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How do you get away with a company vacation that nice? That's my next question.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Aero Fighters Assault''. Oh my god, yeah, that was -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes considers that the worst game they ever worked on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty rough.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Aero Fighters''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you involved in that one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I don't think so.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nope. Different developer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There were some rumors - actually, I was going to ask about it - that Video System -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It is. It's Video System.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this for ''Aero Fighters Assault'' or something?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, god forbid, no. Don't even put my name in the same sentence.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sorry. [laughs]'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, like a milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How long did they give you?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Plus -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Plus I'm hourly, so bring it on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right, absolutely. Take that triple time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think he was producer on that, and director, I think.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They just wanted to push you guys?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Except Wes. Wes wasn't having an amazing time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, really?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like a sound ID list or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''He's literally seeing him every night.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, the freaking co-founder's waiting for you.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You already know where the conversation's going.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Before I could even say anything, Jason tried to blame me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes is behind him.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's in front of me. I saw blood, dude. I saw red.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Everybody's like, "Oh my god."'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''We had LaserDisc. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As you're calming down.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back then, hundreds of dollars was a lot more.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
I should probably put a light on here. Hold on, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's so nice. The crickets are chirping.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I love the nature in the background.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can you hear it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I did for a second there. Mostly just seeing the tree in the background is nice.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can we bring him in?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got his voicemail. [texting] He's like, "Can I call you later?" I'm like, "No, interview time."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hey, if he can't make it, no worries. I'm sure he'd be okay with meeting with me individually.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It'd be fun having him here, though.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I was going to say, then I can pit you guys against one another.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, we did, yes.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Marvin Gaye.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned a couple other ones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sly and the Family Stone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've never actually seen Taxi.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Hey, Ashley.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks so much for hopping on.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Check you out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're at an ourdoor plaza... Wow. Oh, I love it. Where are you?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm in Puerto Rico.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beautiful. Gorgeous.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, it's gorgeous. Hey, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much for joining us.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What are we doing here?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Questions I can't answer, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Harrier 2000''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''After that, I couldn't blame you.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They still owe me a lot of money.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez. Yeah, that you'll never get back. I don't think Video System is around anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't think so.<br />
<br />
No, I think that was around the same time they were going through financial troubles. Maybe that was it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about the fake milestone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh gosh, that was really crappy. The fake milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes, yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: This is what happens when you lie in business.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Rude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, just before that was even a thing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Big purple ones.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Big purple ones. Now you can probably put about six of them in your phone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh. What was it, like $20,000 licensing per computer, something like that?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, per seat for a site license, or per-seat license.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Eight years later, all that's outdated. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, we worry about the sound engine last, we just kind of find a way to fit it in.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. Yeah, there was some audio in there too, I think. We'll do the sound first.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got a guy. Got a guy.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Really? No documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You're dealing with assembly code, and there's no debugging system, there's no anything, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was there a developer support line? Could you call someone at Nintendo to be like -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No. We were the developers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's terrifying.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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..."<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. After a month, I'd be partying too.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We were just trying to see a polygon. One polygon. One triangle. Anything, to do something.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my gosh.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that one? I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Makes sense.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. They were the ones that came to you with the idea for a flight simulator game in the first place?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. It was basically a reboot of the original ''Pilotwings''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes, did your SDK get used by all the other companies that were building their games?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, that was all internal.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Everybody did their own SDK?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We didn't sell our technology.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The military's a whole different world when it comes to scale.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. That was cheap. We took out all the competition because we were like a third of their price.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. I'm just imagining a $100,000 seat license too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, I don't even know if we actually gave it a name.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The system before that was AudioWorks and VisionWorks.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: VisionWorks turned into Vega, and Vega turned into - yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it wasn't Fusion 64, was it?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was later. That was a commercial one, right?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That was the one we used to do the commercial stuff. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. You were talking about the -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: In any case -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, continue, I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no wonder they liked you so much.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. That was 120 hours a week of me sleeping under my desk.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my god.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Smelling like - I'm starting to smell myself. That's not good.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would that have been running on an SGI Onyx or something?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. We had to have the - was it the Onyx, or wasn't it the smaller one after that?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The Indigo.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Indigo? I think it was the Onyx. I think it had to be back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Was it the SkyWriter?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would love to see a single screenshot of that egg with a mohawk. That sounds hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Beetle Adventure''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love ''Beetle Adventure''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sent you the ''Egghead Shred'' link, by the way.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, perfect. Oh, look, yes, they're calling it an N64 game, which I wouldn't -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Which it definitely was not.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, gotcha. Whoa. Oh my. Okay.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: 1993, maybe.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We had the motion trackers on the hands, so you could kind of steer with -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. That's so fascinating. Those T-poses.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They actually had the motion trackers on them, and then you just stand in front.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, someone's preserved it. They've got it running. If you wanted to - ooh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That's got to be Aaron Hightower. Probably is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I'll have to look into that a little later. That's hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Nobody did that back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, they were in mono. Fortunately, mono.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. I guess - oh, sorry, go ahead - this is the 30th anniversary of ''Pilotwings''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, it is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. '96, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We're not that old.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no, no. Not at all. You guys are young forever.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You weren't even born when we wrote that game, were you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Fair enough.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think so too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The cars lining up on the road.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think the amount of technology we packed into that game at that time was incredible for what we had to use.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about Jason Rice, and I told him about -<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, did you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I did hear about that. Yeah, that good story.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: He actually blew out his eyeballs, he was screaming so loud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, he did. Yeah, he was like - oh, they can hear me from down the hall.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm still pissed. He had the audacity to try to blame me. What an idiot.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What an idiot.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that's rough. You've got to take responsibility for your actions.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Did you tell him about John Vitale and all the audio?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Some stupid amount of memory. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him we got Gordon, the producer of the studio, to be our vocal talent.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The Scottish guy?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, she did a double role.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: The key thing is -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: She worked for Paradigm.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A hundred percent. "No, I'm just filtering it out for you."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Blow the engine.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I bought a video game. I didn't buy a real-life F1 car driving experience.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does it actually do that in the final game?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, no. They decided that wasn't such a smart idea.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, they backed off really quick on that one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the second year, like, "Okay, I'll make this other company do it and then you can deal with them."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That sounds so fun, to be placing all that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah. Wes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you have any cowboy hats? Oh, I already know the answer. You guys have one.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They did manage to total three cars.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because they weren't used to driving in America?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Driving in general, I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Remember we were supposed to meet them at the sushi restaurant?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, their favorite restaurant, Tokyo or whatever.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Where are they? Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I bet. Oh my god, all the pre-washed, pre-cooked rice we have.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. This is coming from the Japanese grocery store.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the name of that flight simulator?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think it was just called Magic Edge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, it was just Magic Edge. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the company that - I'm sorry, did that ever actually get put into Wonder Eggs, or was that just a proposal?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, good point.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wait, why were they stopping you from leaving?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Because we weren't done yet. We'd only been working for 16 hours.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, they were stopping you from leaving to go back to the hotel?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. Blocking the door?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''These were Namco guys?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Namco guys, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're probably just trying to be helpful.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They were trying to act like they were contributing something to the equation, I guess.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, true, true. Yeah, got to be useful.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I could just see them all going back to the boardroom and doing their reports, flipping through their English-to-Japanese dictionary.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. From 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "He's pulling his pickle."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. In some official logbook somewhere from 1994, "jerking the gherkin."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't really want to tell that story.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's my favorite thing you did to them. It's evil.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this a psychological test? Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, it was, yeah. That was probably the meanest thing we did to them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All in good fun, right? It's an amusement system, it's a ride, you're having fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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"?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no. You're dealing with Americans now. We're a meritocracy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the lawsuit about, if you don't mind? If you're not able to tell, or if you need to speak generally -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, I probably shouldn't be talking about that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That's a good comparison.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. By like 1998, everyone's computers could do half of what SGI machines could anyway, and give it another 10 years.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh wow, I didn't know that. Thank you, I appreciate the insight there.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. I probably should have invested in that company back when they started.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: ''Skies''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't remember ''Skies'' either. What is that?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That might've been after we sold the company.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually, I think - Paradigm. ''Skies'' is an unreleased online - Michael Layne Turner, comics. No, maybe...'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't recognize that.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, we got halfway through a Dreamcast game and then they shut down the Dreamcast.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa, what game was that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you know what staff member I would be able to ask more about that Dreamcast project?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Mike might remember that, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha. Yeah, this would've been '99-ish. I'll ask Mike.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You do another interview with Mike and you've done three of the founders.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, him or maybe Dave Gatchel.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dave Gatchel.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, Dave would know.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We actually had a development Dreamcast, and then they ended up shutting down the hardware before our game came out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, like 2001, I think. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You mean - were you over there? We did a French version, a German version, a Spanish version, and a Japanese version.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were those games - your N64 games - bug-tested by Mario Club in Japan, or did you have local Western bug testers?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No one's ever going to do that.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "I just made five bucks, and now it's a bug."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We couldn't do what they do now.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Triaging.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dude, oh, I'm so glad you brought that up.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Do you remember this? It was the ice cave.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It was a mirror texture thing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, just a random texture. It just happened to look like Jesus. During development they actually saw that it looked like Jesus.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They saw Jesus. Yeah, that was one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Baby Jesus.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did they catch that right away, or did that take a little while?'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It sounds very Hawaiian.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What do you remember about that one, if you don't mind me asking?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They brought in an American team that time. The guy that interfaced was an American. Do you remember him? Tall guy.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That sounds right. He had reddish hair, brownish-blond hair.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren was kind of like their handler when he was in America.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The guy I dealt with told me he wanted the soundtrack to be modeled after - oh god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Guitars?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, yes and no. Who did "Ants Marching"?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Teddy Bears' Picnic"? No.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, not that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You said "Ants Marching," I thought "Teddy Bears' Picnic."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: '90s song. Huge '90s artist. He's from Australia or something.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Dave Matthews.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, right. You'll never get the '90s again. It really was a special time.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you treated your staff well.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We hired good people. Yeah, they were all very talented except for one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very good talent. I got that story. Unless you're talking about Dan.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: All right, guys.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Okay, Ashley, we'll see you.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Bye, bud.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, bud. What do you think of my hair? It's getting kind of crazy, isn't it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love it. It's freaking awesome, dude.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm going with everything. I'm chilling. I'm going with the Big Lebowski look.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Down there it rains randomly, so you never know, right?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, yes. All right, guys, we'll talk to you soon.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, thanks so much.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, that was great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that was cool. Thank you so much for bringing him on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They do. More than music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''My pilot school?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All that stuff. I get hundreds of people telling me that. Literally crazy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so freaking cool.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You're telling me he was a nice guy, right?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super, and super shy. Then we beat Beyoncé. My band beat Beyoncé.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa. Okay, I got the right one then.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''14 songs.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A couple. You had a few. You had ''Spy Hunter'' and -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You should ask Wes about ''Spy Hunter''. Oh my god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, you did. [pulls out Dan's YouTube page] Is it ''Pilotwings 64'' Rocket Belt Demo? No...'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That funky little piece.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Every note.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The "Funky Little Fusion Thing," yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, absolutely. Right off the bat. Yeah, with the pianos and just that really funky bass.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So powering, keeping the beat going. I like that picture of you too. That's a good one.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I like it. That's a good photo. ''Spy Hunter'' on the PS2 - why didn't those tracks get used?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, maybe. I apologize, I should have had the original interview printed up next to me.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow. Good stuff.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Back in the day, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay, we appreciate it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I said, "Dak, I'm thinking of doing it." He's like, "No way, let's do it." I reached out to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're a legend.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's been years, and I haven't done it, so I'm going to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'll be huge. Shoot. When is MAGFest this year?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar. I don't know him personally.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What's his name? Ian?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Ian Cowell, C-O-W-E-L-L. He does all remakes of video game music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, okay, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's a great guy. A ton of fun. He'd be good at it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Please. You'd make a lot of people happy that way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That's funny, man. That's crazy stuff. Really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You literally are a legend.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's nuts.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, man. Thank you, I appreciate that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It might still be on the Wayback Machine.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're part of this planet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, there's no origami anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, there's not. There's no more of this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Hey, you know what? Maybe with this interview, people start paying attention to the pit boss system more.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I doubt it, but it's cool talking about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'll also lean on you for that for Mike and Dave. That'd be pretty cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Dan. This was a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, whenever, whenever. All good. A pleasure, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Have a good night.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You too.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Craig_Stitt_(interview)&diff=177372Craig Stitt (interview)2026-10-11T23:18:01Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Changed redirect target from Craig Stitt (2025 interview) to Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)</p>
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<div>#REDIRECT [[Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Craig_Stitt_(2025_interview)&diff=177371Craig Stitt (2025 interview)2026-10-11T23:17:49Z<p>CartridgeCulture: CartridgeCulture moved page Craig Stitt (2025 interview) to Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)</p>
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<div>#REDIRECT [[Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02_interview)&diff=177370Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)2026-10-11T23:17:49Z<p>CartridgeCulture: CartridgeCulture moved page Craig Stitt (2025 interview) to Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)</p>
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<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=CraigStitt-2.jpg<br />
|name=Craig Stitt<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Sega<br />
|date=2025-08-02<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hi! Good morning Mr. Stitt! First off, it's an absolute pleasure to speak with you. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little nervous in speaking with you.'''<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt: No worries. It's my pleasure. It really, really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Alright, and again, thank you so much for giving me your time like this. That's very kind of you.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no, I enjoy sharing knowledge and history and trying to get all this stuff out there for people to hear and see and know and keep it alive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Great, I've noticed that. Thank you just so much for having that mindset because it means that not only does a lot of your work get shared and more well known, but others' as well. [Sharing] information; that's a great mindset to have.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it makes me wish I had taken better notes back in the day. I've got a whole box of stuff at Sega that went missing. You know, a move, either when I left Sega or a move somewhere, so a lot of my sketches and all that stuff back at my time at Sega are gone, which is unfortunate.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, that is really unfortunate. I'd be so anxious knowing that.'''<br />
<br />
Well, it kicked me- when you're doing this stuff you have no clue that 20 or 30 years later you're going to be talking about it still. [laughs] But yeah, somewhere out there in a landfill in Redwood City is a box of little three and a half inch floppy disks with all my Sonic artwork on it. What kicked me and everything is: ''Sonic'' is the one where it never even crossed my mind to keep that because it was all proprietary software. Tom Payne, one of the other artists at Sega (at STI) did keep his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Now you've got people that have the ability to pull the information off there and then get to it. Like, "Ah, man, I wish I still had mine." Oh well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, maybe this interview can act as a sort of verbal version of that.'''<br />
<br />
I hope so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Just to get started here, I did want to start on your background. Can I ask what your earliest creative influences growing up were?'''<br />
<br />
My whole family is very artistic and creative. Most of them also sing and dance, which I do not do. Yeah, the art was pretty much the whole family, especially my mom did a lot, my mom and my sisters. So I've always been influenced and supported in anything I want to do artistically. It's interesting, though, that I'm the only one to have gone, in the family, to have gone into art as a career. I think part of that is timing. I'm the younger of six- I'm number five of six kids. Strictly speaking, my older brother considered going into art, but he's like 12 years older than me. At that time, it was very limited on what your options were.<br />
<br />
Illustration, you know, magazines and book covers and magazine illustrations and stuff. It's very competitive and very limited, the market. On top of that, my brother's a little afraid to go and, you know, ruin his art, ruin his enjoyment of art because it was a job. He became an accountant, which I don't understand. [laughs] Anyway. So I'm in school and… actually my high school art teacher is one of the hugest impacts of my life because she wasn't family, and she said, "You can make a living at this." She pulled me aside one day early on and said, "Craig, you could make a living at this."<br />
<br />
That clicked. That clicked something in my brain. Even then I was still "OK, you can make a living as an artist?" I was a biology major and finally I ended up switching over to art and then finally switched over to art education, was going to teach art. Then that's where the timing of everything kicked in. Just as I'm in college, the computer graphics industry explodes. I come out of school, I get pulled into the early computer graphics industry and then from there into video games. I've never taught art, because I got sidetracked in making games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. What was the first computer you worked on when it came to designing graphics on the computer for the first time?'''<br />
<br />
It was called the GeniGraphics.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the GeniGraphics?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It was huge. The first generation ones I worked on used eight inch floppy disks, so actually truly floppy disks.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually floppy.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I can't remember the memory on those disks. It was… it wasn't called vector graphics… It was designed to do… like you did a lot of text graphics and like business meeting stuff. Like pie charts and boring stuff. You could do artwork on it. It was just a pretty complex problem. It was very interesting way of creating art on them. You can do some beautiful stuff. That's what I was doing, and I had gotten to the point, though, where I was really not happy doing it.<br />
<br />
I guess complaining too much. I was married at the time. Every time I come home from work, my wife at the time would have the wanted section of the newspaper spread out on the table with circled job opportunities. Looking for a job for me. She was tired of me complaining. She called one day while I was at work and she said, "I found your job." I know I kept this clipping, and I can't find it. But it's "Wanted: video game artist and game designer wanted, no experience necessary." That was Mark Cerny at STI, putting together his group at STI for Sega.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you hired directly by Cerny? Like, was he the one who was in your hiring interview?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I still do have the little scrap of paper where I wrote down his information and his phone number and his name really quick, the first time he called and said, "Yes, we'd like to talk to you and get more information from you." Yeah, so that was him. It was the very first time I met him. I assumed he was somebody's secretary or whatever, because he was so young. Very quickly I realize, "Oh, no, that's him, that's the boss." I was just thinking about him the other day because I lost touch with him. I'd love to get a hold of him again and just catch up because I was realizing what a huge impact he had on my life because he hired me at Sega.<br />
<br />
Then he left Sega and did a couple things, but he ended up in L.A. and I wanted to work with him again when I wanted to leave Sega. I called him, and then he's how I ended up at Insomniac Games. That was my career, Insomniac Games. That's all knowing Mark. Huge impact of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the date that you were hired? I know you said it was in 1990, I believe. No worries if you can't remember the specifics.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't remember it. Actually, you could look it up. I think if I remember correctly, my hiring letter, I think, got scanned in at the…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Video Game History Foundation.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Video Game History. I think they've got a copy, if not it's around here somewhere. Yeah, would have been 1990.<br />
<br />
I'm in South San Francisco now, moved up here a couple of years ago to get closer to my son and his family. I occasionally drive down the 101 [freeway], and every time I do I drive past… The building that STI had was just off- facing the freeway. Every time I drive past I'm like, "There's the old STI building." But it wasn't the very first one. The very first building with this tiny little office in some industrial complex down in San Jose just off of 880 [or] 17 [freeways]. I've been trying to remember… I have no idea where that is. I wonder if I've got the address somewhere for that building. [800 Charcot Avenue] That letter would probably have the address on it. I've gotta go find that letter. So 1990.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Let me see if I can find the… what was the name of this city… Was that in Foster City? Does that ring a bell?'''<br />
<br />
No, that would have been… Sega headquarters was in Redwood City. That interim office… because Mark was very consciously as far away from Sega as he could be, but be close enough that you could run back and forth, because he didn't want… That was the whole point of STI was to get it away from having too much oversight by people who didn't know what they're doing. That weren't game people. But we finally did end up at Sega actually, in their headquarters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned him getting away from SoA's oversight from non-game people. Did he see that as one of the big problems that STI was founded to fix?'''<br />
<br />
I know that's what he was trying to get away from initially, in the very beginning, and was hesitant as we kept moving closer and closer, but I don't remember there being a lot… Well actually. Trying to think. I know like even on ''Kid Chameleon'', which was the first game I worked on at STI. We were getting crap from marketing trying to tell us how to name stuff and name the character and name the game and it was frustrating. But I think yes. I wasn't part of it because you know, Mark would have insulated and would have been taking the brunt of that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of ''Kid Chameleon''. As an artist that was new to game development, was working on ''Kid Chameleon'' particularly challenging? What was challenging about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was. As I was just talking about that original building and that original office. The memory is like seared into my brain of like, the very first week I'm there, of me going outside and just trying to not freak out because I was like "I don't belong here." [laughs] I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know anything. I have to like relax and then go back inside. It was very different because it was this… It was a completely different picture. It was big Digitizers and you're drawing stuff pixel by pixel by pixel. I had done little to no animation prior to that. But it was very exciting.<br />
<br />
So you pixel by pixel and you do learn how to do it. I remember, I look back at this and I feel bad in that I remember it clicked, the animation and once again… the walk cycle was six frames and your characters were 32 pixels tall. Man, looking back at that, that's insane. I remember I had a, or looked like I was having, an easy time of it and that I knew what I was doing.<br />
<br />
I remember Brenda Ross was having a hard time and she was talking to Mark and Mark says, "Well go ask Craig." Because Brenda was hired before me but not by… I'm not sure how long she had been there. Not very long, but long enough, and Mark said, "Go ask Craig." I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just making it up on the fly and so when she asked me "Can you show me how to do this?" I went, "Yeah, but I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to teach you because I don't know. I'm just making it up," I think she took that wrong and this is where I feel bad. I think she thought I was blowing her off or something. I always look back at that and I think that just got… I don't know why that's something that's always stuck in my head is that initial conversation.<br />
<br />
Yeah, so once you got into it… I remember thinking the initial interview was for the Sega arcade systems, which I was very excited about. Then I find out that it was for the home system, and I'm like, [disappointedly] "Oh really?" For some reason I'm like, "Ah." I also went, "Oh crap." My neighbor had an Atari 2600, and that was the last time I had played any home video games. I had to run out and borrow a friend's NES to play- I had my first conversation with Mark saying, "Yeah, we want you talk to you again." I had better go play some home games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Just to familiarize yourself with them?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, because I'd never heard of the Genesis. I knew about the NES, but I'd never even touched one. I'm like, "Okay, I better scramble here so I have some idea what I'm talking about." But I very quickly realized I was glad and definitely looking back, I'm glad I was doing home games, console games versus arcade games. I had more fun doing that. Yeah, it was… Man, it's so different than games today.<br />
<br />
It's pixel by pixel and limited colors. I remember the transition from Genesis stuff onto the PS1. It was wonderful because all of a sudden you don't worry about palettes anymore. You just paint on Photoshop and you just build stuff and you still got memory issues and stuff. It went from… you look at a ''Kid Chameleon'' game or anything I did on Genesis and I could say "Everything on that screen I touched, every pixel there, I put every pixel on that screen." Then you get into the other games, the teams get bigger and the games get bigger. It's cool, but I miss that complete ownership or whatever of the world.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. It's your work as opposed to it being filtered through so many teams or like… the 'too many chefs' feeling.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. The funny thing is, I prefer to work as a team, but at the same time, it was nice to look at it and have it all be my work. It's this weird thing going on in my head that I really do prefer working as a team. I'm better if I'm with people that I can bounce ideas off of and pull ideas from and work with.<br />
<br />
Jumping ahead a little bit here. On ''Ratchet and Clank'' at Insomniac, there was a level, Metropolis, on ''Ratchet 1'', that was really a nightmare level. It was huge. The map was way too big for what we'd agreed was possible to do. The artists I was working with… there were always two environment artists building a level because they were huge, even the good sized ones. The other artists- Tom… last name just slipped my brain, was having- well, something's going on in his life. He was having a hard time at work. He was always behind, he was late and I always had to redo about half his artwork. That game, other than one little area, everything in it is mine.<br />
<br />
I was like, "Oh, okay, so this is nice;" to look at this and go, "Hey, yeah, that entire city is mine." Which is satisfying. Very different than the pixel art.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You were mentioning limited color usage and that just being a challenge with the palette. That was like a theme that defined most Genesis-era games.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How difficult did you find that?'''<br />
<br />
At times, very. The palettes were difficult, but you learned how to dither since you're doing things literally pixel by pixel. If you didn't have a green, you could do every other square blue and yellow and get a green. It would blur out on the TV. The bigger problem was just the amount of art you were allowed to use for anything, particularly in the animations.<br />
<br />
I can remember once, and this was for ''Dark Empire'', there was a boss character and… Dunn… William Dunn? Man, my brain…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Bill Dunn, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, there we go. Bill Dunn was the designer on that. I haven't talked to him in like forever. I remember he gave me the little sheet that had directions and the description of what the enemy was and what it was going to do and what animations they would need for it. I remember it saying, and this is like a little mini boss: "Writhing dramatic death. Six frames."<br />
<br />
I went, "Bill, you're not going to… writhing dramatic death and you've given me six frames." So that was always really… how do you get something to look good with six frames. People have gone back and have ripped all those files out of those games. I actually have a lot of the little walk animations for the different enemies I've done and that stuff. It's very interesting to go back and look at it and remember just moving pixels around to get just the right… cause you're using the blur of the television to get the things you need because you didn't have as many- y'know, there were 32 pixels by 32 pixels for the characters most of the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if you had any involvement in ''Dick Tracy'', but it sounds like that happened just before you got there.'''<br />
<br />
Correct. I thought I was going to be working on ''Dick Tracy''. I got there and they were already, I don't know, pretty close to shipping it. I didn't work on it. They were working on it when I got there, but yeah, I didn't have anything to do with it. I remember being bummed because at the time, the movie was a big thing. It was like, "Oh, that's really cool. That's exciting." I was bummed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Kid Chameleon'' was following ''Dick Tracy'', which was Disney's, Touchstone's thing. It seems like ''Kid Chameleon'' was the first chance that STI's artists and staff got to really flex their creativity.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. At the time, Sega was looking for a mascot. Nintendo had Mario and Sega didn't have anything. Mark… one of the things on ''Kid Chameleon'' was… we wanted to be Sega's mascot. Cause there was no Sonic yet. We're doing it and it was loosely based… There was another… who was the "Kid"? There was another "Kid" game that was in Japan on the Genesis, and it was strange.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Alex Kidd''.'''<br />
<br />
''Alex Kidd'', yeah. I can't remember what the relationship was there. There is one, I don't know what it was. We were hoping… There were a couple things. One, Mark wanted to make the biggest game ever made, the longest game ever made on the Genesis. It's like 1,800… You used to measure the side-scrollers by screens. It's 1,800 screens, if I remember the number right, so it was huge. ''Kid Chameleon'' was an enormous game with no saves and no battery backup. Part of that was money. It was cheaper to not have a battery cartridge, but also Mark didn't want to have a save. He wanted people to have to play through.<br />
<br />
It was interesting though, cause it was- this actually affected the way some stuff I did later on, is when we did finally see… We got this early beta game that was being done in Japan called ''Sonic''. We went into the break room and put it on and played it, and it was beautiful. I remember sitting there with Mark and we were trying to figure out how they both did the art and the programming for like the loops and some other kinds of cool stuff that was new. We played for a few minutes and laughed. It was like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really pretty." But we were like, "No big deal." At that time there may not have been any Rings at all in the game. If there were Rings, there was definitely no splash.<br />
<br />
A month or so later, however long, we get the new version and there's definitely Rings and a Ring splash. Now we're fighting over who gets to play. "Give me the controller! I want to play!" because now it was fun. Now it was addictive. Now we went, "Ah, crap. This is Sega's character. ''Kid Chameleon's'' gonna be a fun game, but we're not going to be Sega's mascot. This is definitely the mascot." That was interesting looking back at that transition of ''Sonic'' being a pretty game, but who cares, to being addictive. I think it was just the Ring splash added something, at least to me, that just completely changed the feel and dynamics of the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I think that does quite a lot. Speaking of that early ''Sonic 1'' build. Did you just die immediately when you got hit or was there some counter which decreased, like a health meter?'''<br />
<br />
I am trying to remember. I don't remember if there was… now I'm gonna guess, now this is just guessing. I'm going to guess you didn't die immediately. Actually, I don't know. It probably just didn't have the Ring splash visually.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''But it had Rings that you had to collect as "health?"'''<br />
<br />
The code would have been prepared for that incoming- they would have been preparing for that. Whatever the death was… I don't remember being frustrated because you get touched and die. But I don't remember what that was.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. No worries about remembering the specifics. I appreciate all you can give me so far, this is already quite a lot. So actually I wanted to go back to… You had mentioned something interesting, you had brought up Alex Kidd. I noticed some of your ''Kid Chameleon'' concept art. You always seem to mark a two letter acronym for the game under your art. All of the ''Kid Chameleon'' stuff is marked KK. At first I thought, "Oh, maybe Chameleon was spelled with a K." But then you had sent me a ''Dark Empires'', and we had someone [MDTravis] open it up and look at the ROM header, and we found the name Kevin Kidd. Which is surprisingly similar to Alex Kidd.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does the name Kevin Kidd ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
That comes down to that whole marketing thing I was talking about of marketing telling us how to name stuff. Originally we had the character named Kevin. It was funny you said that, you were saying, "Why did I mark KK on everything?" Yeah, it's cause he was Kevin. Then marketing didn't like the name Kevin. They wanted to name him… let's see, Dylan? There was this whole kerfuffle about naming the character.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dylan Charles.'''<br />
<br />
Dylan Charles! Yes. Where did you get that name? That was- did Brenda remember that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, that was actually on our… I'm in front of my computer right here, that's on our ''Kid Chameleon'' page. It looks like it was sourced from… a 1992 players guide. I don't know how they got that.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Wow, man. Yeah, that was his name. I know what's somewhere on one of the levels, there's some carving in the stone or maybe it's on one of the title screens. There's these runes carved into the rock. If you look at it, it says Kevin. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Just a little personal saying that no one's going to care about. I remember the name being a big deal. It was the same issue down at Insomniac. Naming stuff. The hardest part of any of these games is naming stuff. You've got to find something everybody likes. You've got to find something that marketing likes. You've got to find something that passes legal. That's hard. That's a really hard labyrinth to wander through.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on ''Kid Chameleon'', how much artistic freedom were you given on the project?'''<br />
<br />
A lot. I don't remember anything other than trying to work out of whatever the art bible was for, "What is the look of it?" It was whatever we wanted to do and could do. Well, all of us, it was our first game. That was Mark's whole thing. That was that ad in the newspapers: "Wanted, artists and designers with no experience." Mark wanted to build a company with… he didn't want to bring people from other companies that had their way of doing things. He wanted to train people in his way of making games and his way of thinking. None of the artists… I don't know about the programmers, but none of the artists had ever made a video game and never done anything like this. It was all brand new.<br />
<br />
I remember Paul Mica. Another one of the artists, incredible artist. Some of his stuff was gorgeous. I remember him just really beating his head against the wall and just always having to go back and make things smaller or… "Paul, you've got way too many colors. You can't use that many frames." He really had a hard time working within the limitations. I remember him being really frustrated by that. I remember learning some little tricks about how to make eyes look alive when you've only got four pixels. Like, "How did he make his eyes look so cool? Oh, okay. He's got one little white pixel right there." Which is actually something I still think of every single time I draw something or I'm painting something and I've got an eyeball. Thank you, Paul. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned you had worked on the Digitizer. Was that working on the Digitizer exclusively, or did you ever dip into something like Amiga Deluxe Paint as well?'''<br />
<br />
Some of the people in the office were using the Amiga. I was just on the Digitizer. I think some of the work on ''Dick Tracy''… I'm trying to think what it was. Cause I didn't work on it, but it was… right. It was such a tiny little office, we're all climbing over on top of each other. Cause I remember somebody showing me something on the Amiga, some auto features like, "Oh, that's really cool that it does that." Like putting a black outline around something. "Oh, that's cool, that saves time." I didn't do anything [on the Amiga], I was all Digitizer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the most challenging thing about working on the Digitizer? Other than everything.'''<br />
<br />
I was just gonna say, "Other than everything?" It was… Once again, your limitations, not so much on the Digitizer issue, it was just the Genesis, of just having the memory and frame rate issues of… you've got so few frames for each animation. One of the tools I really wish it had was, and this would have been for building the worlds, is you had a certain number of little eight by eight squares. What did we call them? Tiles? Stamps? Tiles.<br />
<br />
Everything went down to an eight by eight little pixel box that then you'd use four of those to make a 16 by 16. You could reuse that 16 by 16 into a 32 by 32. That's how you save memory was you reused these ever-increasing size chunks that then would fit and click back and forth. Then you could rotate and change colors and it was free as far as memory was concerned. I remember very specifically, on the Sonic games, of really wishing I had some tool that could sort through and find the doubles or ones that were close.<br />
<br />
Cause you always end up with a little- you just needed a little bit more of, and there would just be squares in there that were never used. Actually… they finally did come up with a tool that showed… Oh, they did! They finally came up with a tool [CMM] you could run that would show how often each eight by eight, in these different tiles, how often they were each used. You go, "Hey, this was only used once. I can get rid of it. Or this one's never used. Yeah, let's cut this, pull that out and save that memory." I'd forgotten about that. That was so nice. That was the dealing with memory and was, yeah, it was a nightmare. I remember it being fun to figure out the colors of those palettes, but frustrating also.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's a certain dance to that, a balance of what you can get and what you can't get out.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! A dance. I love the word dance there. When you make it work and you get it to come together… Which is funny, cause that's something you don't even think about. PS1 on, it didn't cross your mind. Like I remember the very first time I was in Photoshop. I'm in L.A. and painting in Photoshop and learning… Actually I just started to use Photoshop at Sega just before I left for something. I remember asking one of the programmers [in L.A.] "How do I pick my palette? How do I choose palettes?" He just kinda looked at me weird. "You don't have to, the programming does that thing. I was like, "Really? Awesome!" It was so much fun. So nice to not have to mess with that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you were mentioning that tile identification program. It might not be the same one but I wanted to run a "Do you recognize this name?" question by you. Yuji Naka had made a tool called the Super Character Maker or CMM. Does that one ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Vaguely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wasn't sure if that was the one that you were talking about, cause it is something that worked with the Digitizer, but I'm not sure if it was 'tile'-related or not.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. That rings a bell but I have no idea. I don't know if it was that tool or a different tool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was working with Yuji Naka like?'''<br />
<br />
[reticent] Hmm.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You can be honest.'''<br />
<br />
He didn't like Americans. He didn't like speaking English. He was a dick. I really have nothing nice to say about Naka. On the other hand, Yasuhara I love and would… There's very few things that would get me back into the game industry. If Mark called or Yasuhara called and said, "Hey, I've got something I'd want to do with you." I'd say, "Yes." Naka didn't like Americans, he didn't like Americans on his team. I'm particularly pissed at him because at the end of ''Sonic 2'', Roger Hector, who was the head of STI at that time, told me that I was going to be a lead artist on ''Sonic 3'' and was very excited about that. But Naka being Naka- cause the way Naka got what he wanted is he threatened everyone. If he didn't get what he wanted, he threatened to quit. So he was going to quit. He wasn't going to do ''Sonic 3'' unless he got his own all-Japanese team in their own office with separate key cards. That was all Japanese. So ''Sonic 3'' was done across the hall behind locked doors. Which pissed me off cause I was supposed to be one of the lead artists on it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're not the only one.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at it… Am I the only American that ended up with environment art in ''Sonic 2''? I think I am. Cause all of Brenda's stuff got cut, and all of Tom's stuff. I'm the only American that had finished art in the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Naka. "I'm going to take my ball and go home" was his go-to plan on everything. You'd give him a big bag of money and give him what he wanted and he'd stay. But he was the exception. The other guys, Yasuhara and… Yamaguchi.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Yamaguchi.'''<br />
<br />
Yamaguchi, the other environment artist, was incredible. He's someone I'd enjoy working with again. He was a machine. He just lived at STI. He never went home and he would redo levels and redo- They'd be beautiful, and he wouldn't be happy with them, and he'd redo them again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You still keep in contact with Yasuhara and Yamaguchi?'''<br />
<br />
Yasuhara, we're friends on Facebook. Occasionally I have asked him questions here and then, occasionally. I do occasionally see him comment or click a like on something I post. The last time I contacted him was… I just digitized the resume videotape I made when I was leaving Sega. This was like maybe five, ten years ago. I was going to say a couple of years… No, it's probably more like 10 years. I had put it up on YouTube and a friend was watching it and says, "What is ''Treasure Tails''?" I went, "What?" Cause I hadn't thought of this in like forever. He goes, "Yeah, it's one of the games you said you worked on" and all of a sudden these memories start coming back. I pulled out the tape quickly and looked at it and sure enough, here's this Sonic universe game with Tails. It's this… not ortho… the weird three quarter angle view…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric? No… something like that. I know what you're talking about.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It'll come to us later. It was a puzzle adventure game for Tails. I had forgotten completely, I completely forgot I'd ever worked on that. It was the one of the last things I did at Sega before leaving. I remember doing all the research and all that got done for it was like three mock-up screens. Just static. I actually contacted Yasuhara cause I was trying to find out who was designing this, who was working on this. I got a hold of Bill Dunn to see if he remembered anything. I wrote to Yasuhara and he got back to me and Yasuhara says, "I don't remember anything from that time." His brain is so burnt from that period in time, he just said, "I don't remember."<br />
<br />
Then I got digging into my journals and found a little bit of information, so I was able to put some times, some dates down and that stuff on it and found out the designer on it was Hoyt Ng and there was a programmer's name written down as far as I remember. We worked on it for… I think a few months. I don't remember how long now, but it got cancelled. Like so many things at STI. That's the reason I left STI: all these potential games, some of them almost finished, that would have been A plus, incredibly beautiful games that got cancelled just because of incompetent management.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Out of all those games that you just mentioned, what was the most complete that you were upset about being cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
That was one I didn't work on. I think the character's name was Jester.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Jester.'''<br />
<br />
I think the name of the game was called ''Kinetix''? ''Kinex'' or ''Kinetix''. I always used to think it was ''Jester'', but I did find a little bit of information. I'm not sure, but I think the name of the game was actually ''Kinetix'' with an X. Anyway, Jester. So this little character made out of clay. The whole point of the game was watching him die. [laughs] There were all these horrible ways of, when you died, if he would get smashed and he didn't look like he was made of clay, but he was made of clay. He'd get smashed, he'd mush out like clay or he'd get set on fire or burned in acid or… it just all these wonderful deaths. They had been working on that… I don't know how much of that was done.<br />
<br />
The two people I know that we're working on it are both gone. Alan Ackerman was one of the artists on it and he passed away a number of years ago and Rick Macaraeg died shortly thereafter. He [Rick] was the designer on it. I don't know who out there would know anything about it, but that's the one that got cancelled that was just a beautiful game that could have been so awesome.<br />
<br />
Then there was ''Spinny & Spike'' by Steve Woita. I don't know how far along they got on that. Then there's my ''Segapede'' slash ''Astropede'' game that didn't get very far, although we worked on it a little long time, but we were just never given the resources. They were trying to do too many things with not enough people.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was not being given enough resources to work on a project a recurring theme at STI?'''<br />
<br />
Absolutely. The one game that did ship was ''The Ooze'', which… I have no idea how it made it out the door. I think it's because it had a very, very, very small team. I think it was me and Tom… Did Brenda- I can't remember Brenda worked on that. Me and Tom were doing the environments, which were pretty simple. I actually did the Ooze. I remember, that game, is way back. The primordial stage of that game was Mark Cerny asking me to do a set of little tiles for animation that were just the Ooze, of every different little shape that you could have, so that the program group would then do the animations. There would be no animating the Ooze. You would just have every conceivable shape in a eight by eight little square that would make any curve.<br />
<br />
Cause he was doing a test with- was it Dave Sanner and Jason Plumb, were doing- cause I think they had this idea for a game and this little test ended up becoming ''The Ooze''. It was funny, I bumped into Dave Sanner just a couple of weeks or a month or two ago, cause I was over at the Video Game History place scanning the last of something in with those guys. We got talking about ''The Ooze'' and they [the VGHF] went, "Oh wait, one of the guys that worked on it is like, right upstairs." It's a very small world.<br />
<br />
It was just very interesting to meet somebody that you haven't seen in 20 years. The last time you saw them, they're in a flannel shirt with long hair and just this easy-going stoner vibe. The guy walks in and I'm like, "Okay, that is Dave, but that is not the Dave I remember from 30 years ago."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Everyone's grown up… I was looking at the early concept art for some of your Ooze work cause it was also in your Video Game History Foundation archive there, and it looks pretty gruesome. There's one concept art of a guy's leg being pulled off into the Ooze. I was going to ask, were the early concepts for that game more gruesome or more adult than the final product?'''<br />
<br />
Well, the art there, I did. Just to clarify, I did the coloring of that because the actual art drawing were done by… Burt somebody, I can't remember his name [Kurt Peterson], but he did the line art, and then I just did some quick color work on them. Those drawings, I think, those are more an emotional… I don't know how serious the game is supposed to be. As a top down-looking game, there is [nothing] like a game being made today. These three-dimensional, running around first-person, third-person thing. I think that art was more for pitching the idea of Ooze versus what it would actually look like in the game. Cause you never see people in the game. It's like your satellite view of buildings and the Ooze. People are a few pixels tall. I haven't played that in a long time either. I don't think I even have a copy of that… Yeah, I never got a copy of ''The Ooze''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. I would have imagined that they would have given you at least one copy of the game that you had worked on.'''<br />
<br />
Well usually that's true. I think cause I left… I'm not sure. I'm trying to think. It came out just as I left Sega. I don't think I got a copy for that reason. That's also the same reason I don't have a copy and I never bought a copy of the last Ratchet and Clank game I worked on? Was it ''Deadlocked''? Cause I left before it actually physically came out.<br />
<br />
The one thing that's gone missing is somewhere there's a box that has all of my signed copies of games. I'd get my games and I'd have the whole team sign it. I've got all the games I worked on signed by the entire team, along with my Genesis and all the other Genesis games, and it's in a box and it's gone. I can't find it. All my Sonic, all my Spyro stuff, all the games are… I can't find the box. I'm a little afraid it's walked out on me.<br />
<br />
I'm hoping it's just mislabeled in a box, inside of a box somewhere. Cause I moved out from L.A. two years ago, back up to the Bay Area. I was really hoping that during this move I would find it. Then in this move, I ended up just shoving boxes in the truck at the end anyway. Hopefully it's in one of those boxes. I'm just hoping my garage wasn't open one day and somebody walked by and saw a box marked video games and picked it up and walked off.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. Hopefully it's still kicking around there.'''<br />
<br />
Hopefully not. Send some good energy out into the universe. Yeah, that had all my copies.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wanted to ask a bunch of ''Sonic 2'' questions and these are going to be a little more specific. If you have to say, "I don't remember that", no worries, I completely understand. A lot of us in the research community find the project especially fascinating. For editorial reasons, I'd like to thank one of our top Sonic researchers, Katsushimi, for providing some of these questions. To begin, could you describe your personal approach to drawing graphics when it came to the ''Sonic 2'' project?'''<br />
<br />
I can remember thinking how it had a very computer generated look. It's all pixels, but it looked like it was made out of polygons. If you look at the palm trees and stuff, it has this very polygon-based look. That was my foundation, especially on the Hidden Palace artwork, was that this is made out of polygons. Trying to think of what else… that's the only thing that's coming to mind right now.<br />
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<br />
'''Were you provided with much Japanese source material when you first started? Like what they wanted the game to look like or… kinda inspirations? Did they give you much material?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember. I don't remember anything other than the first game, other than playing ''Sonic'' [1]. I don't remember any other source material or reference material being given.<br />
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<br />
'''We're curious about what feedback you got from other staff on your art as development progressed.'''<br />
<br />
I remember it being very positive. The one I do remember that was negative, and I had to agree, was actually both in Hidden Palace and Oil Ocean, the distant background, that independent layer in the background. I had a really hard time with those. I think that was also coming down to really limited memory. Those number of little squares, little tiles you had was very limited. I know on Oil Ocean, I wish I had a picture of what I did because I do not remember what it looked like at all. Yamaguchi was definitely not happy with it. The background that's in Oil Ocean in the game is actually Yamaguchi's. I remember at the time being frustrated a little bit. That it wasn't mine, that I couldn't do the background. The background wasn't mine. I also know that mine sucked. But I don't remember what it looked like.<br />
<br />
Hidden Palace Zone is the background that's there I'm not happy with. It was a tricky thing to do. That [background] was the hardest part. That's the only time I remember any negative comments was specifically the background on Oil Ocean. I know there's an original background I did for Hidden Palace that I think shows up in some of the magazine screenshots.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yes. The cave-y stalagmites and stalactites look.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, the more cave-shaped looks. That got replaced with whatever is there now. So yeah, that's mine. Even that, I'm still not happy with it. The favorite artwork I've ever done on any video game is Hidden Palace Zone. I'm the most proud of that work. But not the background.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. Honestly it's a beautiful looking stage.'''<br />
<br />
I know one of the things that was very important to me, and this is true all the way through the stuff I did on the PS1, was I always did everything I could to not have artwork in the environment look like wallpaper. Because you did have this limited number of tiles, and if you had a large area, all of a sudden it got very repetitive. A lot of artists in a lot of games, it's just wallpaper. It's just so obvious that it's the same pattern just stamped. To a certain extent you can't get away from that because it is wallpaper. It is the same pattern. But there's ways of doing it to offset it and make subtle changes to try and break that up. So even if you go back to ''Kid Chameleon'', I remember spending a lot of time trying to come up with these interesting shapes that were in fact repeatable, but they weren't on a grid.<br />
<br />
One of the ones I'm the most proud of is Hidden Palace Zone. It's this geometric, polygonal, crystal-based stonework that everything's built off. That's this repeating pattern, but it's off at a weird angle, and so you only see that it repeats if you get a good half a screen full of the same image of the same wall. You go, "Okay, there is a repeating pattern there." But it bothered me even on ''Sonic''. I look at some of the other Sonic levels, but even in ''Sonic 3''. I look at ''Sonic 3'', and I'm maybe more judgmental there because I was supposed to be on that. There's wallpaper. There's some levels like, "Really? That's… Naka doesn't like American art? That's crap. That made it into a Sonic game?" There's just a couple of levels that are just like… y'know, most of the stuff's gorgeous. Some is like, "Really? This is acceptable?"<br />
<br />
That was one of my big things on the side-scrollers was trying not to make that wallpaper. Even on PS2, you've still got textures that you're repeating on large areas. I really tried to hide the fact that you were reusing textures over and over and over again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So another thing I wanted to ask about ''Sonic 2'', some of our researchers have characterized ''Sonic 2'' as just scraps of things compiled into a game, maybe not as cohesive as it could be. Would you agree with that?'''<br />
<br />
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but I also can't disagree with that perspective of it. I think that may be because… I remember when Yasuhara gave his initial pitch for this massive multi-universe time traveling extravaganza, that would have been incredible. I remember at the time going, "You're nuts. There's no way. We don't have the time. We don't have the memory. We don't have anything to do that."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More lack of resources.'''<br />
<br />
So I think that's where maybe the hodgepodge aspect of it comes in is it's in bits and pieces. It could also just be just the nature of… I'm trying to compare ''Sonic 1''. It's been so long since I played the other one. Y'know, how homogenous was ''Sonic 1'' versus ''Sonic 2''? I remember thinking levels like Casino [Night] Zone were beautiful! But it didn't fit. "Where's this in the world? Why is this in the world? What is this?" Then deciding it didn't matter because it's pretty and it's fun and who cares?<br />
<br />
So, yeah, I can definitely see how there's this hodgepodge… The worlds don't have a lot of throughput into each other in a continuous story way. There's some of them that were a little story driven, but a lot of them are just like "What's cool looking?" Maybe I should say… that would be a good question for Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You proposed a sidekick named Boomer for the sidekick competition that they had. Why a turtle? What inspired that idea?'''<br />
<br />
For me, it was the Tortoise and the Hare thing, fast versus slow. Sonic is known for being fast, and so his buddy is slow, he's a turtle… although he's not actually slow cause that wouldn't work. That's how I ended up with a turtle. That and I was trying to think of a second player character that would interact with Sonic, gameplay wise. In the pictures, if you've got them there, the turtle would drop down and… then also I was thinking of the Godzilla Kaiju monster…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gamera.'''<br />
<br />
Gamera! I was gonna say, it starts with a G. Gamera. He'd pull his legs in and become a little jet pack, so Sonic could use him as like a jet-powered skateboard or surfboard to get over obstacles or to do whatever. That would allow Boomer or Boomy (I'd said it a couple of different ways depending on where I wrote it down and when I wrote it down) to be able to keep up with Sonic. But also I was looking for something to compliment Sonic as opposed to just being the same [thing].<br />
<br />
I know people have sent me links where somebody has actually, in pixels, animated this little character. They were just like, "Okay, if they had done that, what would he look like?" I'd love to actually see that in the level. I'd love to see what he would look like in the Sonic world. I mean, Tails is a better character. But it would have been fun to have invented… it would have been fun to have my character be that guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You could add to the gameplay that way. Tails can seem like just another Sonic. He had flying, which expands the gameplay, but it sounds like with Boomer you were trying to build on the gameplay that was already there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. But I can also see from a realistic point of view, pragmatic point of view of… if they'd done that, that just complicates everything with programming. You've now got an entire new thing to program completely from scratch and it's going to radically change your gameplay and affect it with that… which is what you also want to do. But where Tails is… he's more of the same, but that's also good. There's not a right or a wrong there, depending on if it's done well and Tails was done well. I was looking for more change and interactivity.<br />
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<br />
'''Oil Ocean seems to derive a lot of thematic inspirations from Chemical Plant. A lot of the graphics look pretty similar. Is there any direct connection there or is it that just a coincidence?'''<br />
<br />
I think that's just coincidence. I don't remember… I mean, it would be very likely we're doing those at the same time. Although Chemical Plant was one of those ones that Yamaguchi redid at least three times from scratch where he wasn't happy with the first one and you'd come in and then he'd completely changed it. That one went through like three almost complete revisions. No, there wasn't any conscious choices there being made as a similarity.<br />
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<br />
'''Speaking of another two Zones that we think might have been related: Oil Ocean and Hidden Palace. Some people believe that they were meant to recycle graphics from one another at some point in development. Does that ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Hmm. Not that I know. I'd be curious to see which piece of the graphics they were thinking of. Cause I… there's nothing in common in either one of them. Trying to think if there's anything… Yeah, that'd be a no as far as I know. I did Hidden Palace first and then Oil Ocean.<br />
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'''What was your idea to create Hidden Palace Zone? What was the inception of that?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember… I think the only input I remember getting from Yasuhara was the map. I don't even know if many sketches exist. In my sketchbook, there's a couple of sketches that show the beginnings of that crystalline polygon-shape stone structure that ended up being the foundation for Hidden Palace. The core of that was that rock formation and just being a cave, but wanting to make it something more than just rock. I don't know if there was any palette input from the Yasuhara or Yamaguchi. I don't remember.<br />
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<br />
'''So that golden-green vibe was yours.'''<br />
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I think so… I think so.<br />
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<br />
'''How did you feel when it was cut?'''<br />
<br />
It's changed over time. I remember going in to like the conference room to sit down and play ''Sonic 2'' just for fun and went to pull up my- cause I said, that was the first level I did. I moved on and was working on Oil Ocean and really close to the end of the game [project]. I remember it being really close to the end of the game, but then checking dates, it's gotta be a little… based on other people's information, there had to be a little more time before the game actually shipped. I remember going to pull up what was the official (at that time) version and it was gone. You couldn't access it. So I went and talked to… I may have asked Yasuhara, but I know I remember talking to Roger Hector and he told me that it had been cut because of memory. Cause they didn't have enough memory, enough room on the cartridge. I remember being really pissed. Like once again, that's my favorite art period to this day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
So I was very pissed. Then the game ships and… then the cool part of that- tangent here, I got to carry the chipset from Sega of America over to Tokyo, cause it was faster and more reliable to physically carry the chipset back then versus to electronically transmit it. I got a free trip to Japan for- I have no idea why they chose me. Then again… While I'm on the plane on the way over, they discovered an A bug, so they did end up actually having to at least electronically transmit something.<br />
<br />
The game had shipped and within a few weeks or months of the game being out, people had used… was it GameShark, Game Genie? One of those to hack into the cart and found Hidden Palace Zone, or a ghost of Hidden Palace Zone. I was pissed. "Well there was room cause it's still there. It's on the cartridge." But it actually turns out that they just didn't have time to program it. They had to do a quick rewrite of both story and… That's where you were supposed to get all the Chaos Emeralds and get your Super Sonic powers or something was in Hidden Palace Zone, by completing Hidden Palace, or something like that.<br />
<br />
There were only ever two levels to Hidden Palace Zone, and there was no boss level. When the guy, I don't remember what his name was [Christian Whitehead], did the handheld phone version of it that brought it all back to life again, he added that weird organ [Egg Gauntlet]. No idea why it's an organ [laughs], but there was no boss on the original.<br />
<br />
I think it was maybe memory as well, but it was definitely they didn't have time to finish the programming and get it into the game proper. I'm actually lucky that parts of it were still on the cartridge and that there was this huge mystery and all these urban legends. Also the fact that it's named Hidden Palace and it's hidden, literally, in the game, kept it alive. I think that's why it is in the game officially now, finally, as of a few years ago. That whole thing kept going cause it did exist. I'm really glad it. It took a couple of decades, but the artwork's out there now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. We get to see your art.'''<br />
<br />
It finally made it.<br />
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<br />
'''Another Hidden Palace Zone question. I believe it was you that had previously… it might've been someone else, but I think it was you that said "Hidden Palace Zone was a secret level that was originally accessed through Mystic Cave Zone." Do you remember anything about that?'''<br />
<br />
One of the 'fall to your infinite death' holes in Mystic Cave… you would fall and not die. You would fall and find yourself in Hidden Palace Zone, which is why I think it works now [in the 2013 port]. I think that's how they implement it now… is the way it was supposed to be. Although now I think it is just a hidden level, it doesn't do anything, where before it was the Chaos Emeralds and it was part of the story and part of the gameplay, as opposed to being just another level, which is why it didn't have a boss level or it was only two levels. It was a separate little thing on its own, which is probably the also reason why it got cut. It was a tangent thing to do something cool, and it was the easiest thing to cut when they ran out of time. Other than the fact that it was being done by an American.<br />
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<br />
'''Speaking of cut Zones, you'd mentioned working on a clown slash roller coaster themed Zone. What would that have been like?'''<br />
<br />
That was just an early thumbnail sketch of me just coming up with different ideas of playing off of that loop de loop idea for the Sonic levels, of having more of that. It didn't get anywhere beyond… did I do? I'm trying to think… I have a vague memory of, on the Digitizer, for some reason, I see red and white checkers and some early concept stuff on the Digitizer. But I really don't remember. The only thing that does exist is a couple of very quick, simple sketches in that sketchbook. I know I had one where the level was nothing but a rail, running around- So it'd be like a metal path, a metal tube doing a ring around the planet and having loops and spins and drops in it. The background would be this Jupiter-type, Saturn planet behind you and you're running around on the ring. But that was just a concept that was just early, early on that didn't get past a few sketches.<br />
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'''You know, I'm interested… You had mentioned, on that clown slash roller coaster Zone, remembering red and white checkers. When I read clown slash roller coaster, I immediately thought of ''Sonic 3'', cause they have Carnival Night Zone, and Carnival Night Zone has a theme of red and white checkers. Do you think there's any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
I don't know. I don't think so. Once again, that content work I did would have been done in like early or mid '91, before ''Sonic 2'' actually officially started or [had] any work done. Then ''Sonic 3'' would have been two years later in a locked office across the hall. So probably not. I'm trying to… I've got these weird images now of that checker and trying to come up with a way to do that curved tent and make it efficient with those little eight by eight… Huh. I remember watching the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space to get ideas. [laughs]<br />
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<br />
'''That's awesome.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think there was some [clown/roller coaster] graphics done on the Digitizer, just to have stuff to pitch to Yasuhara.<br />
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'''Did that Zone have a name at all, an early name, or was it just graphics at that point?'''<br />
<br />
No, this would have been just me mocking some quick stuff up to show Yasuhara for potential ideas. Cause all the actual design stuff would have been Yasuhara's. So it's just putting together ideas to… it's like Boomer. They may have done this for the levels as well, but Boomer, they definitely put a call out. They said, "Hey, everybody, we need a player two. Pitch us some ideas." They maybe did the same thing for the levels but I don't know. That was me just pitching ideas and trying to get something visual to show Yasuhara. That's somewhere in a landfill in Redwood City.<br />
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<br />
'''Aw god, that pains me. So, another ''Sonic 2'' experiment you did. You had mentioned your burning forest Zone, and that's actually something I asked about in our previous emails. You experimented with the idea of a burning forest Zone and the ways of designing graphics with the intent to make in the trees look like they were on fire. Can you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Is that… is that me? I don't… I don't remember. Was that Brenda? I don't think that's me. Did I… really? Wow. If I did, I've completely drawn a blank on that. Although… [thinking]. Oh man. Once again, I have this very weird memory of… You know, my first response is no, but then- this vague memory of struggling, trying to figure out how to do fire and… Wow. It's almost more of an emotional memory… Yeah, there is something in there, but yeah, it's gone.<br />
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<br />
'''[laughs] Speaking of early Zones, do you remember much… Brenda had made that mockup for the magazines… actually I think it was a little bit more than a mockup. Her Desert Zone that you could recycle into a Winter Zone. Do you remember that at all?'''<br />
<br />
I'll say superficially… When you're doing this stuff, you're so nose into your screen. Most of what I remember of Brenda's work is stuff that I have seen or talked about or heard long after. I have very few… the only level I remember… watching Brenda and walking past her computer and remember her working on was the forest Zone [Wood Zone]. All the desert stuff is like, "Okay, she did it, and there's other people talking about it, but I don't remember anything from the time.<br />
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<br />
'''Understandable. There was so much going on with ''Sonic 2''.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
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<br />
'''How was working on ''Spinball''?'''<br />
<br />
''Spinball'' was fun. It was a little frustrating cause I got pulled off of… did I get pulled off ''Segapede'' to do ''Spinball''? I think so. Sometime I did, in fact, go through my journal and get a timeline of events. It was fun to be back on a Sonic title, even though it wasn't ''Sonic 3''. It's interesting. This is another one where Brenda got screwed because they were supposed to be a hidden watery cave level as level one [Underwater Caves]. The game would start with Sonic flying into this cave at sea level, and then you'd come into those caves, and this toxic level, which I was doing, and then into these other levels on up. Then for reasons they had to cut a level, and so they kept Brenda's and smushed, theme-wise, her's and mine together.<br />
<br />
Now the bottom half of my level, I had to go through and convert what was slime, on the bottom of mine, into water that turned into slime the higher you got on the level. If you look at screenshots, the patterns of this bulbous rocky formation that make up the cave is, in fact, Hidden Palace artwork dressed up. It's the same shape, it's the same repeating patterns, because that pattern worked so well, that I just rounded all the edges and turned it into these gooey bulbous shapes as opposed to squared-off polygons.<br />
<br />
I remember it was fun. It was a little frustrating working with Peter… starts with an M [Peter Morawiec], who was the lead designer and did a lot of artwork and did all that. He was a real perfectionist. He had a vision of how he wanted it to be. There was a lot of reworking stuff that was… sometimes he'd have a good point and other times it's like, "Why? No. That's just… that's fine." But once again, both he and Adrian, the programmer, were both really nice guys and just working their butts off. Yeah, so it was good. It was good to be back on a Sonic title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So I have a very specific question that you might know as an artist. Do you know who drew ''Spinball's'' sprites? We think it's either Macaraeg or Brenda.'''<br />
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So the actual sprites for him spinning, when he was a little blue ball?<br />
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<br />
'''More Sonic's normal sprites.'''<br />
<br />
I would have assumed it was Yamaguchi. Did Yamaguchi do ''Spinball''? I'm trying to think if he did Sonic…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I don't think Yamaguchi did ''Spinball''. I can't find his name on the production credits…'''<br />
<br />
Oh! For ''Spinball''! For some reason, my brain snapped back to ''Sonic 2''. For ''Spinball'', I don't know. It was probably… if I had to guess? Tom, but that's a guess. It could have been Brenda. It wasn't me! [laughs]<br />
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<br />
'''Speaking of, do you recall Brenda's project titled ''Fat, Daddy''? The one with the cats and the jazz themes and the bebop, beatnik themes?'''<br />
<br />
Very vaguely. Once again, if you'd have asked me, "Did Brenda pitch anything or doing any of these?", I would have said "No." Somewhere else that has come up and then I get these "Oh I saw some images." There's nothing I remember of the fact that I know "Oh yeah, there was something." But then again, like ''Treasure Tails''. I was working on that and I forgot about it! [laughs]<br />
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<br />
'''[laughs] So let's talk about ''Dark Empires''. Could you give us a top-down summary of ''Dark Empires''?'''<br />
<br />
So Bruce Dunn [Bill Dunn] was the designer on it. I was doing that… That must have been before ''Kid Chameleon''. Cause it seems like they were at the same time, but that makes no sense, so it hadn't been before, because they got cancelled… We were at the little office in San Jose. By the time we got to the office in… is that Menlo Park? I'm not sure where you actually are on the freeway, where that building is, halfway up the 101 [freeway], halfway to Sega headquarters. I think by the time we got there, ''Dark Empires'' was dead.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was, cause we were doing ''Sonic 2'' during… We were doing ''Kid Chameleon'', cause I remember going in to Mark and saying, "Hey, I get some extra time to work now cause I'm going through a divorce. I'm going to be spending a lot of time at work." [laughs] No real reason to go home anymore. It almost had to be before [STI moved]. It wasn't a type of game I typically played much of, but the style and… William, he's a really nice guy. A pleasure to work with, really easy going… Bill. Bill Dunn. The style was right up my alley. This fantasy Dungeons & Dragons [style] - monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build. Did a lot of sketches that didn't…<br />
<br />
Ken Rose, who was the programmer, just sent me like a month ago that playable version. That's another thing that's in that box that is missing is my actual ROM card for ''Segapede'', and I had one for ''Dark Empires''. Luckily Ken still had the code for those. I wasn't able to get it to work, and then my son was supposed to come over and help me figure it out, and we never got that done. It'd be interesting to play it again, cause the only thing I have is to watch that videotape of my resume. But yeah, that was Bill's baby.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall what the impetus was for STI making what is essentially is a real time strategy game, or feels like a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, that's what I was just trying to think of. I was just trying to remember… cause I remember some conversations with Bill and Mark. I remember Bill being concerned that it was too much of a niche game for what Mark wanted to do, what Mark wanted STI to be, and him not being surprised that it got cancelled. Not happy about it, but not being surprised, because it wasn't the game that Mark wanted STI to be making that was going to be these A-title, top of the playlist games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Strategy was new back then. Console strategy.'''<br />
<br />
I remember the only real strategy game I ever played at that time was a Genesis game called ''Herzog Zwei''. I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played. Tried to get into like ''Starcraft'' and those and just never got into them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did ''Herzog Zwei'' and other titles… was that what inspired Bill, or you guys as a team, to make a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't know. My memory is just of drawing pictures and doing the animations and "writhing dramatic death" for the boss… No, that was ''Kid Chameleon''. The writhing dramatic death was ''Kid Chameleon''. It wasn't really a boss. It was this snake creature that didn't end up being used. No, that was ''Kid Chameleon''. I remember having a lot of fun doing the artwork [for ''Dark Empires'']. I remember really enjoying working with Bill, and that art style was very natural for me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I feel like you naturally gravitate towards creatures and particularly I've noticed a theme of dragons that continued on later in your career.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It's interesting because ''Spyro''… the idea for ''Spyro'', was one of mine. I'm the one that pitched the idea for a dragon. It's interesting that once we got the go-ahead on that, it was an art style that was outside… the actual environment there, outside of what I would normally do. It's much prettier, it's much softer, much more painterly. It was one of the other artists, Kirsten, can't remember her last name. [Kirsten Van Schreven‑Butler] It's hyphenated, the last name. She's another environment artist and her texture work was this very loose, very painterly look in these pastel colors. That was it. I was, "Okay, that's ''Spyro''. That's the look we want."<br />
<br />
I remember always looking at her work and then actually pulling out some of her textures to use as a canvas to start on, to learn how to do that painterly loose quality. It was a different, it was a look that is outside of my go-to, which is a little more monster-y and a little more hard-edged.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on ''Dark Empires'', it looks like the game starts in more of a traditional medieval fantasy, and that proceeds into like a sci-fi setting. Do you remember whose idea was it to have the game focused around like growing, evolving time, like time would progress?'''<br />
<br />
So once again, I don't really remember. I don't know how much of this was a collaboration between Bill and Mark. I think it was mostly Bill. Those would be questions for him. All I remember is the visuals on it. I don't remember anything story-wise or gameplay-wise beyond a clicking, moving strategy type game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned that you were working on it, we have Bill working on it, and I think Scott Chandler was on programming. Do you recall anyone else working on ''Dark Empires''?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. No, like I wouldn't have remembered Scott did the program until you mentioned it. I'm trying to think if Rick did anything on it… I don't think so. Did Alan [Ackerman] do anything on it? I don't think so. If I ever get that up and running where I can run through it and see… I don't know if there's any other pieces that are not my artwork that I'd recognize as, "Hey, I didn't do that." I don't remember any other artists, but it all blurs together. Somewhere in my mind, I want to say I'm doing that at the same time I'm doing ''Kid Chameleon'', but that doesn't make any sense. Too long ago.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall why exactly it was cancelled? You had mentioned Mark saying that it was against the ideology of STI (to make these big franchise-creating series). Do you recall the exact reasons you were given why ''Dark Empire'' was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
No. I think it was just too much of a niche game or… I don't know if there was conversations about it just wasn't working. It wasn't fun.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I wanted to ask was: in your VHS resume for both ''Dark Empires'' and ''Treasure Tails''. You're looking at the art through the same debug display. There was a crimson line and text at the bottom that says WINDOW 0,223. Was that your art tool or… was that a specific tool?'''<br />
<br />
That's the Digitizer. I think if I remember it, I'm literally videotaping the screen of the Digitizer. This is like real low-tech. I literally had my video camera on a tripod recording the screen, if I remember right. Hm…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It does look like it's direct feed. I can't speak to a hundred percent for sure, but the VHS resume looks like a direct feed.'''<br />
<br />
I just remember having my little camcorder. Maybe I did have it feeding in directly. It's all very primitive. No editing tools or anything. To edit it, I would like literally hit pause and start the next one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To hop to ''Jester'' really quick. Do you remember whose idea was it to make a game starring a protagonist made of clay? Cause you can do a whole lot with that concept, it's a creative idea.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. I don't know… that would either be, to the best of my guessing memory, would be either Mark or Rick, or a collaboration between those two. I'm trying to think how much game design Rick was doing. I know Rick was doing a lot of game design and artwork, cause I think Rick did the animations for Jester. I'm trying to remember if Mark was doing game design on that. I think Mark and Rick were doing game design. Once again, I didn't work on it.<br />
<br />
I know he [Rick Macaraeg] did the animations for Jester. I don't know if he was doing level art. I know Alan Ackerman did level art. I don't know who… I want to say Mark was probably doing some game design for that as well, but I don't know, don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''And just to confirm, this is Mark Cerny?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Mark Cerny. So the primary designer and my memory was Rick Macaraeg. That was his baby. But I don't know if he was working with Mark initially to come up with the concept or if that was Rick's idea. I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A question you may have already answered, I apologize if you did. Do you remember exactly why ''Jester'' was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
I mean, not a good reason. I think it was… it had to have been almost finished cause it had been in production for like two years. Part of it is Mark Cerny had moved on. He had left Sega. I want to say it suffered the death of any project that dies after its lead promoter leaves, after its producer leaves. Sega was really bad for: a producer would come in and would start a bunch of projects and then they would leave, and then a new producer would come in. Well, the new producer doesn't want to be working on somebody else's projects. They want to be doing their projects.<br />
<br />
My best guess is that that was a major contributor to [the cancellation of] ''Jester'' was that Mark Cerny had left. So there was no huge person- the person that was really behind it was no longer there, and we had new producers that didn't have any interest in doing somebody else's game. I wish I knew, I wish I could remember how much of the game was done. Cause I remember it just didn't make any sense to cancel it. Of all the games that got cancelled. That's the one that just should have gotten done. It was new, it was fun, it was creative. It was very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another cancelled STI project, this one we actually know less about than ''Jester'': What was ''SpellCaster''?'''<br />
<br />
''SpellCaster''! Okay, so it never got beyond a pitch. So after Sonic, they said, "Okay, you can pitch ideas." The head people from SoA would come down… Toyoda… I can't remember the name. It was a Japanese guy, was really nice guy. Tom Kalinske, another really nice guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda.'''<br />
<br />
Wait, what was his name again?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda, I believe.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Shinobu, a really nice guy. I think he's the one that chose me to go to Japan for some reason. They would come down with whoever from marketing and they would sit around the conference room table and you can come in and pitch an idea. ''SpellCasters'' was me and Dave Sanner, the programmer I just re-met, and we came up with this idea of this combat game, but to set it apart from every other ''Street Fighter''-type game out there, two things is: my big thing was you were going to be able to actually affect the environment, not just throw spells and weapons, hit, hurt the other players. If he was standing on a platform, you could shatter the platform or you could hit something to have it fall on him and you could also interact with the environment.<br />
<br />
Then Dave's big thing is he wanted the spells to be a sound-based, music-based. As you push the buttons, it would play a sound. You would hear notes as the players were mashing their buttons. That would do two things. One, you could hear the other player. Once you got playing enough, you could recognize songs, recognize a short tune, and you'd get a little heads up as to what the other guy was going to do. We did up a document, I did up some artwork, and we pitched it to Sega and that's as far as I got. They said, "Oh, thank you, but no."<br />
<br />
That's as far as that got, just the documents you see there and a single pitch meeting. I also came back after that and just myself put together ''Segapede'' and pitched that. That's the one where Sega went, "Hey, we like that. But we want to see a proof of concept." So that's when ''Segapede'' ended up coming about.<br />
<br />
The foundational idea for ''Segapede'' was it was initially it was supposed to take place in the Sonic universe. The core concept was that… the memory I talked about, that very first time I ever played ''Sonic'' and there was no Ring splash and then playing it again and there was a Ring splash and how much the Ring splash made it fun was, that was the core. The base idea that started ''Segapede'' was the character was going to be the centipede that each of the body segments was this little ball bearing, a little unicycle thing, with your power-ups sitting on top of that. It could be an extra engine to go fast. It could be rocket launchers. It could be spikes. It could be whatever gameplay characteristics, things you needed, would be these different body segments.<br />
<br />
Zip the character is basically a unicycle. He's just this one little ball bearing with this little character on top, and as he runs around the level, he collects these body pieces, and you collect your power ups like any other game. The difference here is that when you get hit, those go flying just like Rings. You'd have a body part splash and these body segments, your power-ups, would all go rolling off screen and you had to run around and grab them all before they went off screen and disappeared like the Rings. I also liked the idea of that centipede shape. Once again, playing off of a Sonic world of these loops and the roller coaster feelings of this… like a roller coaster train, this whole string of pods rolling and sliding around in a Sonic world, basically, was the foundation for ''Segapede''.<br />
<br />
Sega liked it, but two things: they wanted a playable prototype, a proof of concept, and they didn't want it to be in the Sonic universe, which I'm still bummed about. Because the original idea had it where Robotnik was experimenting with Chaos Emeralds in his lab and they exploded and they vaporized and he breathed in all this Chaos Dust and it was going to kill him, putting him into a coma, and it was going to kill him. Sonic decided he wanted to save him. This goes back to the movie Incredible Voyage [Fantastic Voyage], where they shrink everyone into this important person. They shrink everyone down… Raquel Welch, and put them in this little submarine and inject them with his blood and they gotta go do brain surgery. That was the gameplay. Zip is in fact microscopic, he's a nanite, but Zip was a friend of Sonic's. So Sonic gets Zip to go into Robotnik.<br />
<br />
The levels are in fact inside Robotnik, and you're collecting this Chaos Dust and trying to save Robotnik. That was the original idea, which I still really like and still think would have been a good game, but Sega didn't want it in the Sonic universe. I had to come up with this other idea that I was never happy with, story-wise of the concept or the reason for anything being. But at least they wanted the game because they gave us like a couple months to do the prototype. That's where I realized I had all this finished artwork for Hidden Palace Zone just sitting on my desk. That enabled us to do a really quick and dirty first playable, proof of concept, but have it look finished.<br />
<br />
The playable version that you [Ashley Rojas] just got sent was what Ken Rose and I managed to do in a couple of months or less. I don't know how much time we spent on that. That's another one that we got… just the lack of support from Sega and our management. Cause they had me managing and I don't manage. I don't know anything about the background of making the games. You know, "Let me do the art." Then they had Ken who… no actually, we didn't have Ken. Ken did the prototype. Then when the game went into production… No, we still did have him, but there was something going on between Ken and management cause Ken wanted some assurances, "What was going on?" I can't remember what the politics were going on there, but there were some politics going on between Ken and management.<br />
<br />
We had at least one Japanese programmer but Ken said he just was a terrible programmer and the other two artists they hired… One was a very talented fine artist [Marte Thompson] and she had been working on the computer, but had been doing technical schematics, literally line work and text, so she had no clue about making video games. I don't think she was even a big game player. Then the other guy was this incredible artist. His name was Alex [Niño]. He was extremely famous in the comic world cause he did like the original Tarzan comics. He's an older guy. The art director hired him just because he could. [laughs] Cause this guy was a legend in the art world. But he'd never worked on the computer at all. I don't know if he even owned a computer at the time.<br />
<br />
He's sketching in his drawings and his concepts and that's something else that got lost is… I have a stack of enemy concepts that he drew for ''Segapede'' that I wish I had. That just dragged on and I think that's when they finally needed people and pull me off, I think to do ''Spinball''. [sarcastically] Awesome.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on ''Segapede'', it looks like the name ''Segapede'' came first and then I believe you changed it to ''Astropede'' near the end as you were preparing to leave Sega. Is that true?'''<br />
<br />
Well, ''Segapede'' was literally just a working title. In fact, I should have put just "working title" because I had no intention of ever calling ''Segapede''. That was just a working title. But then once we get the final approval… So that prototype was called ''Segapede'', but then once we got final approval, the new working title, hopefully final real title had it shipped, would have been ''Astropede''. Once again, that never went down the path of, "Does everybody like it? Does marketing like it? Does legal like it?" It never even got to that point. ''Segapede'' was just the prototype working title.<br />
<br />
I got teased a lot. Brenda used to tease me a lot about the name [laughs]. But yeah, it was just a working title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall the name of that fine artist and the Japanese artist? Can you recall either of those names?'''<br />
<br />
I can see her [Marte]. Then Alex Niño. Alex Niño was the older guy that had drawn the Tarzan comics, like back in the fifties or sixties. Really nice guy. His sketches were just gorgeous. But just kinda useless when it comes to making video games. Mark may have wanted to hire people outside the industry in the beginning. That's not what we needed then. We needed the people that could hit the ground running, and a producer that would actually produce.<br />
<br />
What was her name… It was frustrating because she was often calling in sick. She'd say, "I had an anxiety attack and I had to turn around and go home." I didn't understand at the time. I'll say, maybe you know this, but I left the game industry in 2005 and am on disability still because of anxiety and depression. I totally get the anxiety thing now, how it just shuts your brain off. "Oh, I get it now." I wish I was more understanding back in the day. What's her name? I can see her.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. No worries at all. If you remember it all, shoot me an email. I'll get that added to our production credits. You said there was a producer on that. Do you remember the producer's name?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, he was English, and he seemed very supportive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dean Lester?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! He seemed very supportive but I remember Brenda and I think Rick Macaraeg both not liking him and telling me to not trust him. And… yeah he stabbed me in the back.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. You're not the first one to say that they had issues working with Dean Lester. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. We got along wonderfully and he was very supportive, it felt like, on putting together ''Segapede''. When he came in it would have been called ''Astropede''. So once it was actually a game in production… He seemed very supportive but he didn't ever actually do anything. Looking back at it… Once again, we needed a project manager. We needed somebody that would actually knew how to schedule and knew all the things that have to be known to make a game and keep things on schedule and keep things moving and all that business end of it.<br />
<br />
I guess he was expecting me to do that and I was trying to do it. I wanted to do that, but that's not what I did, it's not anything I actually knew anything about. This was in, what, my third game, fourth game ever? When time came and Sega realized that they needed to… Cause I think they had like five games running simultaneously. He didn't support keeping ''Segapede'' going. Didn't give it the resources it needed at all, ever. As I said, he got me a couple artists, but that weren't fit for the job. According to Ken, a programmer that was not fit for the job. At that point I realized like, "Oh, this is why Brenda and Rick didn't care for Dean." They knew this was going to happen.<br />
<br />
There was another programmer, a woman. I do not remember her name at all… Once again, she had her own thing going, had projects that she wanted to do. When she came in, you could feel things shift. Her and Dean were there at the same time. I was also butting heads with Roger Hector, because morale at this point was low. They had ''Spinny & Spike'', Steve Woita's game. ''Segapede'', my game. ''Spinball'', which was Peter's game. ''The Ooze'' was going on also. They were trying to do Sonic on for the Mars, 32X, or whatever that chaotic transitional crazy thing that Sega screwed everything up on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah [laughs].'''<br />
<br />
You had least five games going simultaneously in a company that really, at best, could do two or three, as far as manpower. The morale was in the crapper. I remember going into [the office of] Roger Hector, who had taken over after Mark left, and saying, "Hey, morale is just really crap right now. Everybody is just miserable." I spent probably an hour in his office. I remember I got about three steps out his door and realized I spent the last half hour or 45 minutes apologizing to him because the morale was 'my problem'. It wasn't the company's. I got about three steps out and I went, "What the fuck?" Because that was Roger's superpower. He's a nice guy, very charismatic. His nickname was Teflon Don. Nothing stuck to him. If anything bad happened, it was never his fault.<br />
<br />
I guess that followed him from his time at Disney. He was really good at avoiding blame. He had to add this power of when you're with him, of… he just had incredible charisma or something. At that point, I literally walked to my desk and called Mark Cerny. "Sayyy, Mark, I understand you're looking for someone, you're putting a new team together." I mean, that was the transition. Like, "Oh, crap, it is time to get out of here," and called Mark.<br />
<br />
Although when Sega didn't get a Sonic for the 32X Mars slash Saturn… that bullet, even Roger couldn't avoid that one. He ended up leaving Sega shortly thereafter because I think he finally couldn't dodge that bullet. That's how I ended up in L.A. with Mark was "OK, it's finally time for me to get out of here."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. That was actually going to be one of my questions, how you moved to Insomniac. I did want to ask one final STI question before we get off. I do appreciate the patience. I know this is a long interview. I'm actually on my last page. We're getting to the end.'''<br />
<br />
Oh that's fine. Don't worry about me, I can talk all day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.'''<br />
<br />
I enjoy sharing and talking.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So my question was, and this is something that you very likely might not know… The whole reason this interview started was because I was asking Brenda about some Michael Jackson ''Sonic 3'' stuff. Do you remember seeing Michael Jackson or ever sitting in a meeting that he was a part of?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Very much so. That's my golden answer to: "Who's the most famous person you ever met?" "See if you can beat this one." I guess he was there signing or doing some contracts or talking about doing the music for ''Sonic 3'' and was a huge Sonic fan and wanted to meet the team. We knew about it. We knew he was coming. We were all in the conference room and it's kinda surreal because I'm siting there and I'm like five feet away from… at that point, that's like the high point of Michael Jackson. He's like the most famous person on the planet, practically. I remember sitting there and thinking, "There are people who would literally kill me to be sitting here."<br />
<br />
I think I asked him one question, mostly it was just him asking questions and talking to people. Most of the time was focused on Naka and Yasuhara and maybe Yamaguchi. Because I know he invited… at least Yasuhara went and spent a day or had lunch at the Neverland Ranch, so went and had lunch with Michael at his place. I'm not sure if not Naka and who else went, but I know I know at least Yasuhara went. I know we gave Michael Jackson one of our Sega jackets. It was the Sega letterman jacket.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Which makes the one I have worth a lot more money because there's pictures of Michael Jackson wearing his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was fun, it was exciting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''In that meeting that you were in with Michael Jackson, was Brenda there with you?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. I'm going to say yes? She could've been, should've been, but I don't remember who else was the meeting. I know it was shoulder to shoulder around the table, but I don't remember who all was there. It was after hours, so it was it was later in the evening. Not late, but after normal hours. I remember I was like one of the last people in the room, so I was just busy working on my desk waiting for somebody to say something, and I looked around and "Where is everybody?" I'm like, "Oh, crap." I got up and poked my head in the door and everyone's… he's already there and I snuck in and sat down. He was on crutches. He never on crutches and never took the sunglasses off.<br />
<br />
He was on crutches because he'd hurt himself doing some commercial. He was filming something and hurt himself, so he's on crutches. Very, very nice, very soft spoken, very complimentary. He had nothing but nice things to say about the game and [he was] thankful to the team. But very quiet, very.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would you be able to tie a specific date to that? The reason I'm glad you said crutches was because we actually know the date that he did have that accident. That was in early March. So it would have to be sometime in March or later in 1993. Would you be able to tie that to a specific date?'''<br />
<br />
I'm going to be fairly certain that that's written somewhere down in my journal. But off the top of my head, I can't. I know… it was after he would have been injured. Then unfortunately, very shortly thereafter, his life imploded, and Sega cut all ties at distance themselves from him. It'd be in my journals. I've just gotta know where my journals are.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was it just that one meeting or two? That you attended?'''<br />
<br />
With the team, yeah, it was just the one that we know of. I don't want if he came other times to talk about doing the music. That was the only time we met him, the only time the only time I knew he was in the building. I remember they put little footprints after he left, they put little footprints where we walked. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Oh that's really funny.'''<br />
<br />
One of the things, when I when I moved back up here, is I drove over and didn't know Sega had moved. I drove over because I hadn't been there in 20 plus years and hardly recognized it because there's so many new buildings and everything. I looked at the building, I wondered who's in there. Same thing when I drive past the STI offices that are off the 101 here, if there's any gamers in that building that know what was created in those rooms… If you had a Sonic fan and they're actually sitting in the room where ''Sonic 2'' was made or where this is made or that was made, I always just wondered, "Do they know or would they care?"<br />
<br />
My favorite celebrity story was for the big release for ''Sonic 2''. So it's a huge party at… a Toys "R" Us or FAO Schwarz? It was a big toy store in New York City. They flew the team out. The morning of the event, I go downstairs from the hotel and there's a limo waiting. I get in the limo and I've got a denim ''Sonic 2'' jacket [on that] they'd given the team. I get in the car and there's Dylan Taylor Thomas [Jonathan Taylor Thomas], the middle son on the TV show Home Improvement, in the car. Home Improvement at the time was a big show and Sega had brought in a bunch of the big kids TV celebrities to play ''Sonic 2'' for the cameras. So he was there. He was already in the car waiting and I go in and I get in the car with him and his mom's there, and he looks at me and he goes, "Oh, are you security?" I went, "No, no, I'm one of the artists." And he's like, "Really? Can I have your autograph?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ah, that's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
So I would see him on a TV show and be like, "He asked for my autograph. He asked for MY autograph." Then later that night… there was the TV show Saved by the Bell, they had the character name was Screech. Kid's name was Dustin [Diamond]. He was there as well. A bunch of us ended up having dinner with him and his dad, and then his room with the hotel was just down from mine. So we come back from dinner, we're sitting there walking and talking, I said, "Good night" and they walked down the hall. I go into my room, I just flip the TV on and there he is. It just happened to turn on to Saved by the Bell with him, and I'm like, "That's weird." That was just really bizarre. Like, "Wait, I just had dinner with you. That's weird." Yeah, every time I see Taylor Thomas I'm like, "Yeah, he asked for MY autograph."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an awesome story, holy crap. [laughs] So to move onto Insomniac, what was early Insomniac like? Because you were there from the very early days.'''<br />
<br />
From the very beginning, from the almost very early beginning, yeah. I left Hector's office, called Mark, and Mark said, "Yes, I need an artist," But I thought he's still here in the Bay Area He's like, "Oh, but I'm in L.A. I do have a team, they've never made a game." But they need an artist, and we're talking and I said, "Well, I can't come to L.A." My son was six years old. I'm divorced, but I'm right here with my son, he's six, I can't move to L.A. Mark said, "Well, tell you what? If you can come down for just three months, and help them finish the game, we'll put you up while you're down here and we'll fly you back to San Jose every weekend." "Hey, OK, I can do that for three months, that'd be kinda fun."<br />
<br />
I flew down, I met Ted and the Hastings brothers and really liked them. [I] wasn't overly impressed with ''Disruptor'', the game they were working on, it was just a ''Doom'' clone. There's no way I would have gone down to work with these guys, who've never made a game, on a ''Doom'' clone, except I really wanted to work with Mark again. Mark's one of those people who I think either you really enjoy working with or you really don't like him. I really enjoyed working with him, luckily.<br />
<br />
I went down for three months, and we're doing ''Disruptor''. I was learning 3D, learning Maya, Alias on the fly. I'm kinda learning Photoshop on the fly, because I really didn't know Photoshop very well yet, and then flying back and forth. ''Disruptor'' was originally for the 3DO platform. Mark's superpower is seeing the future and knowing what the future needs. You can start work on it now so that it's ready when the future needs it. That really is his superpower. He says, "Okay, at 3DO… this is not going to work. Let's go start talking to Sony and the PlayStation." We didn't have to do much art change, but we had to rework some stuff.<br />
<br />
At some point, shortly thereafter, Ted asked me if I wanted to go permanent with them, as opposed to just my three month contract. Flying back and forth was fine. I talked to my son about it. Like, "Okay, we'll just keep doing this. I'll just keep flying back and forth." So that three months flying back and forth… ended up [as] 25 years in L.A. Ten of that with Insomniac. I never planned on moving to L.A.<br />
<br />
We did ''Disruptor'', which got wonderful reviews… and didn't sell, because Universal didn't advertise it. No one had ever heard of it. Also, ''Tomb Raider'' came out at the same time. And ''Dark Empires'' [''Star Wars: Dark Forces''] and ''Doom''. ''Star Wars'', which was actually a good game on the PS1. ''Doom'', which was almost unplayable on the PS1, but it was ''Doom''. Then ''Tomb Raider'', which is ''Tomb Raider''. ''Disruptor'' didn't sell. No one ever heard of it.<br />
<br />
It was after ''Disruptor'' that… at that point, it was just the two Hastings brothers (Alex and Brian Hastings) and Ted Price who'd started the company. I was their first employee. They had one contract artist in before me that I left shortly after I started. I think it was just me and the contract artist and the Hastings and Ted, and there was Michael Johns and Mark, with Mark's little company Cerny Games. That was it.<br />
<br />
That game shipped. At that point, there's just the four of us. There's just the Hastings, Ted and myself. Ted said, "Okay, everyone go take two weeks and come up with a game and come back, we'll all pitch them to each other, and we'll decide what we do next." So I think Al Hastings came back with like this Martian… no, this off-road racing game, which came from the fact that, on ''Disruptor'', when you're running around Mars, there's these rolling sand dunes you're running across, and it was really fun just to run around out in the desert and catch air on top of the dunes. He was thinking, "Okay, we can make a game out of that." I'm pretty sure Ted pitched an alien invasion game, that I'm guessing eventually became ''Resistance'' on the PS3. I don't remember what Brian pitched.<br />
<br />
Then I pitched this game where you get to be a dragon, as opposed to riding or slaying a dragon. You are the dragon. In the original pitch, you started out as a hatchling, you started out as an egg and it hatches, and the premise is that as the game progresses, you get bigger and bigger and bigger and become more powerful. The gameplay is you need to leave your little den and go out and gather gold and gather treasure and bring it back, but then you also have to protect it, it's your lair, and you've got to protect it against various people coming in to try and steal your treasure. Then that changes throughout time as you live to be… you can live for thousands and thousands of years. The world, so to speak, would change through eras in time.<br />
<br />
I pitched that idea to Ted and the Hastings and everyone said they liked the dragon idea. We polished it up and then pitched it to Mark Cerny and Universal Studios. This is where Mark's superpower comes into play is… Universal liked it. Mark liked it. But he said, "Two suggestions. Keep the dragon the same age. Because sequels will be easier." Wow, yeah, never occurred to me that we'd be making two of these. Then the other one was him looking ahead knowing it's going to take two years to make this game. In two years, who's going to be buying and playing the PS1. He said, "Keep him the same age and keep the game cute and a little more family friendly," because your average player age is going to drop a couple of years by the time you guys get this game out.<br />
<br />
That's when we did another rework and we ended up with this little dragon named… once again, never his real name. People always think it's his real name. His working title name was Pete because it was a play off Pete's Dragon. It just drives me nuts, where people say, "If you named him that Disney would sue you." It's like, "No, the dragon in Pete's Dragon is named Elliot. That's the little boy named Pete. That's the joke here, people. We're not going to name him Pete." But by the end of it, I really did want to name him Pete, cause after 18 months… once again, that naming thing, it took forever to find a real name. By the time we got around to it, I liked Pete.<br />
<br />
We reworked it and brought in Charles Zembillas as a contract artist, just to do some character design, cause he also did all the character design for Naughty Dog. ''Crash Bandicoot'' and the other stuff for Naughty Dog. We brought him in and I think he was there just for an afternoon or morning, early afternoon. Then we couldn't decide… he did a whole bunch of drawings. He's incredible. He did a whole bunch of drawings, but no one liked any one drawing as our little dragon. We had pieces we liked. I took the ones we liked, photocopied them, then I cut the head off of one and I either shrunk it down a little bit, or I blew it up bigger, and I used some Wite-Out and I taped these things all together. I took a photocopy of that and I brought that into the conference room and everyone went, "That's our dragon. That's our character." That's one of the scans I still have, that cut and paste Spyro.<br />
<br />
He was originally green. I did the color comp and he's green. But we very quickly realized that he's green, and for a lot of the game, he's going to be running around on grass. So that's not going to work. Plus there was Gex and Croc and at least one other… Yoshi. There's all these other green reptile mascot characters. "Y'know, maybe not green." That's the one of the other things I still have is this 25 year old videotape of Spyro in all these different colors, trying to find what would look good. We ended up on purple, and that's how we ended up with a little purple dragon.<br />
<br />
I remember the very first time Al Hastings had it up and running. Literally just a flat green plane. I think maybe it had like one little square in the middle for a reference point, and it was just this flat green plane with a grass texture on it. But you could run around with Spyro and it was fun. You could sit there and just run around and chase your tail for ten minutes and have fun. I remember telling somebody, "Okay, this is our game to screw up. Cause this is fun with no gameplay and no world. If this is not fun when we're done, WE'VE screwed up." That was the beginning of ''Spyro''.<br />
<br />
Of all the games I've worked on, ''Spyro'' is the one that's near and dear to my heart. If I hadn't been at Sega, somebody else would have done the artwork on Hidden Palace on ''Sonic'', or if I hadn't been around later on at Insomniac, somebody else would have done ''Ratchet and Clank's'' artwork, and maybe it wouldn't be as good, maybe it'd be better. Had I not been at Insomniac when I was, there would be no little green dragon or a little purple dragon. You would have an off-road racing game or an alien invasion game that may or may not have been a hit.<br />
<br />
He's near and dear. Ted was always really good at- anytime somebody would ask him, "Why did you guys make a game about a dragon?" he'd always say, "Well, Craig Stitt said he always wanted to make a game about dragons. Craig said he's always liked dragons." That was awesome at the time. I really appreciated the fact that Ted always made sure to mention my name. I think as time went on… you say something enough and that becomes fact. I think as time went on, all Ted thinks I did was say, "Dragons are cool. Let's make a game about a dragon."<br />
<br />
No, there was this whole concept and there was so much more there. It's gotten to be a little frustrating that there wasn't more acknowledgement. As years went by at Sega and Insomniac… there was some crap going on there, and it literally broke me. That's why I left in 2005 was I basically had a nervous breakdown and pretty much lost the ability to paint or draw. Which I'm just now starting back after 2015 years. It was very hard when Insomniac wanted, or I should say needed, to leave Universal Studios, because it meant leaving Spyro behind, because Universal owned the IP.<br />
<br />
Ted didn't have the emotional connection I had to Spyro. But he did have to deal with the BS of Universal on a regular basis, which I guess was just nonstop. They finally had to break ties. Then after ''Spyro'', Sony is like, "Hey, you guys come over here!" Before, when we sent out for resumes during ''Disruptor'', trying to staff up for ''Spyro'', it was really hard to even get resumes. We're sort of this no-name company and "Who's going to send their resume in?" Then after ''Spyro'', we're stealing people from Disney, we're stealing animators from Disney, we're getting stacks of resumes. It really helps to have a little name recognition and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Sony really wanted… for their new game, they wanted a character that had hands. I think the game designers did as well, because it was it was problematic trying to figure out ways to get Spyro to do things since he was a quadruped. Then ''Spyro'' ended and then we did… there was another game that would have been really awesome. At this point, Insomniac is now off the lot from Universal, we've got our own building, floor of the building.<br />
<br />
Paul… what's last name… he was one of the game designers and pitched an idea called ''Monster Knights'', like Knights with a K. ''Monster Knights''. The play dynamic was the character, all of his power-ups and weapons and tools, so his shields and his armor and his guns or his bows or whatever, were actually monsters of different kinds that he would use as a shield or as armor or as a weapon. Beautiful art, great concept, and some reason, you know, Ted and the Hastings didn't like it.<br />
<br />
Then somebody… I think Al pitch this game that ended up just being called a ''Girl with a Stick''. Our working title was ''I5'', Insomniac's 5th game. These beautiful worlds where this girl with this magical stick would run around, fight monsters, and she'd plant her stick in… you get to certain locations and you could activate these huge spells for these big boss fights. The worlds were gorgeous. We're working really closely with Naughty Dog, sharing the same tools and kinda the same 3D engines between each other. The game was gorgeous. I really wish I had videotape of particularly this one level I did. It was just… it was a painting. It was gorgeous. But the game wasn't very much fun.<br />
<br />
We worked on it for like, eight months, or even more maybe, and Ted finally comes in and says, "Okay, everyone, I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is we're canceling ''I5''. The good news is we're canceling ''I5''." Everyone, Sony, everybody was just like, "This is beautiful. But it's just not fun."<br />
<br />
Then pretty quickly thereafter, ''Ratchet and Clank'' popped up. I'm not sure who pitched that idea. Was it Brian? It may have been Brian. That one fell into place very quickly as far as names and characters, all the front end on that, at least from my perspective, which I had (from a frustrating point of view) almost no input on. It was very frustrating to go from being at the ground level, inputting ideas and being in all the meetings as you're building up a new concept, to literally not being invited to the meeting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oof.'''<br />
<br />
That just got worse as time went by. If I had to do it all over again, I would have quit after ''Ratchet and Clank 1''. I should have quit after ''Ratchet and Clank 1''. Right in the middle of ''Ratchet''… like, during ''Spyro'', I remember, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night, I'm at my desk banging away on something on behind schedule, and Ted would call me into his office. "Hey, Craig, can I talk to you?" and I'm like, "Oh man, I am so busted." I'd into to his office and I'm getting ready to get chewed out, and Ted would go, "Hey, Craig, just want to thank you for being here. We couldn't do this without you. Here's the raise."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's nice!'''<br />
<br />
"Okay! Oh, okay." Then I'd go back to work. Then like a year later, another late night, I'm at my desk, I'm behind schedule, like everybody always is. Ted says, Hey, "Can I see you at my desk?" I'm like "Crap, I'm busted. I'm in so much trouble." He goes, "Hey, Craig, couldn't do this without you. Thank you. Here's a raise." "Oh, okay."<br />
<br />
Then jump ahead to… halfway through ''Ratchet and Clank'', this time during the day. Ted says, "Hey, can I see you in my office?" "Yeah, sure." This time I'm not freaking out. Like, "Hey, I'm getting a raise." I go in and Ted says, "If you're behind schedule again, we're gonna have to fire you."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[shock] No.'''<br />
<br />
That was so asinine, it was such a bizarre statement, my brain didn't register it. I just went, "Oh, well, I'll work harder. I'll put some more hours in," and I went to lunch. I'm sitting at lunch and all of a sudden I'm like, "What the fuck? Did he just threaten to fire me?" It didn't register until halfway through lunch. I go back into his office, and I go "Ted, did you…?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't react." I'm like, "Yes, because it's asinine. Everybody's behind schedule!" At the time, I think I was writing the schedule. So I said, "Okay."<br />
<br />
Then the next level is that Metropolis [Metropolis, Kerwan] from ''Ratchet 1'', which is that level that I working with Tom on, which he was having a hard time [on]. I ended up pretty much doing the whole level that was impossible to do. It was three times the size it should have been, that we'd all agreed on. I remember pointing it out to Ted. At the meeting, they rolled the thing out on the floor because it's so big. I immediately go, "They've gotta cut at least like sixty percent." Because these are literally just still just paper… Was this still just paper taped together, or were they finally printing out stuff using Illustrator? It used to just be hand-drawn graph paper taped together.<br />
<br />
Ted just came in like, "Tough, do it, figure it out, make it work." I did. This is also the level that… When we pitched ''Ratchet'' to Sony, we use the ''Spyro'' engine. With all this forced perspective, and all these tricks, made it look like a PS2 game. There's all this trickery going on. It looks incredible, would love to have that videotape. "Okay, this has to look good. This is the level we sold the game to Sony on."<br />
<br />
It's still the flagship level of the series to this day, to the best of my knowledge. So that's done, and I remember Ted looks at me, he just gives me this nod and this wink like, "Yeah, you're good. Don't worry about it." But I wasn't. I was continually not invited to meetings and left out of stuff and given crap and I just got the feeling that they would love to fire me because they could hire three college kids out of college for what they're paying me. I should have spoken up. They'd hire somebody and have to give them some responsibility, so they'd take one of my responsibilities away. They just kept putting me down into smaller and smaller responsibility. I still had a half dozen artists under me and whatnot. It was just… it was getting bad.<br />
<br />
The end of the story is during ''Ratchet Deadlocked'' is they've already broken off a handful of people to start working on ''Resistance'' for the PS3, cause that's a whole new system, you gotta learn everything over again. So we finished ''Deadlocked''. I remember I sat down, I learned how to use the new tools and do everything new. Then I go and I sit down and I teach my team, the environment team, how to use these new tools and how things are going to work. Then I go back and I go and I sit at my desk and… I can't do it. My brain just doesn't. The simplest decision. I can't decide do I want 10 polygons or 20 polygons on this curve. I just can't make the simplest decision. A little time goes by and I get called in by Ted. "Craig, can I see you in my office?" And it's, "We are firing you." You can either resign and we'll give you half of the upcoming bonus or we're firing you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sounds like you had to deal with more than you deserved there.'''<br />
<br />
I don't know where their mindset was. I look at what they've done for other employees who were having problems, that they bent over backwards for. Maybe if I had approached them and said, "Hey, there's something going on here. It's not that I'm not working hard enough or that I'm lazy. Something is wrong." Yeah, I should have left after ''Ratchet''. I should have left when they threatened to fire me that very first time. I should have said, "Fuck you." [laughs] I really should have. I would probably have my sanity.<br />
<br />
They really messed me up. Although I was telling part of that story to a coworker… Currently, I'm working at a children's museum and I'm just on the floor. I just play with kids. I'm a camp counselor. I just sit and draw and play with the kids and do games and silly stuff. So not management. I'm on the floor. Most of my coworkers are like 20 years old or in high school still. This started in L.A. after I hadn't worked for a number of years, and a friend kept saying that I really need to come work at a children's museum in L.A. It was a long drive and I was like, "I don't know…"<br />
<br />
I just went down and went to one of her special events at the museum and just sat there for a while and talked to everybody and played around the museum. "Yeah, I need to be here." So this is my new calling. I was talking to this employee and I said, "You know, I wonder where I'd be if I had quit when I should have?" I love their response, because I said, "Well, if I had, I'd probably still be making games." He goes, "Yeah, maybe, but you wouldn't be here." I went, "Oh, yeah." I prefer this. I don't make near the money I make making video games, you make stupid money making video games. Here, I'm basically making minimum wage. But this is good. This is keeping me healthy, healthy and happy.<br />
<br />
My times at Insomniac were a real mixed bag. They went from incredible to literally breaking me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah…'''<br />
<br />
I remember they took me out on a cruise once. At that big party on the cruise, Ted's going through the history of Insomniac, and he briefly mentions and moves on. Which is okay, it's fine, it's a big company and it's got a lot of history. But it kinda bugged me. Once again, it's like I'm very curious… I'm trying to not let too much ego get in the way here… I'm curious where Insomniac would be if there was no ''Spyro''. Who knows what they would have done without it. ''Spyro'' was in the top five for the PS1 of overall sales. Cross-generational, cross-gender, beyond what we ever expected to have it be.<br />
<br />
So Ted's talking, and Al comes over… Al, very quietly (Al is very quiet) says "Thank you." He says that and it really touched me. "We could not have done this without you." It was just so nice to hear that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine… What changes do you feel could have been made which would have helped you avoid that burnout? That's kind of a big question.'''<br />
<br />
If I stood up for myself. So when they started taking responsibilities away… Like in one game, I would be in charge of something or I would have come up with the idea for something. Then the next game, I wouldn't need being invited to that meeting. It's like, "Okay, it's not like I did a really crappy job. I don't get to do it again." It's like, "No, I did a very good job. So why am I not even invited the second time around?" When we hired new people, if I had stood my ground a little more and said, "No, those are my responsibilities, find something else for them to do."<br />
<br />
This goes all the way back to the very beginning. When we first hired John Fiorito, who was the other art director at Insomniac in the early years… so they didn't really have an art director because there were just two artists and a couple programmers and Ted. As ''Spyro'' got going, Ted was telling me, "OK, you're going to be art director on the next project." But he never officially made it official. But when they hired John, all of a sudden, it's like, they've got to keep John happy. John's a great person and an incredible artist, and he's also a really good manager. I'm a sucky, horrible manager. He was a good manager.<br />
<br />
Instead of willingly saying, "Oh yeah, we'll just split up my responsibilities and John will take this and I'll take this." I wish I had said, "No, no, no, Find something else for John to do." John and I worked really well together and there was a nice division of responsibilities there, but that was the beginning of "Oh, we've got something new. Let's take some of Craig's responsibilities." I don't know what their motives were. I try not to be too hard on myself. "Well, John's a better artist than I am." John's definitely a better manager than I am.<br />
<br />
If someone's work sucks or isn't working right, and you need to say, "You're not going home until this is fixed." or "You're working extra because this needs to be fixed," I would point out what needed to be done or that it wasn't right. When they didn't fix it before they left, I would stay late and fix it. Which would put me behind on my schedule. That's why I'm a shitty manager. I would have done that as we hired more people, and I would have said, "Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being asked about these things? Why are these no longer my responsibilities? Were you not happy with them? You never said anything."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like they had an inclusion problem.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I don't really know why. At first, I was definitely treated like the golden boy the first couple of years because I was the only person that made a game. I already had a couple of million-selling titles under my belt. I really tried to not act that way. I really tried not to be cocky or arrogant or to feel like I could get away with things. But I think it must have come across that way to some people. The only thing I remember getting called out on prior to "You're behind schedule" is… I actually was verbally told by Ted, "You are in charge here. You are the art director on this." This would have been on ''Ratchet'' or ''Spyro 2''. "You're in charge of the art." At least for some small piece of it, because there was John still.<br />
<br />
Chad Dresden was there and I remember he was a great artist, really fast, and I did (as a crappy manager) make the mistake of asking him to fix bugs and fix things and do things that I didn't have time to do. He always had time because he was always ahead of schedule because he worked his ass off and he was fast. He started to resent the fact that because he was ahead, I was always asking him things to do. He talked to Ted and Ted called me into his office and chewed me out for always dumping stuff on Chad.<br />
<br />
It was bad on me. I take that one. It wasn't fair to Chad. That's the only time that anything had been said that I think… I don't know. I don't know. If I stood up for myself earlier, and if they gave in, then great, I would have had what I wanted. And if they didn't, I would have left earlier.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you handled it as best you could within what you were given.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I was still flying back and forth every weekend. I'd be curious to see what Ted's memories or perspective is on this, but… not that it matters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So while you were telling me that I wrote down a couple more Spyro questions, if you don't mind me hopping back a little bit.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, please. I can get off my sob story and actually get back to talking about games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no, you're good. That's an important part of it. That's an important part of your career.'''<br />
<br />
One more thing really quick here. Something I tell people, regardless of where they're working, is the mistake I made at Insomniac is: I thought of them as family. I had been there since the beginning. I was their first employee. I thought Insomniac is family. Work is never family. You are an asset. You are a tool. You're a cog in their machine. You are loved and taken care of as long as they want to take care of you, but you are not family. The second something changes, you're just replaceable. Don't make that mistake of thinking of someplace as family or home when it's not.<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to questions about ''Spyro''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I did want to say on the topic of burnout. When I asked you what changes could have been made, I was more referring to the company, because even though you took it on yourself and you were very noble in saying, "What could I have done differently," I was thinking more of… because if you're undergoing burnout, that can be personal issues, but I feel like the company also has a responsibility to address, on their end, what's causing that issue to be saddled on you in the first place.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at the few other people that I know had some diagnosed physical issues that made it very hard to work. Insomniac bent over backwards to keep them and make sure that they were happy and healthy and content. Chad's very talented. He was a good art director. When he needed to leave the company and go back to family in North Carolina, they opened up another branch of Insomniac in North Carolina that he could work from there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez.'''<br />
<br />
I'm like, "Okay?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"So you can't understand my position on this, but you can open up an entirely new branch in a different state?"'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. For the longest time, for the first number of years… Insomniac fired a couple of people, but nobody left Insomniac because where would you go that was better? We were making incredible gains. The coworkers were awesome, the perks and the food and everything in the office was awesome. There was literally nowhere else you could go. Then as the company got bigger, and they got more corporate, it turned into just another company. Ted kept saying, "We're never going to go corporate, we're always gonna stay the same." Then it got as corporate as it could be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So to hop to a couple questions I wanted to ask about ''Spyro''. You said that originally, there was the concept for him aging and… because dragons are really old, the world would evolve around him. To jump back to our ''Dark Empires'' discussion, that's a theme in ''Dark Empires''. You have both dragons and the world evolving around the player. Is there any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
Not consciously. But now that you say that? Yeah, there's definitely that transition there. I don't know if that was subconsciously still in my brain, that part of my brain liked, or… Yeah, that wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you eventually settle on the name Spyro?'''<br />
<br />
We went around with that. Names are so hard. It took forever to find a name for the company because Insomniac was named Extreme Games when I first went down. We went on forever… It was like last minute. We needed to do press releases for ''Disruptor'', and like, "We need a company name." Finally got Insomniac. Another company… We had Insomniac games, and there was another Insomniac Studios that had filed. You have to… the first one to get a product on the shelf can actually lock the name down. So we were in a race with Insomniac Studios to be the first one to ship and we beat them. I feel sorry for them because now they got to start over.<br />
<br />
''Spyro'' is the same way. Pete was… I think it's one of the Hastings came up with Pete. It's like, "Yeah, perfect." But you're always thinking. We get closer and closer and then Sony starts pushing like, "OK, we need a real name." We're throwing all these different names out. I know Pyro got put out early, but it was too on the nose. Also we don't want parents getting pissed off because their kids are lighting fires. Finally, pretty close to the shipping of [the game], we're "We've got to have a name." Somebody at Sony pitched Spyro.<br />
<br />
Everybody liked it, except for Brian Hastings, who went, "Hey, wait a minute. I pitched that name like three months ago, and nobody liked it." We're like, "Oh, really?" So he was always a little pissed that he'd pitched it and we hadn't liked it. Somebody at Sony came up with Spyro. Luckily it passed all the tests.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One final ''Dark Empires'' question, and I appreciate you letting me hop around here.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no worries.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So we noticed that the ''Dark Empire's'' ROM, the existing ROM, doesn't have any sound. Do you recall if anyone was planned to be assigned to do music and sound for it?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
It's weird. I'm trying to remember if there was sound on… Well then again, it's been 35 years? 1990, when? 30, 35 years. [laughs] Since I would have last played that. Yeah, not that I know of. Sound effects, I guess, would have done in house. Then music… I know for ''Kid Chameleon'', they brought in somebody outside to do the music. Actually, he did some of the sound effects, too. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Going back to ''Spyro'' here. Of all the original Spyro games, or I will say, of all three of the original Spyro games, which did you enjoy working on the most?'''<br />
<br />
It's down to 1 or 2. It's a trade off because, short answer, the first one, just because it's new and it's this wonderful, beautiful world. But then, the second one, because… all the hard starts, all the hard, unfun stuff about the being the creative process, is done. Now you're just having fun. You know the tools, you know the world, and you can just build. So it's hard [to answer]. My favorite level of all the levels is Badlands, Skelos Badlands. Is that in 1? Just something about that one, I really like the artwork. I like skulls, if you can't tell from some of the other games I worked on. That was the first time I got to do skulls and bones in a Spyro game.<br />
<br />
The other interesting thing, that was my big surprise on ''Spyro'', is the skies. Al Hastings came up with this way of doing skies with polygons where you're lighting the vertex and then the computer will gradate between whatever is on this vertex to the next vertex, so you can get these gradations. By shaping your polygons, you can create clouds or whatever you want in the sky. Ted did the first one or two. He then asked me to take over doing the skies. I really didn't want to. It was very tedious. They weren't particularly pretty. I didn't think there was much creatively you could do with it. The tools were really just very basic. The first couple were just a lot of work and a lot of manual, intensive, just not fun computer work. But as the tools improved, in the end, of all the different things I did in ''Spyro'', doing the skies is my favorite.<br />
<br />
I really learned how to push what could be done with the tools and with polygons and vertex lighting. Jump ahead 30 years, and get talking to people… the people who find me or find out find out that I worked on ''Spyro'' they always bring up the skies. The skies were one of their favorite things.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
That means so much to me. I've talked to a couple of different people who talk about how they didn't have the best childhood. ''Spyro'' was their escape. Particularly, there was at least at least a couple different times that people have told me that they had spots, their favorite spot, where they would just go sit and listen to the music of ''Spyro''. The music of ''Spyro'', you can't beat. They would just go sit and listen to the music and look at the sky. I'm like, "Wow."<br />
<br />
The worlds were fun to build, and I've got some favorite places and favorite things and had a lot of fun building the world. But the skies. I look back at those… I just recently here just came across this picture of a tattoo that's one of my skies. It's very clearly made to look like it's polygons and a vertex-lit tattoo of the sky, with a crystal dragon from ''Spyro 1'' on top of it. This beautiful tattoo, it kinda freaked me out in a good way, because I've seen lots of tattoos of Spyro and different games I've worked on. I built the crystal dragon and I built the sky. I'm looking at this person's tattoo. "That's my artwork on your body." That is cool. That is wild.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It must be rewarding hearing feedback like that.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, it is. It really, really is. I'm trying not to cry right now. I gotta learn the word in Japanese, but there's a Japanese word that means your reason for being [Ikigai]. It's four different things. It's a Venn diagram with four circles. The first one is doing something that you enjoy doing. The second one is doing something that you're actually good at doing. The third one is doing something that they actually will pay you to do. And the fourth one is doing something that enhances or gives back to the world.<br />
<br />
I look at my time at museums, when working with kids, I'm like, "Okay, I enjoy doing it. I'm good at doing it. They pay me to do it. And it's definitely helping the world." That's a good reason for being. Back when I was making games, and was making really good money, and I had a lot of friends who were working like two or three jobs to barely keep paying the rent… I felt really guilty that I'm sitting around listening to music, drawing monsters all day, and I'm getting paid money. My one friend pointed out like, "No, what you're doing is important. It is affecting people. These are more than games to some people." I really understand that now. From talking to these people and seeing the way people's eyes light up, when I'm talking to someone and they find out that I worked on ''Spyro'', and they just light up.<br />
<br />
Actually, at the museum down in L.A., every Thursday, they have 15 minutes in the morning for like, you could have a show and tell. You could sign up and bring in something to talk about a trip or a knee surgery or your favorite whatever. People kept asking me to bring in some artwork and video game stuff. So I did. My boss knew I'd made games, but that he didn't know anything beyond that. As I'm going through my artwork, and I pulled out the Spyro stuff, his eyes literally opened up and his jaw literally dropped and he's staring at me. Afterwards he comes to me and goes "''Spyro''! That was my game, that was the game." It's so weird to watch him try to be my boss and not go all fanboy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] That's really sweet.'''<br />
<br />
I really had a very fortunate life. Not only did I get to make games, I got to work on some of the best base games out there. ''Sonic''. I mean, come on, my second game ever was ''Sonic the Hedgehog''. Then ''Spyro'' and ''Ratchet and Clank''. They're still making Ratchet and Clank games. Sonic's got movies, Spyro's got a TV show. Although he's kinda butt ugly in it because ''Skylanders'', but it's still Spyro. Ratchet and Clank's got a movie. ''Comix Zone'', the rights got sold to make a movie.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh!'''<br />
<br />
I don't know if anything ever happened to that, but somebody bought the rights. So yeah, very fortunate life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What advice would you give to young artists entering the industry?'''<br />
<br />
What would I tell people? Because I do get asked that a lot. I do encourage people. It's as much luck and being in the right place. People ask me how I got into the industry. If I answered "An ad in the newspaper that said wanted artists, no experience necessary." I mean, come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's not going to happen nowadays.'''<br />
<br />
What kinda bullshit lazy writing is that? I had a sign on my desk for years. Well, I had two signs on my desk. I had KISS, K-I-S-S, which is 'keep it simple, stupid.' [laughs] To remind myself to keep everything simple. I need to make a sign here for my projects here. The other one was, 'if you love your job, you'll never have to work a day in your life.' I've felt very fortunate that that's almost my entire life, other than shoveling fries in high school, I've had jobs where I was really enjoying the work.<br />
<br />
When I talk to people, I tell them to pursue something that you really enjoy, because if you can get that, if you can make a living at that, it's not work. It's very hard, and there's not many people that can manage to do it, but if you can… Then I follow that up with my cautionary tale. "Don't be blinded by that." Because that will mess you up. But just have faith. It does happen. It happened to me, it can happen that you can you can follow this and do it.<br />
<br />
People ask specific suggestions on the game industry now and I just tell them, "It's changed so much. I can give you some generic stuff that worked 30 years ago, but it's so different now." It's changing again here with AI stuff coming in. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the art. Actually, it'll be interesting to see what happens to games across the board.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting new time.'''<br />
<br />
My nephew was just showing me this game that is entirely AI generated. It's huge, because it's just this computer continually creating worlds that you can fly to. It'll be interesting. It's not a bad thing. It's just a new tool, but it will be interesting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you could return to game development, what kinda game do you think you'd most want to make today?'''<br />
<br />
I would love to make that original dragon game I pitched. Let's say we had made that. Let's say Mark had went "Awesome. Perfect." I think it would have been an incredible title, would have been a really fun game. It would have been kinda niche though. Moms and grandmas and girlfriends and four-year olds all want to play ''Spyro'', but you also didn't lose the 15 year old boys. Where if you had this more realistic looking dragon, it would have been a good game, but it wouldn't have been with this worldwide hit. I would still love to play that, would love to make my original dragon game. What'd I call it? ''DragonSpan''.<br />
<br />
Or I would love to finish up ''Astropede''. That one could have maybe happened. I was talking to Ken, and we're bouncing back and forth like "How do we… what do we do here?" because we both wanted to see it finished. I would love to see that, because I still think… there were some technical problems and gameplay issues that we had never got to the point to where we had resolve, they were going to be a real problem, that I think now wouldn't be a problem. Just because resolution's higher on games now.<br />
<br />
I would love to make the original dragon game, where you're protecting your hoard and fighting off D&D adventurers coming in, but you also gotta go out and kidnap the princess so you have something to eat. Have you ever see the movie Dragonslayer, 1982?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's vaguely familiar. I don't think I've seen it.'''<br />
<br />
One of the most wonderful- it's not the most realistic dragon still to date, but the dragon in it is incredible in most scenes. That movie was definitely at the forefront of my brain as I was thinking of the original pitch for ''Spyro''. That and Lord of the Rings; Smaug. By the end of the game, you're Smaug. Even more so, you're this D&D magic-using, talking, powerful dragon that's casting spells and all sorts of stuff. I would love to do that. And the artwork for that would be fun. That's right up my alley again. [laughs] Monsters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course. Looking back at all of your work in the game industry, what are you the most proud of?'''<br />
<br />
[thinks] ''Spyro''. My favorite artwork that I'm the most proud of… I'm really glad it got cut from ''Sonic 2'' because it made it more than just another level, is the Hidden Palace artwork and the Hidden Palace level. I'm really proud of that. It's kinda taken on a life of its own. Then ''Spyro''. Specifically in ''Spyro'', the skies. The rest of the artwork in the game is beautiful and fun, but after having talked to so many people about the skies… and then myself going back and looking at them. Cause people have gone through with various editors and pulled the skies out. I'd love to see the meshes without the vertex lighting. I'd love to see the meshes of these skies.<br />
<br />
I'm trying to explain to people and they're like, "What?" "Oh, I can just show you." Somewhere, there's a magazine article that has a single screenshot with and without the light colors. I've been going through and looking at these panoramic views of the skies and just… Once in a while, I'll do a piece of art, and I step back and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that?" I've got one painting, the Calvin and Hobbes painting, which is up on that DeviantArt link. The Calvin and Hobbes painting, that's one where I finished and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that? It wasn't you. Who did that?"<br />
<br />
I look at the Spyro skies, and I'm like, "Yeah, wow, those are gorgeous. Who did those?" It's nice. I like that feeling of, "Oh, I can actually look at that and I don't see all the flaws." You know, most other artists and people in general on anything, they look at something they did and all they can see is "Oh, I didn't get this right, I didn't get that right." I look at the skies and it's like, "Wow, yeah…"<br />
<br />
Talking to these people, it's surreal. That tattoo… Wow. "You did something that touched people."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your work had a huge influence.'''<br />
<br />
There was a special about these guys who went to Spain because they were huge fans of the spaghetti Westerns, in particular, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. They were going to hike around and they were going to find all the filming locations. Are you familiar with the movie?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it all the way through, but I'm familiar with spaghetti Westerns.'''<br />
<br />
You gotta watch it. It's a must-watch movie. It can be a little long, but yeah, it's classic, and it's Clint Eastwood. At the end of the movie, there's the three bad guys. There's the good, the bad, the ugly. There's this three-way Mexican standoff gunfight in the middle of this big circular cemetery with gravestones all around it. Incredible music playing, classic spaghetti Western gunfight. These guys are looking for that location, because it wasn't a real cemetery. It's a place they built out in the middle of Spain. During this special, they're talking about these different things and meeting people who were extras and whatnot, they get talking to Hatfield, lead singer from Metallica, James Hatfield, who loves the movie. In fact, Metallica starts every one of the concerts with the song that plays right before that gunfight.<br />
<br />
They're talking to him and he said something that really hit home with me. He says, people come up to him either at concerts or just on the street, and tell him how much his music means to them or how it changed their lives. He said he used to just say "Thank you very much," but then he realized that he doesn't see his music the way they see his music. To him, part of it's just a job, it's just what he does. To them, it's so much more. It can be the spiritual thing. It literally changed their lives. When he's talking to these people, he says he tries really hard to remember that, that this is more than just his music to them.<br />
<br />
As I'm listening to him talk, and I'm just starting to talk to all these people about ''Spyro'', I'm like, "Oh, yeah." I mean, I'm not a huge gamer. I've got other things I spend way too much time and money on. This realization is like, for some of these people… like the look on my boss' face and these other people. It's huge. Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Thanks again for the patience with this long interview, we're almost about done here.'''<br />
<br />
No worries, I enjoy it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can tell.'''<br />
<br />
It's cathartic for me. Sonic, Spyro, Insomniac… see where I am on that. Like, "Oh, no, I've still got to work on that." Well, my brain's dealing with that. It's all good. Like I said, I know how much some of this stuff means to different people. One of the things I really want to do is… I've been putting my artwork out there for quite a while. It's in like game forums and places where like the gamers are going to find it, but I know there's the casual fans that don't go online looking for these stories, that would love to hear these stories and see these pictures and know some of this stuff. That's not where they spend their time digging into the Internet.<br />
<br />
I want those people to find some of this stuff and hear some of these stories. I want to get out there. I'm getting older. [laughs] I want to make sure it's out there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah… How do you feel about the influence Hidden Palace Zone had on the larger gaming community? Obviously, they named the game preservation group after it, but Hidden Palace has become kinda the symbol for like mystery in games. That must be a good feeling.'''<br />
<br />
It's another one of those surreal feelings. Once again, it makes me feel glad that it got cut from the game. Had it not been cut, it could be on somebody's ranking list of… "What's your favorite level in ''Sonic 2''?" would be really the only place it'd ever be discussed. It's part of the whole industry now, especially within the Sonic world. It's surreal, very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it means quite a lot. That's all the questions I had to ask you. I appreciate so much again that you've given me all your time. We've been talking for almost three and a half hours here. That's incredibly gracious of you.'''<br />
<br />
I'd be putting off what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. [laugh] I'm accomplishing something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, actually, one last question. Speaking of Hidden Palace, you had previously donated ''Segapede'' to Hidden Palace for preservation, and they did a big history post about it and they were able to study it. If you don't mind, could we do the same with ''Dark Empires''? Get it uploaded, write a little history post about it?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Once again, for the people that are going to be interested that stuff… I wish I remembered more about it. I remember doing the sketches and the only reason I remember doing those sketches because I still have those sketches. Maybe it'll trigger somebody else's memory now from something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I was so happy that you were sharing names, and part of the reason I was asking about names, was because I was actually going to reach out to get more information on just all the projects that we talked about, with all your former coworkers.'''<br />
<br />
I can't remember what I was asking Bill about… I know I talked to him or texted him probably a decade ago now. If you can track Bill down, he would definitely be able to give you more. I'm trying to think, who else… I think was Bill I contacted about ''Treasure Tails'', and he said he didn't have anything to do with it, but I think he said Hoyt did. I don't think I… did I ever get a hold of Hoyt? I can't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I'd love to track him down.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I'd like to remember more about ''Treasure Tails''. I do remember I do have my notes in my journal that talk about being excited about this kinda stuff. Then all of a sudden, "Eh, it's being cancelled."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you're ever able to find that journal again, please shoot me an email. As you said, there's probably tons of juicy information in there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think in the relative STI days, I actually scanned in those pages. I've been meaning to go through and pull out… because the other thing is in the landfill and Redwood City. I was busy doing this, because I was really pretty good about writing in a journal every morning or whenever, and decided that I was going to have two journals. I was going to have my personal journal, about just likes and thoughts and dating, whatever. Then my other journal about work, I was going to do at work, and I was going to do it on the computer. I'd sit down every morning and type for a few minutes.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, that journal, the typed journal on the floppy disk, is probably in a landfill somewhere because it got left behind. It didn't get brought with me. As opposed to my books, I still have my books. Unfortunately, they're mostly full of who I'm dating at the moment. The key moments and dates are still in that, so that at least allows you to get some anchor points to lock in… I'm almost sure it'll have the date of Michael Jackson's visit.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] I mean, that's low priority, but I appreciate whatever you're able to dig up and send my way.'''<br />
<br />
But you think… okay, so the accident [Michael Jackson had]. Knowing it's in March of 93, did you say was his accident…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, so March of… Just to give you an overview of what we know from other developer statements. Brenda said some of this, David Javelosa said some of this. There was at least one meeting before he sprained his ankle because Brenda said that she remembered him not on crutches. That would have put in January or February 1993 or earlier, but probably January, February '93. Then there was a second meeting where he was on crutches that you saw him, so we think that might have been mid '93.<br />
<br />
That first meeting was him discussing ''Sonic 3'' off crutches. The second meeting was him discussing ''Sonic 3'' more, just discussing doing it. He was on crutches, so that was March or later. Then there was a third meeting where he was also on crutches, that was later in '93 because he was dropping off materials to STI for ''Sonic 3'', probably demos or tracks like that.<br />
<br />
If you can find a date… no worries. We're just always like to piece together timelines on Sonic Retro.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, every little piece of information leads to the next little piece of information.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, it's like archaeology.'''<br />
<br />
It literally is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like assembling… It's like you have a bit of pottery and you just assemble pieces and then you put some pieces in place and say, "Oh, the outline for this piece looks like this other piece." It's almost like a puzzle that way.'''<br />
<br />
There was something recently here… that somebody pointed out something online. I had made a comment on Reddit or somewhere. Somebody came back and they had they said something else like, "Oh, I thought this," or "I've seen this written." Actually, they posted a link to another article. I'm reading that and went, "Yes!" All of a sudden it flipped something that I remembered. These little pieces, like "Okay, that can't work because this is here now." So you have to change what was happening. Then all of a sudden, these other memories come back, because now you remember things in the correct order and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it's archaeology. It's piecing together. Occasionally, you look at the paleontology and look at some of the early drawings of dinosaurs like, "Wow, that is so wrong."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, they were trying but it was wrong.'''<br />
<br />
"You were trying. I can see why you got that. But that's not how it was." Then wait another 100 years and I'm sure they'll be looking at our drawings doing the same thing. They'll watch Jurassic Park and go, "What were you guys thinking?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. History is an interesting thing.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, if you've got any more questions, go ahead and shoot them to me again. I'm always more than happy to do what I can and try to remember what I can.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, we really appreciate the openness.'''<br />
<br />
You've done this a couple times today. Where you're just asking a question, and I'd go, "No, I don't remember anything." But there'll be a certain word, you'll say a certain thing, and "Oh, wait!" Like the fiery forest thing. I'm like, "Oh, wow." I don't initially remember anything, but I now know that was a thing. Because I can remember trying to remember how to do flames on branches… weird.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, whatever you remember you can always find my way as well. I'll probably be following up this interview with maybe a couple more questions that I either forgot or I look at the interview and I'm like, "Oh, shoot, I should ask that. Something like that."'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, my pleasure. It really has been my pleasure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, this was wonderful speaking with you. Again, you gave me over three and a half hours of your time. I cannot thank you enough for everything that you gave us today.'''<br />
<br />
[laughs] But now you've got to edit this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, my gosh, yeah. So with transcriptions… Because I do my own transcriptions, it's about two to three hours for every one hour of recording. This might be a nine hour project. So I was going to say, I'm going to take about a week to two weeks to transcribe this, clean it up, get it all together, and then I'll publish it, and then I'll send you a link. If you see any minor issues or if I got a name wrong or something, you can just let me know.'''<br />
<br />
Okay, yeah. Well, good luck, and thank you. I enjoy this, and I'm happy to do it. I'm more than happy to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Craig. This is absolutely wonderful again.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Well, talk to you later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Talk to you later. Bye bye.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
:''[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas Originally published on Sega Retro on August 7, 2025].''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=News/Happy_Halloween_2025!_Dark_Empires_Prototype_%26_Craig_Stitt_Interview&diff=177369News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview2026-10-11T23:17:38Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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'''[https://hiddenpalace.org Hidden Palace] and [https://segaretro.org/ Sega Retro] '''PROUDLY''' present...''' <br><br><br />
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[[Dark Empires (prototype)|''Dark Empires'' at Hidden Palace]]<br><br />
[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires ''Dark Empires'' at Sega Retro]<br><br />
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[[Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)|Craig Stitt interview]]<br><br />
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[https://segaretro.org/Sega_Technical_Institute Sega Technical Institute] was Sega of America's first attempt at an internal game development division. Headed by [https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny Mark Cerny], an American developer who had spent the previous three years at Sega's Tokyo headquarters developing Master System software, the small autonomous studio first began operations in an unassuming San Jose business park in January 1990. It was deliberately positioned near Sega Enterprises USA (Sega of Japan's US arcade division) rather than Sega of America's headquarters in San Francisco to insulate the fledgling studio from what Cerny saw as unproductive and excessive oversight from company management. Most importantly, STI reported directly to Sega's Japanese management and was granted the unique privilege of bypassing Sega of America's concept approval processes.<br />
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Cerny's original vision for STI had been to establish a hybrid training and development center where inexperienced American talent could learn directly from visiting Japanese developers, eventually creating an American-led studio capable of addressing what Sega of America viewed as an over-reliance on Japanese software. Sega had originally planned to send eleven Japanese arcade developers to California, but after the US embassy in Tokyo denied their O-1 visa applications and temporarily barred further submissions, Cerny was forced to build an American team without assistance from Japan. Despite these constraints, his concept of an open development environment encouraged staff to freely conceive and pitch their own ideas - principles that would give rise to the studio's history of experimental projects.<br />
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STI began development of its first original game in 1990, the action-platformer ''[https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon Kid Chameleon]'', a result of Cerny's initiative to create a character-driven global blockbuster franchise. However, it wasn't the only original project undertaken by the fledgling studio. That same year, [https://segaretro.org/William_G._Dunn Bill Dunn], a designer at STI and tabletop gaming enthusiast, conceptualized a fantasy-based tactical strategy game for the Sega Genesis. The new title would reference the design of Technosoft's recently released ''[https://segaretro.org/Herzog_Zwei Herzog Zwei]'', a novel title which brought real-time strategy gameplay to home console owners. Cerny approved the concept later that year, assigning programmers [https://segaretro.org/Scott_Chandler Scott Chandler] and [https://segaretro.org/Ken_Rose Ken Rose], alongside artists [https://segaretro.org/Yasushi_Yamaguchi Yasushi Yamaguchi] and [https://segaretro.org/Craig_Stitt Craig Stitt], to development. No audio staff were assigned to the game, but Stitt speculates that music and sound would have been handled by an outside composer.<br />
<br />
Stitt in particular was enthused to join the project. A traditional artist and illustrator who shared Dunn's love of tabletop games, Stitt specialized in fantasy artwork, regularly creating monster designs for his own tabletop campaigns, with his work characterized by an emphasis on dragons. He recalls, "The style was right up my alley. This fantasy ''Dungeons & Dragons'' [style], monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build." Alongside Dunn, the two collaborated with Cerny on designing a top-down fantasy tactical strategy game set in a world of dragons and monsters, with different factions vying for control of the land. The game which would become known as ''[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires Dark Empires]'' officially began early production at STI's original San Jose offices sometime in 1990.<br />
<br />
Stitt was largely unfamiliar with strategy games before being assigned to ''Dark Empires'', but was also a fan of the aforementioned ''Herzog Zwei''. "I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played." He went on to create over a dozen pieces of concept art for the project, including early artwork of the game's unimplemented science fiction setting and a range of distinct units and tiles. Genesis graphics were created on Sega of Japan's [https://segaretro.org/Digitizer_System Digitizer System], a light-pen-based graphics workstation shipped to California by Japanese management, with Stitt's artwork adopting a detailed medieval fantasy style inspired by his ''Dungeons & Dragons'' illustration experience.<br />
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''Dark Empires'' would be structured around two opposing factions (consisting of gold and purple dragons and their respective leaders in the dumped prototype) engaging in battle across a selection of six different planets. Each faction would have a leader unit that functions similarly to a king in chess, with victory achieved by defeating the opposing faction's leader. The game was planned to progress through evolving time periods over the course of gameplay, with concept art depicting settings such as Natural, Fantasy, Prehistory, Horrific, and Cybernetic. Gameplay itself would alternate between two perspectives: a zoomed-out view reminiscent of ''Herzog Zwei'', where players move individual groups of four units across the battlefield, and a hexagonal unit-based view in which individual units can be commanded to both move and attack the enemy faction.<br />
<br />
The team had planned a number of then-novel mechanics for ''Dark Empires'', including neutral temples which players could enter to initiate a battle against a ram-headed enemy controlled by the opposing player. Defeating this enemy would reward the player with an additional single-dragon squad to command, requiring players to balance time and unit management against the possibility of expanding their forces. In addition to the two main player factions, wild dragons would roam the map as hostile forces that would attack either side, controlled by the enemy player once engaged. Units also possess nonfunctioning experience bars that gradually increase during play, seemingly intended as a leveling system for individual unit growth.<br><br />
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Development progressed into late 1991, when the game reached a first-playable state, featuring basic and mostly functional combat gameplay and the framework for a promising American-designed console tactical strategy game. However, as strategy games for home consoles were then an unproven and largely unheard of concept, Cerny's desire to focus on large blockbuster titles was bound to eventually clash with a game of relatively niche market appeal. Further, the studio was already beginning to suffer from recurring mismanagement problems, particularly in the allocation of project resources like assigned staff. To compound matters, Sega of America's marketing department had just tasked STI with starting production of ''[https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(16-bit) Sonic the Hedgehog 2]'' that November, with Yamaguchi leaving the project to help lead that game's development. Shortly after the completion of its first-playable prototype, ''Dark Empires'' was cancelled in December 1991.<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt later recycled certain ''Dark Empires'' concepts for use in future projects; among these was the design for a bald, disembodied human head with striking green eyes, a concept which would evolve into ''Kid Chameleon''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s final boss, Heady Metal. Also repurposed was one of ''Dark Empires''<nowiki>'</nowiki> more developed planned leader units, the Elf King, appearing as a playable character in his pitch for the ultimately undeveloped 1993 Genesis fighting game ''SpellCaster''. Stitt later noted potential connections between the cancelled project and his later pitch for ''Spyro the Dragon'', including the emphasis on dragons and the concept of evolving time periods. "That wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere."<br><br />
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Following its cancellation, ''Dark Empires'' went virtually undocumented until Stitt uploaded a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOlHbBTF8eI 1995 video résumé] of his STI work to YouTube in August 2020, including five Digitizer stills of gameplay and a set of sprite art from the game, publicly revealing the project for the first time. Commenting on the video, he also revealed that he had a working ROM image. Five years later in August 2025, Sega Retro editor Ashley Rojas [https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas interviewed Stitt] on his career and Sega Technical Institute work, including coverage of ''Dark Empires''. During the interview process, Stitt shared his copy of the ROM - which had thankfully been retained by Ken Rose after all these years. The game was subsequently documented by both Rojas and technical researcher MDTravis, allowing ''Dark Empires'' to finally see the light of day nearly 34 years after its cancellation.<br />
<br />
The dumped prototype, dated September 1991, identifies itself with the ROM header <tt>KEVIN KIDD</tt> - an early working title for ''Kid Chameleon'' conceived as a Western-oriented continuation of the ''Alex Kidd'' lineage - suggesting ''Dark Empires'' was built upon that game's source assets. At this point in development, however, the prototype is markedly incomplete. The password system and menu options are nonfunctional, with every stage selection loading into an identical battlefield. Units are also limited to a single attack per turn, leaving combat skeletal in design, and sound is absent altogether. Regardless, the build marks an early effort by Sega of America's flagship R&D studio to explore concepts outside the norm and exists as a fascinating example of Sega Technical Institute's pre-''Sonic 2'' development output.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:CraigStitt-2.jpg|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<center><br />
Special thanks go to [[Craig Stitt (gospyro)|Craig Stitt]], for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, [[User:MDTravis|MDTravis]] for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and [[User:Armadylo|Armadylo]] for editing and proofreading this article.<br />
<br />
[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture Ashley Rojas (CartridgeCulture)]<br />
<br />
<br />
Have a happy Halloween!<br><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_skeleton.gif|centre|frameless]] <br />
|}<br />
</center><br></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Dark_Empires_(prototype)&diff=177368Dark Empires (prototype)2026-10-11T23:17:28Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Prototype<br />
|titlescreen=DE_title.png<br />
|Page name=Dark Empires (prototype)<br />
|status=Released<br />
|releasedby=CartridgeCulture<br />
|filereleasedate=October 31, 2025<br />
|game=Dark Empires<br />
|system=Sega Mega Drive<br />
|unreleased=Yes<br />
|news_page=News/Happy_Halloween_2025!_Dark_Empires_Prototype_&_Craig_Stitt_Interview<br />
}}<br />
{{Download|file=Dark Empires (prototype).zip}}<br />
'''''Dark Empires''''' was one of [https://segaretro.org/Sega_Technical_Institute Sega Technical Institute]'s earliest original projects, beginning production in 1990 alongside ''[https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon Kid Chameleon]''. A fantasy strategy [[:Category:Sega Mega Drive prototypes|Mega Drive]] game inspired by the likes of ''[https://segaretro.org/Herzog_Zwei Herzog Zwei]'', it was an experiment in bringing tactical strategy gameplay to the early 16-bit market. Development progressed to December 1991, when management permanently shelved the project, reportedly due to its niche market appeal clashing with [https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny Mark Cerny]'s desire to focus on more character-driven blockbuster titles like ''[[:Category:Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_prototypes|Sonic the Hedgehog 2]]''.<br />
<br />
The project's dumped build, a first-playable prototype, contains a ROM header dated <tt>1991 SEP</tt>, three months before the game's official cancellation.<br />
<br />
==Screenshots==<br />
<gallery heights=160><br />
DE_planets.png<br />
DE_gameplay1.png<br />
DE_gameplay2.png<br />
DE_gameplay3.png<br />
DE_gameplay4.png<br />
DE_gameplay5.png<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
==Videos==<br />
<center><br />
<youtube heights="320" widths="224">RVcqSYHl_7c</youtube><br />
</center><br />
<br />
==Acknowledgments==<br />
Special thanks go to [https://segaretro.org/Craig_Stitt Craig Stitt], for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, [[User:MDTravis|MDTravis]] for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and [[User:Armadylo|Armadylo]] for editing and proofreading [[News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview|the game's announcement article]].<br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
*''[[News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview|Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview]]'' announcement article<br />
*''[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires Dark Empires]'' at [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro]<br />
*[[Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)]]<br />
<br />
{{Prototype Footer|{{Navbox prototype|Dark Empires}}}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview)&diff=177367Adrian Powell (2026-02-11 interview)2026-10-11T23:01:44Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=AdrianPowell.png<br />
|name=Adrian Powell<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Lemmings<br />
|date=2026-02-11<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?'''<br />
<br />
Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art - the best in the UK. In addition to his teaching, he seemed always to be creating artwork at home, with his materials scattered around the house. At that early stage in my life, I was unaware that my home surroundings would influence my future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned drawing and making your own comics as a kid. What comics or cartoons did you grow up with? And what cartoon and/or artist influenced you the most?'''<br />
<br />
My elder brother and I would create our own art and even produce comics. I suppose we were influenced by professional national publications such as the Dandy, the Beano, and Eagle (my favourite).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you go to school for art or were you self-taught?'''<br />
<br />
At school, my records show that I was generally at the top of the class in art, with favourable comments from the teachers. However, I have to admit to playing truant from school whenever it was a sports day (I did not like sports). But my time was not wasted. I would visit a local signwriter's studio and learned a lot about graphics and brushwork. I have to say though, there was little doubt that I was influenced by my father. I achieved my GCE in several subjects, including my most important qualification - art!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned you were a commercial artist, and that you have experience working in printing, publishing, and the like. Could you tell us more about your experience in the printing and typesetting industry?'''<br />
<br />
At the end of my schooling, I began work in the Publicity Department of the local authority, which was responsible for promoting the seaside resort where I lived. The job involved producing holiday guides, posters, leaflets, etc. A wonderful time, and very hands-on for learning the ins and outs of arts and graphics. I also attended night school for art and design. The teacher was... my father.<br />
<br />
There followed a number of jobs in and around London. For several years I was the production manager and print buyer for four monthly trade magazines - very hands-on and often stressful in making publication dates. During this time came marriage and a family, until I decided to go freelance in the North of England where my roots were. Quite a challenge, but I had a number of business contacts, one of which was a printing company. I had regularly produced various items of artwork for their customers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned being introduced to Psygnosis some time in 1990. How did that connection first happen?'''<br />
<br />
One of their customers was moving direction by investing in a new product in the exciting area of computer games. A small group of “techies” in Dundee had created a game but needed finance to go forward. Step in Psygnosis. My printer client phoned me one day to ask if I could draw cartoons and was I available the next day.<br />
<br />
The following day I was taken to Psygnosis HQ and introduced to the team. Psygnosis was a conversion of a Liverpool dockland warehouse on the river Mersey, with large open spaces where lots of young people were sat at monitors. In particular was a young guy with a screen in front of him. I sat with him and he began the game with ping pong balls performing many antics amongst the now familiar backgrounds of underground scenarios. He explained that the "balls" were in fact creatures called Lemmings, and they wanted me to produce a Lemming. And so it began. Big challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you given any guidelines on what the rest of the team wanted the Lemmings to look like? I'm curious how much freedom you had in your designs.'''<br />
<br />
The brief to me was to create something unique, and that whatever the character looked like, they would have to convert it into pixels! I had never heard of pixels! And there would be a number of different characters and antics on the screen at the same time. The problem would be to not have pixel overload on the screen. These were early days of games, and I knew nothing of the tech side.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How many iterations did your designs go through? I'm also curious what the internal "feedback, changing things, feedback" process went.'''<br />
<br />
I roughed several paper sketches in pencil initially, with a lot of Psygnosis visits. Pressure was on and the team were waiting anxiously as each day passed. At last, the Lemming was chosen after a few tweaks and colourization. Artwork commenced.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your previous experience in typesetting really shows when it comes to the game's iconic logotype. Can you tell us about the process of designing that logo?'''<br />
<br />
Because of my fascination with graphics, I decided to produce the logotype first. This was, after all, the major piece in the promotion. I had a particular admiration of a font called Cooper Black. Once again, I visited Psygnosis for agreement. I had made a shade of green for the Lemmings' hair, and for continuity, I used it in the title. I firmly believe the enthusiasm the team had for the logo set the way for me - more so than the Lemming itself. However, I realized at this point I was being given complete freedom in my first ever journey into computer games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mention being given about 4 months to meet a Christmas deadline, with ''Lemmings'' actually launching in February 1991. Does this mean your hiring date was around… August or September 1990? Is that right?'''<br />
<br />
This was August 1990, I think. Launch date was a few months away!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of challenges, what's the biggest challenge in working remotely as a contract artist?'''<br />
<br />
My small studio was away from home in order that I didn't have any family interruptions during urgent creativity. ''Lemmings'', I envisaged, was about to become a major part of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Now you drew the game's box art, but I believe you created the box design as well. As in, determining the design layout and where things would go, if I have that correct. Could you tell us about the process of designing the game's box?'''<br />
<br />
The now iconic box cover artwork involved planning, airbrushing, and tracings. During the production of the cover, I was updated by Psygnosis of additional artwork requirements - more characters! Diggers, Floaters, Blockers, Builders, even a life-size Lemming.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You also mentioned working on a bunch of promotional artwork and the game’s manual. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
I had to create [all] this for point-of-sale distribution. Badges and lots of other point-of-sale items. And then some very involved artwork for the back of the box cover. The instruction manual was a very last-minute addition to my workload. The piece of artwork for the cover of the box showing two Lemmings carrying a placard was added later and changed over the course of reprints. I understand 20 million copies were printed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As an artist, what was the biggest difficulty in working under such a tight timeline?'''<br />
<br />
Probably the biggest challenge in being self-employed is discipline. But when the piper is calling the shots and the cheques at the end of the month, you just get on with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you do any further work on the Lemmings franchise?'''<br />
<br />
As for later games, I recall that Sony bought the Lemmings copyright. I was not involved in any more games. However, and I can't be sure of dates, several years later I was contacted by an American Lemmings fan who collected retro art. This communication started another voyage back to creating Lemmings images. He wanted to buy the original box cover artwork. I had no idea where it was or if it still existed. He asked me if I could recreate it, which I did. Then his brother wanted the same. Then it snowballed rather rapidly. I was back in the world of Lemmings artwork as commissions in the USA, France, Italy, the UK, the world, even Australia. And so it continues.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How does it feel to have impacted so many lives in such a positive way?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I was asked to appear in a film about the history of ''Lemmings''. Eventually I was invited to the premiere in Dundee. My wife and I were shown to the VIP area in a cinema filled with Lemmings fans and watched the film. Very moving. At the end there was a questions and answers session. Someone asked about the original artist and I was asked to stand and take a bow. The audience stood and applauded. Later I answered lots of questions, signed autographs, and generally enjoyed the fame.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned your work for an Alzheimer's care organization and painting murals based on nostalgic themes for the patients? Could you tell us more about this work?'''<br />
<br />
With regard to the mural work I have done, this was over a long period for a major company involved in Alzheimer's care. For my part it was most enjoyable. I travelled to several parts of the UK. My brief was to sit with the residents and ask if they could recall childhood. Obviously, much of the recollections involved comics and games. Then I would paint the memories outside their bedroom. It worked and gave me great pleasure in seeing some recognition. Often they would sit and watch me paint, sometimes even joining in.<br />
<br />
A wonderful time in my life. In fact, most of it has been good. Maybe a book is next.<br />
<br />
<br />
:''[https://www.artpal.com/lemmings_art Support Adrian Powell at ArtPal]''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02_interview)&diff=177366Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)2026-10-11T22:59:46Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=CraigStitt-2.jpg<br />
|name=Craig Stitt<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Sega<br />
|date=2025-08-02<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hi! Good morning Mr. Stitt! First off, it's an absolute pleasure to speak with you. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little nervous in speaking with you.'''<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt: No worries. It's my pleasure. It really, really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Alright, and again, thank you so much for giving me your time like this. That's very kind of you.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no, I enjoy sharing knowledge and history and trying to get all this stuff out there for people to hear and see and know and keep it alive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Great, I've noticed that. Thank you just so much for having that mindset because it means that not only does a lot of your work get shared and more well known, but others' as well. [Sharing] information; that's a great mindset to have.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it makes me wish I had taken better notes back in the day. I've got a whole box of stuff at Sega that went missing. You know, a move, either when I left Sega or a move somewhere, so a lot of my sketches and all that stuff back at my time at Sega are gone, which is unfortunate.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, that is really unfortunate. I'd be so anxious knowing that.'''<br />
<br />
Well, it kicked me- when you're doing this stuff you have no clue that 20 or 30 years later you're going to be talking about it still. [laughs] But yeah, somewhere out there in a landfill in Redwood City is a box of little three and a half inch floppy disks with all my Sonic artwork on it. What kicked me and everything is: ''Sonic'' is the one where it never even crossed my mind to keep that because it was all proprietary software. Tom Payne, one of the other artists at Sega (at STI) did keep his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Now you've got people that have the ability to pull the information off there and then get to it. Like, "Ah, man, I wish I still had mine." Oh well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, maybe this interview can act as a sort of verbal version of that.'''<br />
<br />
I hope so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Just to get started here, I did want to start on your background. Can I ask what your earliest creative influences growing up were?'''<br />
<br />
My whole family is very artistic and creative. Most of them also sing and dance, which I do not do. Yeah, the art was pretty much the whole family, especially my mom did a lot, my mom and my sisters. So I've always been influenced and supported in anything I want to do artistically. It's interesting, though, that I'm the only one to have gone, in the family, to have gone into art as a career. I think part of that is timing. I'm the younger of six- I'm number five of six kids. Strictly speaking, my older brother considered going into art, but he's like 12 years older than me. At that time, it was very limited on what your options were.<br />
<br />
Illustration, you know, magazines and book covers and magazine illustrations and stuff. It's very competitive and very limited, the market. On top of that, my brother's a little afraid to go and, you know, ruin his art, ruin his enjoyment of art because it was a job. He became an accountant, which I don't understand. [laughs] Anyway. So I'm in school and… actually my high school art teacher is one of the hugest impacts of my life because she wasn't family, and she said, "You can make a living at this." She pulled me aside one day early on and said, "Craig, you could make a living at this."<br />
<br />
That clicked. That clicked something in my brain. Even then I was still "OK, you can make a living as an artist?" I was a biology major and finally I ended up switching over to art and then finally switched over to art education, was going to teach art. Then that's where the timing of everything kicked in. Just as I'm in college, the computer graphics industry explodes. I come out of school, I get pulled into the early computer graphics industry and then from there into video games. I've never taught art, because I got sidetracked in making games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. What was the first computer you worked on when it came to designing graphics on the computer for the first time?'''<br />
<br />
It was called the GeniGraphics.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the GeniGraphics?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It was huge. The first generation ones I worked on used eight inch floppy disks, so actually truly floppy disks.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually floppy.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I can't remember the memory on those disks. It was… it wasn't called vector graphics… It was designed to do… like you did a lot of text graphics and like business meeting stuff. Like pie charts and boring stuff. You could do artwork on it. It was just a pretty complex problem. It was very interesting way of creating art on them. You can do some beautiful stuff. That's what I was doing, and I had gotten to the point, though, where I was really not happy doing it.<br />
<br />
I guess complaining too much. I was married at the time. Every time I come home from work, my wife at the time would have the wanted section of the newspaper spread out on the table with circled job opportunities. Looking for a job for me. She was tired of me complaining. She called one day while I was at work and she said, "I found your job." I know I kept this clipping, and I can't find it. But it's "Wanted: video game artist and game designer wanted, no experience necessary." That was Mark Cerny at STI, putting together his group at STI for Sega.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you hired directly by Cerny? Like, was he the one who was in your hiring interview?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I still do have the little scrap of paper where I wrote down his information and his phone number and his name really quick, the first time he called and said, "Yes, we'd like to talk to you and get more information from you." Yeah, so that was him. It was the very first time I met him. I assumed he was somebody's secretary or whatever, because he was so young. Very quickly I realize, "Oh, no, that's him, that's the boss." I was just thinking about him the other day because I lost touch with him. I'd love to get a hold of him again and just catch up because I was realizing what a huge impact he had on my life because he hired me at Sega.<br />
<br />
Then he left Sega and did a couple things, but he ended up in L.A. and I wanted to work with him again when I wanted to leave Sega. I called him, and then he's how I ended up at Insomniac Games. That was my career, Insomniac Games. That's all knowing Mark. Huge impact of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the date that you were hired? I know you said it was in 1990, I believe. No worries if you can't remember the specifics.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't remember it. Actually, you could look it up. I think if I remember correctly, my hiring letter, I think, got scanned in at the…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Video Game History Foundation.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Video Game History. I think they've got a copy, if not it's around here somewhere. Yeah, would have been 1990.<br />
<br />
I'm in South San Francisco now, moved up here a couple of years ago to get closer to my son and his family. I occasionally drive down the 101 [freeway], and every time I do I drive past… The building that STI had was just off- facing the freeway. Every time I drive past I'm like, "There's the old STI building." But it wasn't the very first one. The very first building with this tiny little office in some industrial complex down in San Jose just off of 880 [or] 17 [freeways]. I've been trying to remember… I have no idea where that is. I wonder if I've got the address somewhere for that building. [800 Charcot Avenue] That letter would probably have the address on it. I've gotta go find that letter. So 1990.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Let me see if I can find the… what was the name of this city… Was that in Foster City? Does that ring a bell?'''<br />
<br />
No, that would have been… Sega headquarters was in Redwood City. That interim office… because Mark was very consciously as far away from Sega as he could be, but be close enough that you could run back and forth, because he didn't want… That was the whole point of STI was to get it away from having too much oversight by people who didn't know what they're doing. That weren't game people. But we finally did end up at Sega actually, in their headquarters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned him getting away from SoA's oversight from non-game people. Did he see that as one of the big problems that STI was founded to fix?'''<br />
<br />
I know that's what he was trying to get away from initially, in the very beginning, and was hesitant as we kept moving closer and closer, but I don't remember there being a lot… Well actually. Trying to think. I know like even on ''Kid Chameleon'', which was the first game I worked on at STI. We were getting crap from marketing trying to tell us how to name stuff and name the character and name the game and it was frustrating. But I think yes. I wasn't part of it because you know, Mark would have insulated and would have been taking the brunt of that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of ''Kid Chameleon''. As an artist that was new to game development, was working on ''Kid Chameleon'' particularly challenging? What was challenging about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was. As I was just talking about that original building and that original office. The memory is like seared into my brain of like, the very first week I'm there, of me going outside and just trying to not freak out because I was like "I don't belong here." [laughs] I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know anything. I have to like relax and then go back inside. It was very different because it was this… It was a completely different picture. It was big Digitizers and you're drawing stuff pixel by pixel by pixel. I had done little to no animation prior to that. But it was very exciting.<br />
<br />
So you pixel by pixel and you do learn how to do it. I remember, I look back at this and I feel bad in that I remember it clicked, the animation and once again… the walk cycle was six frames and your characters were 32 pixels tall. Man, looking back at that, that's insane. I remember I had a, or looked like I was having, an easy time of it and that I knew what I was doing.<br />
<br />
I remember Brenda Ross was having a hard time and she was talking to Mark and Mark says, "Well go ask Craig." Because Brenda was hired before me but not by… I'm not sure how long she had been there. Not very long, but long enough, and Mark said, "Go ask Craig." I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just making it up on the fly and so when she asked me "Can you show me how to do this?" I went, "Yeah, but I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to teach you because I don't know. I'm just making it up," I think she took that wrong and this is where I feel bad. I think she thought I was blowing her off or something. I always look back at that and I think that just got… I don't know why that's something that's always stuck in my head is that initial conversation.<br />
<br />
Yeah, so once you got into it… I remember thinking the initial interview was for the Sega arcade systems, which I was very excited about. Then I find out that it was for the home system, and I'm like, [disappointedly] "Oh really?" For some reason I'm like, "Ah." I also went, "Oh crap." My neighbor had an Atari 2600, and that was the last time I had played any home video games. I had to run out and borrow a friend's NES to play- I had my first conversation with Mark saying, "Yeah, we want you talk to you again." I had better go play some home games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Just to familiarize yourself with them?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, because I'd never heard of the Genesis. I knew about the NES, but I'd never even touched one. I'm like, "Okay, I better scramble here so I have some idea what I'm talking about." But I very quickly realized I was glad and definitely looking back, I'm glad I was doing home games, console games versus arcade games. I had more fun doing that. Yeah, it was… Man, it's so different than games today.<br />
<br />
It's pixel by pixel and limited colors. I remember the transition from Genesis stuff onto the PS1. It was wonderful because all of a sudden you don't worry about palettes anymore. You just paint on Photoshop and you just build stuff and you still got memory issues and stuff. It went from… you look at a ''Kid Chameleon'' game or anything I did on Genesis and I could say "Everything on that screen I touched, every pixel there, I put every pixel on that screen." Then you get into the other games, the teams get bigger and the games get bigger. It's cool, but I miss that complete ownership or whatever of the world.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. It's your work as opposed to it being filtered through so many teams or like… the 'too many chefs' feeling.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. The funny thing is, I prefer to work as a team, but at the same time, it was nice to look at it and have it all be my work. It's this weird thing going on in my head that I really do prefer working as a team. I'm better if I'm with people that I can bounce ideas off of and pull ideas from and work with.<br />
<br />
Jumping ahead a little bit here. On ''Ratchet and Clank'' at Insomniac, there was a level, Metropolis, on ''Ratchet 1'', that was really a nightmare level. It was huge. The map was way too big for what we'd agreed was possible to do. The artists I was working with… there were always two environment artists building a level because they were huge, even the good sized ones. The other artists- Tom… last name just slipped my brain, was having- well, something's going on in his life. He was having a hard time at work. He was always behind, he was late and I always had to redo about half his artwork. That game, other than one little area, everything in it is mine.<br />
<br />
I was like, "Oh, okay, so this is nice;" to look at this and go, "Hey, yeah, that entire city is mine." Which is satisfying. Very different than the pixel art.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You were mentioning limited color usage and that just being a challenge with the palette. That was like a theme that defined most Genesis-era games.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How difficult did you find that?'''<br />
<br />
At times, very. The palettes were difficult, but you learned how to dither since you're doing things literally pixel by pixel. If you didn't have a green, you could do every other square blue and yellow and get a green. It would blur out on the TV. The bigger problem was just the amount of art you were allowed to use for anything, particularly in the animations.<br />
<br />
I can remember once, and this was for ''Dark Empire'', there was a boss character and… Dunn… William Dunn? Man, my brain…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Bill Dunn, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, there we go. Bill Dunn was the designer on that. I haven't talked to him in like forever. I remember he gave me the little sheet that had directions and the description of what the enemy was and what it was going to do and what animations they would need for it. I remember it saying, and this is like a little mini boss: "Writhing dramatic death. Six frames."<br />
<br />
I went, "Bill, you're not going to… writhing dramatic death and you've given me six frames." So that was always really… how do you get something to look good with six frames. People have gone back and have ripped all those files out of those games. I actually have a lot of the little walk animations for the different enemies I've done and that stuff. It's very interesting to go back and look at it and remember just moving pixels around to get just the right… cause you're using the blur of the television to get the things you need because you didn't have as many- y'know, there were 32 pixels by 32 pixels for the characters most of the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if you had any involvement in ''Dick Tracy'', but it sounds like that happened just before you got there.'''<br />
<br />
Correct. I thought I was going to be working on ''Dick Tracy''. I got there and they were already, I don't know, pretty close to shipping it. I didn't work on it. They were working on it when I got there, but yeah, I didn't have anything to do with it. I remember being bummed because at the time, the movie was a big thing. It was like, "Oh, that's really cool. That's exciting." I was bummed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Kid Chameleon'' was following ''Dick Tracy'', which was Disney's, Touchstone's thing. It seems like ''Kid Chameleon'' was the first chance that STI's artists and staff got to really flex their creativity.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. At the time, Sega was looking for a mascot. Nintendo had Mario and Sega didn't have anything. Mark… one of the things on ''Kid Chameleon'' was… we wanted to be Sega's mascot. Cause there was no Sonic yet. We're doing it and it was loosely based… There was another… who was the "Kid"? There was another "Kid" game that was in Japan on the Genesis, and it was strange.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Alex Kidd''.'''<br />
<br />
''Alex Kidd'', yeah. I can't remember what the relationship was there. There is one, I don't know what it was. We were hoping… There were a couple things. One, Mark wanted to make the biggest game ever made, the longest game ever made on the Genesis. It's like 1,800… You used to measure the side-scrollers by screens. It's 1,800 screens, if I remember the number right, so it was huge. ''Kid Chameleon'' was an enormous game with no saves and no battery backup. Part of that was money. It was cheaper to not have a battery cartridge, but also Mark didn't want to have a save. He wanted people to have to play through.<br />
<br />
It was interesting though, cause it was- this actually affected the way some stuff I did later on, is when we did finally see… We got this early beta game that was being done in Japan called ''Sonic''. We went into the break room and put it on and played it, and it was beautiful. I remember sitting there with Mark and we were trying to figure out how they both did the art and the programming for like the loops and some other kinds of cool stuff that was new. We played for a few minutes and laughed. It was like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really pretty." But we were like, "No big deal." At that time there may not have been any Rings at all in the game. If there were Rings, there was definitely no splash.<br />
<br />
A month or so later, however long, we get the new version and there's definitely Rings and a Ring splash. Now we're fighting over who gets to play. "Give me the controller! I want to play!" because now it was fun. Now it was addictive. Now we went, "Ah, crap. This is Sega's character. ''Kid Chameleon's'' gonna be a fun game, but we're not going to be Sega's mascot. This is definitely the mascot." That was interesting looking back at that transition of ''Sonic'' being a pretty game, but who cares, to being addictive. I think it was just the Ring splash added something, at least to me, that just completely changed the feel and dynamics of the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I think that does quite a lot. Speaking of that early ''Sonic 1'' build. Did you just die immediately when you got hit or was there some counter which decreased, like a health meter?'''<br />
<br />
I am trying to remember. I don't remember if there was… now I'm gonna guess, now this is just guessing. I'm going to guess you didn't die immediately. Actually, I don't know. It probably just didn't have the Ring splash visually.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''But it had Rings that you had to collect as "health?"'''<br />
<br />
The code would have been prepared for that incoming- they would have been preparing for that. Whatever the death was… I don't remember being frustrated because you get touched and die. But I don't remember what that was.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. No worries about remembering the specifics. I appreciate all you can give me so far, this is already quite a lot. So actually I wanted to go back to… You had mentioned something interesting, you had brought up Alex Kidd. I noticed some of your ''Kid Chameleon'' concept art. You always seem to mark a two letter acronym for the game under your art. All of the ''Kid Chameleon'' stuff is marked KK. At first I thought, "Oh, maybe Chameleon was spelled with a K." But then you had sent me a ''Dark Empires'', and we had someone [MDTravis] open it up and look at the ROM header, and we found the name Kevin Kidd. Which is surprisingly similar to Alex Kidd.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does the name Kevin Kidd ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
That comes down to that whole marketing thing I was talking about of marketing telling us how to name stuff. Originally we had the character named Kevin. It was funny you said that, you were saying, "Why did I mark KK on everything?" Yeah, it's cause he was Kevin. Then marketing didn't like the name Kevin. They wanted to name him… let's see, Dylan? There was this whole kerfuffle about naming the character.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dylan Charles.'''<br />
<br />
Dylan Charles! Yes. Where did you get that name? That was- did Brenda remember that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, that was actually on our… I'm in front of my computer right here, that's on our ''Kid Chameleon'' page. It looks like it was sourced from… a 1992 players guide. I don't know how they got that.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Wow, man. Yeah, that was his name. I know what's somewhere on one of the levels, there's some carving in the stone or maybe it's on one of the title screens. There's these runes carved into the rock. If you look at it, it says Kevin. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Just a little personal saying that no one's going to care about. I remember the name being a big deal. It was the same issue down at Insomniac. Naming stuff. The hardest part of any of these games is naming stuff. You've got to find something everybody likes. You've got to find something that marketing likes. You've got to find something that passes legal. That's hard. That's a really hard labyrinth to wander through.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on ''Kid Chameleon'', how much artistic freedom were you given on the project?'''<br />
<br />
A lot. I don't remember anything other than trying to work out of whatever the art bible was for, "What is the look of it?" It was whatever we wanted to do and could do. Well, all of us, it was our first game. That was Mark's whole thing. That was that ad in the newspapers: "Wanted, artists and designers with no experience." Mark wanted to build a company with… he didn't want to bring people from other companies that had their way of doing things. He wanted to train people in his way of making games and his way of thinking. None of the artists… I don't know about the programmers, but none of the artists had ever made a video game and never done anything like this. It was all brand new.<br />
<br />
I remember Paul Mica. Another one of the artists, incredible artist. Some of his stuff was gorgeous. I remember him just really beating his head against the wall and just always having to go back and make things smaller or… "Paul, you've got way too many colors. You can't use that many frames." He really had a hard time working within the limitations. I remember him being really frustrated by that. I remember learning some little tricks about how to make eyes look alive when you've only got four pixels. Like, "How did he make his eyes look so cool? Oh, okay. He's got one little white pixel right there." Which is actually something I still think of every single time I draw something or I'm painting something and I've got an eyeball. Thank you, Paul. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned you had worked on the Digitizer. Was that working on the Digitizer exclusively, or did you ever dip into something like Amiga Deluxe Paint as well?'''<br />
<br />
Some of the people in the office were using the Amiga. I was just on the Digitizer. I think some of the work on ''Dick Tracy''… I'm trying to think what it was. Cause I didn't work on it, but it was… right. It was such a tiny little office, we're all climbing over on top of each other. Cause I remember somebody showing me something on the Amiga, some auto features like, "Oh, that's really cool that it does that." Like putting a black outline around something. "Oh, that's cool, that saves time." I didn't do anything [on the Amiga], I was all Digitizer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the most challenging thing about working on the Digitizer? Other than everything.'''<br />
<br />
I was just gonna say, "Other than everything?" It was… Once again, your limitations, not so much on the Digitizer issue, it was just the Genesis, of just having the memory and frame rate issues of… you've got so few frames for each animation. One of the tools I really wish it had was, and this would have been for building the worlds, is you had a certain number of little eight by eight squares. What did we call them? Tiles? Stamps? Tiles.<br />
<br />
Everything went down to an eight by eight little pixel box that then you'd use four of those to make a 16 by 16. You could reuse that 16 by 16 into a 32 by 32. That's how you save memory was you reused these ever-increasing size chunks that then would fit and click back and forth. Then you could rotate and change colors and it was free as far as memory was concerned. I remember very specifically, on the Sonic games, of really wishing I had some tool that could sort through and find the doubles or ones that were close.<br />
<br />
Cause you always end up with a little- you just needed a little bit more of, and there would just be squares in there that were never used. Actually… they finally did come up with a tool that showed… Oh, they did! They finally came up with a tool [CMM] you could run that would show how often each eight by eight, in these different tiles, how often they were each used. You go, "Hey, this was only used once. I can get rid of it. Or this one's never used. Yeah, let's cut this, pull that out and save that memory." I'd forgotten about that. That was so nice. That was the dealing with memory and was, yeah, it was a nightmare. I remember it being fun to figure out the colors of those palettes, but frustrating also.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's a certain dance to that, a balance of what you can get and what you can't get out.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! A dance. I love the word dance there. When you make it work and you get it to come together… Which is funny, cause that's something you don't even think about. PS1 on, it didn't cross your mind. Like I remember the very first time I was in Photoshop. I'm in L.A. and painting in Photoshop and learning… Actually I just started to use Photoshop at Sega just before I left for something. I remember asking one of the programmers [in L.A.] "How do I pick my palette? How do I choose palettes?" He just kinda looked at me weird. "You don't have to, the programming does that thing. I was like, "Really? Awesome!" It was so much fun. So nice to not have to mess with that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you were mentioning that tile identification program. It might not be the same one but I wanted to run a "Do you recognize this name?" question by you. Yuji Naka had made a tool called the Super Character Maker or CMM. Does that one ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Vaguely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wasn't sure if that was the one that you were talking about, cause it is something that worked with the Digitizer, but I'm not sure if it was 'tile'-related or not.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. That rings a bell but I have no idea. I don't know if it was that tool or a different tool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was working with Yuji Naka like?'''<br />
<br />
[reticent] Hmm.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You can be honest.'''<br />
<br />
He didn't like Americans. He didn't like speaking English. He was a dick. I really have nothing nice to say about Naka. On the other hand, Yasuhara I love and would… There's very few things that would get me back into the game industry. If Mark called or Yasuhara called and said, "Hey, I've got something I'd want to do with you." I'd say, "Yes." Naka didn't like Americans, he didn't like Americans on his team. I'm particularly pissed at him because at the end of ''Sonic 2'', Roger Hector, who was the head of STI at that time, told me that I was going to be a lead artist on ''Sonic 3'' and was very excited about that. But Naka being Naka- cause the way Naka got what he wanted is he threatened everyone. If he didn't get what he wanted, he threatened to quit. So he was going to quit. He wasn't going to do ''Sonic 3'' unless he got his own all-Japanese team in their own office with separate key cards. That was all Japanese. So ''Sonic 3'' was done across the hall behind locked doors. Which pissed me off cause I was supposed to be one of the lead artists on it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're not the only one.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at it… Am I the only American that ended up with environment art in ''Sonic 2''? I think I am. Cause all of Brenda's stuff got cut, and all of Tom's stuff. I'm the only American that had finished art in the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Naka. "I'm going to take my ball and go home" was his go-to plan on everything. You'd give him a big bag of money and give him what he wanted and he'd stay. But he was the exception. The other guys, Yasuhara and… Yamaguchi.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Yamaguchi.'''<br />
<br />
Yamaguchi, the other environment artist, was incredible. He's someone I'd enjoy working with again. He was a machine. He just lived at STI. He never went home and he would redo levels and redo- They'd be beautiful, and he wouldn't be happy with them, and he'd redo them again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You still keep in contact with Yasuhara and Yamaguchi?'''<br />
<br />
Yasuhara, we're friends on Facebook. Occasionally I have asked him questions here and then, occasionally. I do occasionally see him comment or click a like on something I post. The last time I contacted him was… I just digitized the resume videotape I made when I was leaving Sega. This was like maybe five, ten years ago. I was going to say a couple of years… No, it's probably more like 10 years. I had put it up on YouTube and a friend was watching it and says, "What is ''Treasure Tails''?" I went, "What?" Cause I hadn't thought of this in like forever. He goes, "Yeah, it's one of the games you said you worked on" and all of a sudden these memories start coming back. I pulled out the tape quickly and looked at it and sure enough, here's this Sonic universe game with Tails. It's this… not ortho… the weird three quarter angle view…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric? No… something like that. I know what you're talking about.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It'll come to us later. It was a puzzle adventure game for Tails. I had forgotten completely, I completely forgot I'd ever worked on that. It was the one of the last things I did at Sega before leaving. I remember doing all the research and all that got done for it was like three mock-up screens. Just static. I actually contacted Yasuhara cause I was trying to find out who was designing this, who was working on this. I got a hold of Bill Dunn to see if he remembered anything. I wrote to Yasuhara and he got back to me and Yasuhara says, "I don't remember anything from that time." His brain is so burnt from that period in time, he just said, "I don't remember."<br />
<br />
Then I got digging into my journals and found a little bit of information, so I was able to put some times, some dates down and that stuff on it and found out the designer on it was Hoyt Ng and there was a programmer's name written down as far as I remember. We worked on it for… I think a few months. I don't remember how long now, but it got cancelled. Like so many things at STI. That's the reason I left STI: all these potential games, some of them almost finished, that would have been A plus, incredibly beautiful games that got cancelled just because of incompetent management.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Out of all those games that you just mentioned, what was the most complete that you were upset about being cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
That was one I didn't work on. I think the character's name was Jester.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Jester.'''<br />
<br />
I think the name of the game was called ''Kinetix''? ''Kinex'' or ''Kinetix''. I always used to think it was ''Jester'', but I did find a little bit of information. I'm not sure, but I think the name of the game was actually ''Kinetix'' with an X. Anyway, Jester. So this little character made out of clay. The whole point of the game was watching him die. [laughs] There were all these horrible ways of, when you died, if he would get smashed and he didn't look like he was made of clay, but he was made of clay. He'd get smashed, he'd mush out like clay or he'd get set on fire or burned in acid or… it just all these wonderful deaths. They had been working on that… I don't know how much of that was done.<br />
<br />
The two people I know that we're working on it are both gone. Alan Ackerman was one of the artists on it and he passed away a number of years ago and Rick Macaraeg died shortly thereafter. He [Rick] was the designer on it. I don't know who out there would know anything about it, but that's the one that got cancelled that was just a beautiful game that could have been so awesome.<br />
<br />
Then there was ''Spinny & Spike'' by Steve Woita. I don't know how far along they got on that. Then there's my ''Segapede'' slash ''Astropede'' game that didn't get very far, although we worked on it a little long time, but we were just never given the resources. They were trying to do too many things with not enough people.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was not being given enough resources to work on a project a recurring theme at STI?'''<br />
<br />
Absolutely. The one game that did ship was ''The Ooze'', which… I have no idea how it made it out the door. I think it's because it had a very, very, very small team. I think it was me and Tom… Did Brenda- I can't remember Brenda worked on that. Me and Tom were doing the environments, which were pretty simple. I actually did the Ooze. I remember, that game, is way back. The primordial stage of that game was Mark Cerny asking me to do a set of little tiles for animation that were just the Ooze, of every different little shape that you could have, so that the program group would then do the animations. There would be no animating the Ooze. You would just have every conceivable shape in a eight by eight little square that would make any curve.<br />
<br />
Cause he was doing a test with- was it Dave Sanner and Jason Plumb, were doing- cause I think they had this idea for a game and this little test ended up becoming ''The Ooze''. It was funny, I bumped into Dave Sanner just a couple of weeks or a month or two ago, cause I was over at the Video Game History place scanning the last of something in with those guys. We got talking about ''The Ooze'' and they [the VGHF] went, "Oh wait, one of the guys that worked on it is like, right upstairs." It's a very small world.<br />
<br />
It was just very interesting to meet somebody that you haven't seen in 20 years. The last time you saw them, they're in a flannel shirt with long hair and just this easy-going stoner vibe. The guy walks in and I'm like, "Okay, that is Dave, but that is not the Dave I remember from 30 years ago."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Everyone's grown up… I was looking at the early concept art for some of your Ooze work cause it was also in your Video Game History Foundation archive there, and it looks pretty gruesome. There's one concept art of a guy's leg being pulled off into the Ooze. I was going to ask, were the early concepts for that game more gruesome or more adult than the final product?'''<br />
<br />
Well, the art there, I did. Just to clarify, I did the coloring of that because the actual art drawing were done by… Burt somebody, I can't remember his name [Kurt Peterson], but he did the line art, and then I just did some quick color work on them. Those drawings, I think, those are more an emotional… I don't know how serious the game is supposed to be. As a top down-looking game, there is [nothing] like a game being made today. These three-dimensional, running around first-person, third-person thing. I think that art was more for pitching the idea of Ooze versus what it would actually look like in the game. Cause you never see people in the game. It's like your satellite view of buildings and the Ooze. People are a few pixels tall. I haven't played that in a long time either. I don't think I even have a copy of that… Yeah, I never got a copy of ''The Ooze''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. I would have imagined that they would have given you at least one copy of the game that you had worked on.'''<br />
<br />
Well usually that's true. I think cause I left… I'm not sure. I'm trying to think. It came out just as I left Sega. I don't think I got a copy for that reason. That's also the same reason I don't have a copy and I never bought a copy of the last Ratchet and Clank game I worked on? Was it ''Deadlocked''? Cause I left before it actually physically came out.<br />
<br />
The one thing that's gone missing is somewhere there's a box that has all of my signed copies of games. I'd get my games and I'd have the whole team sign it. I've got all the games I worked on signed by the entire team, along with my Genesis and all the other Genesis games, and it's in a box and it's gone. I can't find it. All my Sonic, all my Spyro stuff, all the games are… I can't find the box. I'm a little afraid it's walked out on me.<br />
<br />
I'm hoping it's just mislabeled in a box, inside of a box somewhere. Cause I moved out from L.A. two years ago, back up to the Bay Area. I was really hoping that during this move I would find it. Then in this move, I ended up just shoving boxes in the truck at the end anyway. Hopefully it's in one of those boxes. I'm just hoping my garage wasn't open one day and somebody walked by and saw a box marked video games and picked it up and walked off.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. Hopefully it's still kicking around there.'''<br />
<br />
Hopefully not. Send some good energy out into the universe. Yeah, that had all my copies.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wanted to ask a bunch of ''Sonic 2'' questions and these are going to be a little more specific. If you have to say, "I don't remember that", no worries, I completely understand. A lot of us in the research community find the project especially fascinating. For editorial reasons, I'd like to thank one of our top Sonic researchers, Katsushimi, for providing some of these questions. To begin, could you describe your personal approach to drawing graphics when it came to the ''Sonic 2'' project?'''<br />
<br />
I can remember thinking how it had a very computer generated look. It's all pixels, but it looked like it was made out of polygons. If you look at the palm trees and stuff, it has this very polygon-based look. That was my foundation, especially on the Hidden Palace artwork, was that this is made out of polygons. Trying to think of what else… that's the only thing that's coming to mind right now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you provided with much Japanese source material when you first started? Like what they wanted the game to look like or… kinda inspirations? Did they give you much material?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember. I don't remember anything other than the first game, other than playing ''Sonic'' [1]. I don't remember any other source material or reference material being given.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''We're curious about what feedback you got from other staff on your art as development progressed.'''<br />
<br />
I remember it being very positive. The one I do remember that was negative, and I had to agree, was actually both in Hidden Palace and Oil Ocean, the distant background, that independent layer in the background. I had a really hard time with those. I think that was also coming down to really limited memory. Those number of little squares, little tiles you had was very limited. I know on Oil Ocean, I wish I had a picture of what I did because I do not remember what it looked like at all. Yamaguchi was definitely not happy with it. The background that's in Oil Ocean in the game is actually Yamaguchi's. I remember at the time being frustrated a little bit. That it wasn't mine, that I couldn't do the background. The background wasn't mine. I also know that mine sucked. But I don't remember what it looked like.<br />
<br />
Hidden Palace Zone is the background that's there I'm not happy with. It was a tricky thing to do. That [background] was the hardest part. That's the only time I remember any negative comments was specifically the background on Oil Ocean. I know there's an original background I did for Hidden Palace that I think shows up in some of the magazine screenshots.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yes. The cave-y stalagmites and stalactites look.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, the more cave-shaped looks. That got replaced with whatever is there now. So yeah, that's mine. Even that, I'm still not happy with it. The favorite artwork I've ever done on any video game is Hidden Palace Zone. I'm the most proud of that work. But not the background.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. Honestly it's a beautiful looking stage.'''<br />
<br />
I know one of the things that was very important to me, and this is true all the way through the stuff I did on the PS1, was I always did everything I could to not have artwork in the environment look like wallpaper. Because you did have this limited number of tiles, and if you had a large area, all of a sudden it got very repetitive. A lot of artists in a lot of games, it's just wallpaper. It's just so obvious that it's the same pattern just stamped. To a certain extent you can't get away from that because it is wallpaper. It is the same pattern. But there's ways of doing it to offset it and make subtle changes to try and break that up. So even if you go back to ''Kid Chameleon'', I remember spending a lot of time trying to come up with these interesting shapes that were in fact repeatable, but they weren't on a grid.<br />
<br />
One of the ones I'm the most proud of is Hidden Palace Zone. It's this geometric, polygonal, crystal-based stonework that everything's built off. That's this repeating pattern, but it's off at a weird angle, and so you only see that it repeats if you get a good half a screen full of the same image of the same wall. You go, "Okay, there is a repeating pattern there." But it bothered me even on ''Sonic''. I look at some of the other Sonic levels, but even in ''Sonic 3''. I look at ''Sonic 3'', and I'm maybe more judgmental there because I was supposed to be on that. There's wallpaper. There's some levels like, "Really? That's… Naka doesn't like American art? That's crap. That made it into a Sonic game?" There's just a couple of levels that are just like… y'know, most of the stuff's gorgeous. Some is like, "Really? This is acceptable?"<br />
<br />
That was one of my big things on the side-scrollers was trying not to make that wallpaper. Even on PS2, you've still got textures that you're repeating on large areas. I really tried to hide the fact that you were reusing textures over and over and over again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So another thing I wanted to ask about ''Sonic 2'', some of our researchers have characterized ''Sonic 2'' as just scraps of things compiled into a game, maybe not as cohesive as it could be. Would you agree with that?'''<br />
<br />
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but I also can't disagree with that perspective of it. I think that may be because… I remember when Yasuhara gave his initial pitch for this massive multi-universe time traveling extravaganza, that would have been incredible. I remember at the time going, "You're nuts. There's no way. We don't have the time. We don't have the memory. We don't have anything to do that."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More lack of resources.'''<br />
<br />
So I think that's where maybe the hodgepodge aspect of it comes in is it's in bits and pieces. It could also just be just the nature of… I'm trying to compare ''Sonic 1''. It's been so long since I played the other one. Y'know, how homogenous was ''Sonic 1'' versus ''Sonic 2''? I remember thinking levels like Casino [Night] Zone were beautiful! But it didn't fit. "Where's this in the world? Why is this in the world? What is this?" Then deciding it didn't matter because it's pretty and it's fun and who cares?<br />
<br />
So, yeah, I can definitely see how there's this hodgepodge… The worlds don't have a lot of throughput into each other in a continuous story way. There's some of them that were a little story driven, but a lot of them are just like "What's cool looking?" Maybe I should say… that would be a good question for Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You proposed a sidekick named Boomer for the sidekick competition that they had. Why a turtle? What inspired that idea?'''<br />
<br />
For me, it was the Tortoise and the Hare thing, fast versus slow. Sonic is known for being fast, and so his buddy is slow, he's a turtle… although he's not actually slow cause that wouldn't work. That's how I ended up with a turtle. That and I was trying to think of a second player character that would interact with Sonic, gameplay wise. In the pictures, if you've got them there, the turtle would drop down and… then also I was thinking of the Godzilla Kaiju monster…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gamera.'''<br />
<br />
Gamera! I was gonna say, it starts with a G. Gamera. He'd pull his legs in and become a little jet pack, so Sonic could use him as like a jet-powered skateboard or surfboard to get over obstacles or to do whatever. That would allow Boomer or Boomy (I'd said it a couple of different ways depending on where I wrote it down and when I wrote it down) to be able to keep up with Sonic. But also I was looking for something to compliment Sonic as opposed to just being the same [thing].<br />
<br />
I know people have sent me links where somebody has actually, in pixels, animated this little character. They were just like, "Okay, if they had done that, what would he look like?" I'd love to actually see that in the level. I'd love to see what he would look like in the Sonic world. I mean, Tails is a better character. But it would have been fun to have invented… it would have been fun to have my character be that guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You could add to the gameplay that way. Tails can seem like just another Sonic. He had flying, which expands the gameplay, but it sounds like with Boomer you were trying to build on the gameplay that was already there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. But I can also see from a realistic point of view, pragmatic point of view of… if they'd done that, that just complicates everything with programming. You've now got an entire new thing to program completely from scratch and it's going to radically change your gameplay and affect it with that… which is what you also want to do. But where Tails is… he's more of the same, but that's also good. There's not a right or a wrong there, depending on if it's done well and Tails was done well. I was looking for more change and interactivity.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oil Ocean seems to derive a lot of thematic inspirations from Chemical Plant. A lot of the graphics look pretty similar. Is there any direct connection there or is it that just a coincidence?'''<br />
<br />
I think that's just coincidence. I don't remember… I mean, it would be very likely we're doing those at the same time. Although Chemical Plant was one of those ones that Yamaguchi redid at least three times from scratch where he wasn't happy with the first one and you'd come in and then he'd completely changed it. That one went through like three almost complete revisions. No, there wasn't any conscious choices there being made as a similarity.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another two Zones that we think might have been related: Oil Ocean and Hidden Palace. Some people believe that they were meant to recycle graphics from one another at some point in development. Does that ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Hmm. Not that I know. I'd be curious to see which piece of the graphics they were thinking of. Cause I… there's nothing in common in either one of them. Trying to think if there's anything… Yeah, that'd be a no as far as I know. I did Hidden Palace first and then Oil Ocean.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was your idea to create Hidden Palace Zone? What was the inception of that?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember… I think the only input I remember getting from Yasuhara was the map. I don't even know if many sketches exist. In my sketchbook, there's a couple of sketches that show the beginnings of that crystalline polygon-shape stone structure that ended up being the foundation for Hidden Palace. The core of that was that rock formation and just being a cave, but wanting to make it something more than just rock. I don't know if there was any palette input from the Yasuhara or Yamaguchi. I don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So that golden-green vibe was yours.'''<br />
<br />
I think so… I think so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you feel when it was cut?'''<br />
<br />
It's changed over time. I remember going in to like the conference room to sit down and play ''Sonic 2'' just for fun and went to pull up my- cause I said, that was the first level I did. I moved on and was working on Oil Ocean and really close to the end of the game [project]. I remember it being really close to the end of the game, but then checking dates, it's gotta be a little… based on other people's information, there had to be a little more time before the game actually shipped. I remember going to pull up what was the official (at that time) version and it was gone. You couldn't access it. So I went and talked to… I may have asked Yasuhara, but I know I remember talking to Roger Hector and he told me that it had been cut because of memory. Cause they didn't have enough memory, enough room on the cartridge. I remember being really pissed. Like once again, that's my favorite art period to this day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
So I was very pissed. Then the game ships and… then the cool part of that- tangent here, I got to carry the chipset from Sega of America over to Tokyo, cause it was faster and more reliable to physically carry the chipset back then versus to electronically transmit it. I got a free trip to Japan for- I have no idea why they chose me. Then again… While I'm on the plane on the way over, they discovered an A bug, so they did end up actually having to at least electronically transmit something.<br />
<br />
The game had shipped and within a few weeks or months of the game being out, people had used… was it GameShark, Game Genie? One of those to hack into the cart and found Hidden Palace Zone, or a ghost of Hidden Palace Zone. I was pissed. "Well there was room cause it's still there. It's on the cartridge." But it actually turns out that they just didn't have time to program it. They had to do a quick rewrite of both story and… That's where you were supposed to get all the Chaos Emeralds and get your Super Sonic powers or something was in Hidden Palace Zone, by completing Hidden Palace, or something like that.<br />
<br />
There were only ever two levels to Hidden Palace Zone, and there was no boss level. When the guy, I don't remember what his name was [Christian Whitehead], did the handheld phone version of it that brought it all back to life again, he added that weird organ [Egg Gauntlet]. No idea why it's an organ [laughs], but there was no boss on the original.<br />
<br />
I think it was maybe memory as well, but it was definitely they didn't have time to finish the programming and get it into the game proper. I'm actually lucky that parts of it were still on the cartridge and that there was this huge mystery and all these urban legends. Also the fact that it's named Hidden Palace and it's hidden, literally, in the game, kept it alive. I think that's why it is in the game officially now, finally, as of a few years ago. That whole thing kept going cause it did exist. I'm really glad it. It took a couple of decades, but the artwork's out there now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. We get to see your art.'''<br />
<br />
It finally made it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Another Hidden Palace Zone question. I believe it was you that had previously… it might've been someone else, but I think it was you that said "Hidden Palace Zone was a secret level that was originally accessed through Mystic Cave Zone." Do you remember anything about that?'''<br />
<br />
One of the 'fall to your infinite death' holes in Mystic Cave… you would fall and not die. You would fall and find yourself in Hidden Palace Zone, which is why I think it works now [in the 2013 port]. I think that's how they implement it now… is the way it was supposed to be. Although now I think it is just a hidden level, it doesn't do anything, where before it was the Chaos Emeralds and it was part of the story and part of the gameplay, as opposed to being just another level, which is why it didn't have a boss level or it was only two levels. It was a separate little thing on its own, which is probably the also reason why it got cut. It was a tangent thing to do something cool, and it was the easiest thing to cut when they ran out of time. Other than the fact that it was being done by an American.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of cut Zones, you'd mentioned working on a clown slash roller coaster themed Zone. What would that have been like?'''<br />
<br />
That was just an early thumbnail sketch of me just coming up with different ideas of playing off of that loop de loop idea for the Sonic levels, of having more of that. It didn't get anywhere beyond… did I do? I'm trying to think… I have a vague memory of, on the Digitizer, for some reason, I see red and white checkers and some early concept stuff on the Digitizer. But I really don't remember. The only thing that does exist is a couple of very quick, simple sketches in that sketchbook. I know I had one where the level was nothing but a rail, running around- So it'd be like a metal path, a metal tube doing a ring around the planet and having loops and spins and drops in it. The background would be this Jupiter-type, Saturn planet behind you and you're running around on the ring. But that was just a concept that was just early, early on that didn't get past a few sketches.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, I'm interested… You had mentioned, on that clown slash roller coaster Zone, remembering red and white checkers. When I read clown slash roller coaster, I immediately thought of ''Sonic 3'', cause they have Carnival Night Zone, and Carnival Night Zone has a theme of red and white checkers. Do you think there's any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
I don't know. I don't think so. Once again, that content work I did would have been done in like early or mid '91, before ''Sonic 2'' actually officially started or [had] any work done. Then ''Sonic 3'' would have been two years later in a locked office across the hall. So probably not. I'm trying to… I've got these weird images now of that checker and trying to come up with a way to do that curved tent and make it efficient with those little eight by eight… Huh. I remember watching the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space to get ideas. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's awesome.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think there was some [clown/roller coaster] graphics done on the Digitizer, just to have stuff to pitch to Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did that Zone have a name at all, an early name, or was it just graphics at that point?'''<br />
<br />
No, this would have been just me mocking some quick stuff up to show Yasuhara for potential ideas. Cause all the actual design stuff would have been Yasuhara's. So it's just putting together ideas to… it's like Boomer. They may have done this for the levels as well, but Boomer, they definitely put a call out. They said, "Hey, everybody, we need a player two. Pitch us some ideas." They maybe did the same thing for the levels but I don't know. That was me just pitching ideas and trying to get something visual to show Yasuhara. That's somewhere in a landfill in Redwood City.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aw god, that pains me. So, another ''Sonic 2'' experiment you did. You had mentioned your burning forest Zone, and that's actually something I asked about in our previous emails. You experimented with the idea of a burning forest Zone and the ways of designing graphics with the intent to make in the trees look like they were on fire. Can you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Is that… is that me? I don't… I don't remember. Was that Brenda? I don't think that's me. Did I… really? Wow. If I did, I've completely drawn a blank on that. Although… [thinking]. Oh man. Once again, I have this very weird memory of… You know, my first response is no, but then- this vague memory of struggling, trying to figure out how to do fire and… Wow. It's almost more of an emotional memory… Yeah, there is something in there, but yeah, it's gone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Speaking of early Zones, do you remember much… Brenda had made that mockup for the magazines… actually I think it was a little bit more than a mockup. Her Desert Zone that you could recycle into a Winter Zone. Do you remember that at all?'''<br />
<br />
I'll say superficially… When you're doing this stuff, you're so nose into your screen. Most of what I remember of Brenda's work is stuff that I have seen or talked about or heard long after. I have very few… the only level I remember… watching Brenda and walking past her computer and remember her working on was the forest Zone [Wood Zone]. All the desert stuff is like, "Okay, she did it, and there's other people talking about it, but I don't remember anything from the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. There was so much going on with ''Sonic 2''.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How was working on ''Spinball''?'''<br />
<br />
''Spinball'' was fun. It was a little frustrating cause I got pulled off of… did I get pulled off ''Segapede'' to do ''Spinball''? I think so. Sometime I did, in fact, go through my journal and get a timeline of events. It was fun to be back on a Sonic title, even though it wasn't ''Sonic 3''. It's interesting. This is another one where Brenda got screwed because they were supposed to be a hidden watery cave level as level one [Underwater Caves]. The game would start with Sonic flying into this cave at sea level, and then you'd come into those caves, and this toxic level, which I was doing, and then into these other levels on up. Then for reasons they had to cut a level, and so they kept Brenda's and smushed, theme-wise, her's and mine together.<br />
<br />
Now the bottom half of my level, I had to go through and convert what was slime, on the bottom of mine, into water that turned into slime the higher you got on the level. If you look at screenshots, the patterns of this bulbous rocky formation that make up the cave is, in fact, Hidden Palace artwork dressed up. It's the same shape, it's the same repeating patterns, because that pattern worked so well, that I just rounded all the edges and turned it into these gooey bulbous shapes as opposed to squared-off polygons.<br />
<br />
I remember it was fun. It was a little frustrating working with Peter… starts with an M [Peter Morawiec], who was the lead designer and did a lot of artwork and did all that. He was a real perfectionist. He had a vision of how he wanted it to be. There was a lot of reworking stuff that was… sometimes he'd have a good point and other times it's like, "Why? No. That's just… that's fine." But once again, both he and Adrian, the programmer, were both really nice guys and just working their butts off. Yeah, so it was good. It was good to be back on a Sonic title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So I have a very specific question that you might know as an artist. Do you know who drew ''Spinball's'' sprites? We think it's either Macaraeg or Brenda.'''<br />
<br />
So the actual sprites for him spinning, when he was a little blue ball?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More Sonic's normal sprites.'''<br />
<br />
I would have assumed it was Yamaguchi. Did Yamaguchi do ''Spinball''? I'm trying to think if he did Sonic…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I don't think Yamaguchi did ''Spinball''. I can't find his name on the production credits…'''<br />
<br />
Oh! For ''Spinball''! For some reason, my brain snapped back to ''Sonic 2''. For ''Spinball'', I don't know. It was probably… if I had to guess? Tom, but that's a guess. It could have been Brenda. It wasn't me! [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of, do you recall Brenda's project titled ''Fat, Daddy''? The one with the cats and the jazz themes and the bebop, beatnik themes?'''<br />
<br />
Very vaguely. Once again, if you'd have asked me, "Did Brenda pitch anything or doing any of these?", I would have said "No." Somewhere else that has come up and then I get these "Oh I saw some images." There's nothing I remember of the fact that I know "Oh yeah, there was something." But then again, like ''Treasure Tails''. I was working on that and I forgot about it! [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] So let's talk about ''Dark Empires''. Could you give us a top-down summary of ''Dark Empires''?'''<br />
<br />
So Bruce Dunn [Bill Dunn] was the designer on it. I was doing that… That must have been before ''Kid Chameleon''. Cause it seems like they were at the same time, but that makes no sense, so it hadn't been before, because they got cancelled… We were at the little office in San Jose. By the time we got to the office in… is that Menlo Park? I'm not sure where you actually are on the freeway, where that building is, halfway up the 101 [freeway], halfway to Sega headquarters. I think by the time we got there, ''Dark Empires'' was dead.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was, cause we were doing ''Sonic 2'' during… We were doing ''Kid Chameleon'', cause I remember going in to Mark and saying, "Hey, I get some extra time to work now cause I'm going through a divorce. I'm going to be spending a lot of time at work." [laughs] No real reason to go home anymore. It almost had to be before [STI moved]. It wasn't a type of game I typically played much of, but the style and… William, he's a really nice guy. A pleasure to work with, really easy going… Bill. Bill Dunn. The style was right up my alley. This fantasy Dungeons & Dragons [style] - monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build. Did a lot of sketches that didn't…<br />
<br />
Ken Rose, who was the programmer, just sent me like a month ago that playable version. That's another thing that's in that box that is missing is my actual ROM card for ''Segapede'', and I had one for ''Dark Empires''. Luckily Ken still had the code for those. I wasn't able to get it to work, and then my son was supposed to come over and help me figure it out, and we never got that done. It'd be interesting to play it again, cause the only thing I have is to watch that videotape of my resume. But yeah, that was Bill's baby.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall what the impetus was for STI making what is essentially is a real time strategy game, or feels like a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, that's what I was just trying to think of. I was just trying to remember… cause I remember some conversations with Bill and Mark. I remember Bill being concerned that it was too much of a niche game for what Mark wanted to do, what Mark wanted STI to be, and him not being surprised that it got cancelled. Not happy about it, but not being surprised, because it wasn't the game that Mark wanted STI to be making that was going to be these A-title, top of the playlist games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Strategy was new back then. Console strategy.'''<br />
<br />
I remember the only real strategy game I ever played at that time was a Genesis game called ''Herzog Zwei''. I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played. Tried to get into like ''Starcraft'' and those and just never got into them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did ''Herzog Zwei'' and other titles… was that what inspired Bill, or you guys as a team, to make a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't know. My memory is just of drawing pictures and doing the animations and "writhing dramatic death" for the boss… No, that was ''Kid Chameleon''. The writhing dramatic death was ''Kid Chameleon''. It wasn't really a boss. It was this snake creature that didn't end up being used. No, that was ''Kid Chameleon''. I remember having a lot of fun doing the artwork [for ''Dark Empires'']. I remember really enjoying working with Bill, and that art style was very natural for me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I feel like you naturally gravitate towards creatures and particularly I've noticed a theme of dragons that continued on later in your career.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It's interesting because ''Spyro''… the idea for ''Spyro'', was one of mine. I'm the one that pitched the idea for a dragon. It's interesting that once we got the go-ahead on that, it was an art style that was outside… the actual environment there, outside of what I would normally do. It's much prettier, it's much softer, much more painterly. It was one of the other artists, Kirsten, can't remember her last name. [Kirsten Van Schreven‑Butler] It's hyphenated, the last name. She's another environment artist and her texture work was this very loose, very painterly look in these pastel colors. That was it. I was, "Okay, that's ''Spyro''. That's the look we want."<br />
<br />
I remember always looking at her work and then actually pulling out some of her textures to use as a canvas to start on, to learn how to do that painterly loose quality. It was a different, it was a look that is outside of my go-to, which is a little more monster-y and a little more hard-edged.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on ''Dark Empires'', it looks like the game starts in more of a traditional medieval fantasy, and that proceeds into like a sci-fi setting. Do you remember whose idea was it to have the game focused around like growing, evolving time, like time would progress?'''<br />
<br />
So once again, I don't really remember. I don't know how much of this was a collaboration between Bill and Mark. I think it was mostly Bill. Those would be questions for him. All I remember is the visuals on it. I don't remember anything story-wise or gameplay-wise beyond a clicking, moving strategy type game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned that you were working on it, we have Bill working on it, and I think Scott Chandler was on programming. Do you recall anyone else working on ''Dark Empires''?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. No, like I wouldn't have remembered Scott did the program until you mentioned it. I'm trying to think if Rick did anything on it… I don't think so. Did Alan [Ackerman] do anything on it? I don't think so. If I ever get that up and running where I can run through it and see… I don't know if there's any other pieces that are not my artwork that I'd recognize as, "Hey, I didn't do that." I don't remember any other artists, but it all blurs together. Somewhere in my mind, I want to say I'm doing that at the same time I'm doing ''Kid Chameleon'', but that doesn't make any sense. Too long ago.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall why exactly it was cancelled? You had mentioned Mark saying that it was against the ideology of STI (to make these big franchise-creating series). Do you recall the exact reasons you were given why ''Dark Empire'' was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
No. I think it was just too much of a niche game or… I don't know if there was conversations about it just wasn't working. It wasn't fun.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I wanted to ask was: in your VHS resume for both ''Dark Empires'' and ''Treasure Tails''. You're looking at the art through the same debug display. There was a crimson line and text at the bottom that says WINDOW 0,223. Was that your art tool or… was that a specific tool?'''<br />
<br />
That's the Digitizer. I think if I remember it, I'm literally videotaping the screen of the Digitizer. This is like real low-tech. I literally had my video camera on a tripod recording the screen, if I remember right. Hm…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It does look like it's direct feed. I can't speak to a hundred percent for sure, but the VHS resume looks like a direct feed.'''<br />
<br />
I just remember having my little camcorder. Maybe I did have it feeding in directly. It's all very primitive. No editing tools or anything. To edit it, I would like literally hit pause and start the next one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To hop to ''Jester'' really quick. Do you remember whose idea was it to make a game starring a protagonist made of clay? Cause you can do a whole lot with that concept, it's a creative idea.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. I don't know… that would either be, to the best of my guessing memory, would be either Mark or Rick, or a collaboration between those two. I'm trying to think how much game design Rick was doing. I know Rick was doing a lot of game design and artwork, cause I think Rick did the animations for Jester. I'm trying to remember if Mark was doing game design on that. I think Mark and Rick were doing game design. Once again, I didn't work on it.<br />
<br />
I know he [Rick Macaraeg] did the animations for Jester. I don't know if he was doing level art. I know Alan Ackerman did level art. I don't know who… I want to say Mark was probably doing some game design for that as well, but I don't know, don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''And just to confirm, this is Mark Cerny?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Mark Cerny. So the primary designer and my memory was Rick Macaraeg. That was his baby. But I don't know if he was working with Mark initially to come up with the concept or if that was Rick's idea. I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A question you may have already answered, I apologize if you did. Do you remember exactly why ''Jester'' was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
I mean, not a good reason. I think it was… it had to have been almost finished cause it had been in production for like two years. Part of it is Mark Cerny had moved on. He had left Sega. I want to say it suffered the death of any project that dies after its lead promoter leaves, after its producer leaves. Sega was really bad for: a producer would come in and would start a bunch of projects and then they would leave, and then a new producer would come in. Well, the new producer doesn't want to be working on somebody else's projects. They want to be doing their projects.<br />
<br />
My best guess is that that was a major contributor to [the cancellation of] ''Jester'' was that Mark Cerny had left. So there was no huge person- the person that was really behind it was no longer there, and we had new producers that didn't have any interest in doing somebody else's game. I wish I knew, I wish I could remember how much of the game was done. Cause I remember it just didn't make any sense to cancel it. Of all the games that got cancelled. That's the one that just should have gotten done. It was new, it was fun, it was creative. It was very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another cancelled STI project, this one we actually know less about than ''Jester'': What was ''SpellCaster''?'''<br />
<br />
''SpellCaster''! Okay, so it never got beyond a pitch. So after Sonic, they said, "Okay, you can pitch ideas." The head people from SoA would come down… Toyoda… I can't remember the name. It was a Japanese guy, was really nice guy. Tom Kalinske, another really nice guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda.'''<br />
<br />
Wait, what was his name again?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda, I believe.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Shinobu, a really nice guy. I think he's the one that chose me to go to Japan for some reason. They would come down with whoever from marketing and they would sit around the conference room table and you can come in and pitch an idea. ''SpellCasters'' was me and Dave Sanner, the programmer I just re-met, and we came up with this idea of this combat game, but to set it apart from every other ''Street Fighter''-type game out there, two things is: my big thing was you were going to be able to actually affect the environment, not just throw spells and weapons, hit, hurt the other players. If he was standing on a platform, you could shatter the platform or you could hit something to have it fall on him and you could also interact with the environment.<br />
<br />
Then Dave's big thing is he wanted the spells to be a sound-based, music-based. As you push the buttons, it would play a sound. You would hear notes as the players were mashing their buttons. That would do two things. One, you could hear the other player. Once you got playing enough, you could recognize songs, recognize a short tune, and you'd get a little heads up as to what the other guy was going to do. We did up a document, I did up some artwork, and we pitched it to Sega and that's as far as I got. They said, "Oh, thank you, but no."<br />
<br />
That's as far as that got, just the documents you see there and a single pitch meeting. I also came back after that and just myself put together ''Segapede'' and pitched that. That's the one where Sega went, "Hey, we like that. But we want to see a proof of concept." So that's when ''Segapede'' ended up coming about.<br />
<br />
The foundational idea for ''Segapede'' was it was initially it was supposed to take place in the Sonic universe. The core concept was that… the memory I talked about, that very first time I ever played ''Sonic'' and there was no Ring splash and then playing it again and there was a Ring splash and how much the Ring splash made it fun was, that was the core. The base idea that started ''Segapede'' was the character was going to be the centipede that each of the body segments was this little ball bearing, a little unicycle thing, with your power-ups sitting on top of that. It could be an extra engine to go fast. It could be rocket launchers. It could be spikes. It could be whatever gameplay characteristics, things you needed, would be these different body segments.<br />
<br />
Zip the character is basically a unicycle. He's just this one little ball bearing with this little character on top, and as he runs around the level, he collects these body pieces, and you collect your power ups like any other game. The difference here is that when you get hit, those go flying just like Rings. You'd have a body part splash and these body segments, your power-ups, would all go rolling off screen and you had to run around and grab them all before they went off screen and disappeared like the Rings. I also liked the idea of that centipede shape. Once again, playing off of a Sonic world of these loops and the roller coaster feelings of this… like a roller coaster train, this whole string of pods rolling and sliding around in a Sonic world, basically, was the foundation for ''Segapede''.<br />
<br />
Sega liked it, but two things: they wanted a playable prototype, a proof of concept, and they didn't want it to be in the Sonic universe, which I'm still bummed about. Because the original idea had it where Robotnik was experimenting with Chaos Emeralds in his lab and they exploded and they vaporized and he breathed in all this Chaos Dust and it was going to kill him, putting him into a coma, and it was going to kill him. Sonic decided he wanted to save him. This goes back to the movie Incredible Voyage [Fantastic Voyage], where they shrink everyone into this important person. They shrink everyone down… Raquel Welch, and put them in this little submarine and inject them with his blood and they gotta go do brain surgery. That was the gameplay. Zip is in fact microscopic, he's a nanite, but Zip was a friend of Sonic's. So Sonic gets Zip to go into Robotnik.<br />
<br />
The levels are in fact inside Robotnik, and you're collecting this Chaos Dust and trying to save Robotnik. That was the original idea, which I still really like and still think would have been a good game, but Sega didn't want it in the Sonic universe. I had to come up with this other idea that I was never happy with, story-wise of the concept or the reason for anything being. But at least they wanted the game because they gave us like a couple months to do the prototype. That's where I realized I had all this finished artwork for Hidden Palace Zone just sitting on my desk. That enabled us to do a really quick and dirty first playable, proof of concept, but have it look finished.<br />
<br />
The playable version that you [Ashley Rojas] just got sent was what Ken Rose and I managed to do in a couple of months or less. I don't know how much time we spent on that. That's another one that we got… just the lack of support from Sega and our management. Cause they had me managing and I don't manage. I don't know anything about the background of making the games. You know, "Let me do the art." Then they had Ken who… no actually, we didn't have Ken. Ken did the prototype. Then when the game went into production… No, we still did have him, but there was something going on between Ken and management cause Ken wanted some assurances, "What was going on?" I can't remember what the politics were going on there, but there were some politics going on between Ken and management.<br />
<br />
We had at least one Japanese programmer but Ken said he just was a terrible programmer and the other two artists they hired… One was a very talented fine artist [Marte Thompson] and she had been working on the computer, but had been doing technical schematics, literally line work and text, so she had no clue about making video games. I don't think she was even a big game player. Then the other guy was this incredible artist. His name was Alex [Niño]. He was extremely famous in the comic world cause he did like the original Tarzan comics. He's an older guy. The art director hired him just because he could. [laughs] Cause this guy was a legend in the art world. But he'd never worked on the computer at all. I don't know if he even owned a computer at the time.<br />
<br />
He's sketching in his drawings and his concepts and that's something else that got lost is… I have a stack of enemy concepts that he drew for ''Segapede'' that I wish I had. That just dragged on and I think that's when they finally needed people and pull me off, I think to do ''Spinball''. [sarcastically] Awesome.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on ''Segapede'', it looks like the name ''Segapede'' came first and then I believe you changed it to ''Astropede'' near the end as you were preparing to leave Sega. Is that true?'''<br />
<br />
Well, ''Segapede'' was literally just a working title. In fact, I should have put just "working title" because I had no intention of ever calling ''Segapede''. That was just a working title. But then once we get the final approval… So that prototype was called ''Segapede'', but then once we got final approval, the new working title, hopefully final real title had it shipped, would have been ''Astropede''. Once again, that never went down the path of, "Does everybody like it? Does marketing like it? Does legal like it?" It never even got to that point. ''Segapede'' was just the prototype working title.<br />
<br />
I got teased a lot. Brenda used to tease me a lot about the name [laughs]. But yeah, it was just a working title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall the name of that fine artist and the Japanese artist? Can you recall either of those names?'''<br />
<br />
I can see her [Marte]. Then Alex Niño. Alex Niño was the older guy that had drawn the Tarzan comics, like back in the fifties or sixties. Really nice guy. His sketches were just gorgeous. But just kinda useless when it comes to making video games. Mark may have wanted to hire people outside the industry in the beginning. That's not what we needed then. We needed the people that could hit the ground running, and a producer that would actually produce.<br />
<br />
What was her name… It was frustrating because she was often calling in sick. She'd say, "I had an anxiety attack and I had to turn around and go home." I didn't understand at the time. I'll say, maybe you know this, but I left the game industry in 2005 and am on disability still because of anxiety and depression. I totally get the anxiety thing now, how it just shuts your brain off. "Oh, I get it now." I wish I was more understanding back in the day. What's her name? I can see her.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. No worries at all. If you remember it all, shoot me an email. I'll get that added to our production credits. You said there was a producer on that. Do you remember the producer's name?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, he was English, and he seemed very supportive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dean Lester?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! He seemed very supportive but I remember Brenda and I think Rick Macaraeg both not liking him and telling me to not trust him. And… yeah he stabbed me in the back.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. You're not the first one to say that they had issues working with Dean Lester. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. We got along wonderfully and he was very supportive, it felt like, on putting together ''Segapede''. When he came in it would have been called ''Astropede''. So once it was actually a game in production… He seemed very supportive but he didn't ever actually do anything. Looking back at it… Once again, we needed a project manager. We needed somebody that would actually knew how to schedule and knew all the things that have to be known to make a game and keep things on schedule and keep things moving and all that business end of it.<br />
<br />
I guess he was expecting me to do that and I was trying to do it. I wanted to do that, but that's not what I did, it's not anything I actually knew anything about. This was in, what, my third game, fourth game ever? When time came and Sega realized that they needed to… Cause I think they had like five games running simultaneously. He didn't support keeping ''Segapede'' going. Didn't give it the resources it needed at all, ever. As I said, he got me a couple artists, but that weren't fit for the job. According to Ken, a programmer that was not fit for the job. At that point I realized like, "Oh, this is why Brenda and Rick didn't care for Dean." They knew this was going to happen.<br />
<br />
There was another programmer, a woman. I do not remember her name at all… Once again, she had her own thing going, had projects that she wanted to do. When she came in, you could feel things shift. Her and Dean were there at the same time. I was also butting heads with Roger Hector, because morale at this point was low. They had ''Spinny & Spike'', Steve Woita's game. ''Segapede'', my game. ''Spinball'', which was Peter's game. ''The Ooze'' was going on also. They were trying to do Sonic on for the Mars, 32X, or whatever that chaotic transitional crazy thing that Sega screwed everything up on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah [laughs].'''<br />
<br />
You had least five games going simultaneously in a company that really, at best, could do two or three, as far as manpower. The morale was in the crapper. I remember going into [the office of] Roger Hector, who had taken over after Mark left, and saying, "Hey, morale is just really crap right now. Everybody is just miserable." I spent probably an hour in his office. I remember I got about three steps out his door and realized I spent the last half hour or 45 minutes apologizing to him because the morale was 'my problem'. It wasn't the company's. I got about three steps out and I went, "What the fuck?" Because that was Roger's superpower. He's a nice guy, very charismatic. His nickname was Teflon Don. Nothing stuck to him. If anything bad happened, it was never his fault.<br />
<br />
I guess that followed him from his time at Disney. He was really good at avoiding blame. He had to add this power of when you're with him, of… he just had incredible charisma or something. At that point, I literally walked to my desk and called Mark Cerny. "Sayyy, Mark, I understand you're looking for someone, you're putting a new team together." I mean, that was the transition. Like, "Oh, crap, it is time to get out of here," and called Mark.<br />
<br />
Although when Sega didn't get a Sonic for the 32X Mars slash Saturn… that bullet, even Roger couldn't avoid that one. He ended up leaving Sega shortly thereafter because I think he finally couldn't dodge that bullet. That's how I ended up in L.A. with Mark was "OK, it's finally time for me to get out of here."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. That was actually going to be one of my questions, how you moved to Insomniac. I did want to ask one final STI question before we get off. I do appreciate the patience. I know this is a long interview. I'm actually on my last page. We're getting to the end.'''<br />
<br />
Oh that's fine. Don't worry about me, I can talk all day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.'''<br />
<br />
I enjoy sharing and talking.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So my question was, and this is something that you very likely might not know… The whole reason this interview started was because I was asking Brenda about some Michael Jackson ''Sonic 3'' stuff. Do you remember seeing Michael Jackson or ever sitting in a meeting that he was a part of?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Very much so. That's my golden answer to: "Who's the most famous person you ever met?" "See if you can beat this one." I guess he was there signing or doing some contracts or talking about doing the music for ''Sonic 3'' and was a huge Sonic fan and wanted to meet the team. We knew about it. We knew he was coming. We were all in the conference room and it's kinda surreal because I'm siting there and I'm like five feet away from… at that point, that's like the high point of Michael Jackson. He's like the most famous person on the planet, practically. I remember sitting there and thinking, "There are people who would literally kill me to be sitting here."<br />
<br />
I think I asked him one question, mostly it was just him asking questions and talking to people. Most of the time was focused on Naka and Yasuhara and maybe Yamaguchi. Because I know he invited… at least Yasuhara went and spent a day or had lunch at the Neverland Ranch, so went and had lunch with Michael at his place. I'm not sure if not Naka and who else went, but I know I know at least Yasuhara went. I know we gave Michael Jackson one of our Sega jackets. It was the Sega letterman jacket.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Which makes the one I have worth a lot more money because there's pictures of Michael Jackson wearing his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was fun, it was exciting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''In that meeting that you were in with Michael Jackson, was Brenda there with you?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. I'm going to say yes? She could've been, should've been, but I don't remember who else was the meeting. I know it was shoulder to shoulder around the table, but I don't remember who all was there. It was after hours, so it was it was later in the evening. Not late, but after normal hours. I remember I was like one of the last people in the room, so I was just busy working on my desk waiting for somebody to say something, and I looked around and "Where is everybody?" I'm like, "Oh, crap." I got up and poked my head in the door and everyone's… he's already there and I snuck in and sat down. He was on crutches. He never on crutches and never took the sunglasses off.<br />
<br />
He was on crutches because he'd hurt himself doing some commercial. He was filming something and hurt himself, so he's on crutches. Very, very nice, very soft spoken, very complimentary. He had nothing but nice things to say about the game and [he was] thankful to the team. But very quiet, very.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would you be able to tie a specific date to that? The reason I'm glad you said crutches was because we actually know the date that he did have that accident. That was in early March. So it would have to be sometime in March or later in 1993. Would you be able to tie that to a specific date?'''<br />
<br />
I'm going to be fairly certain that that's written somewhere down in my journal. But off the top of my head, I can't. I know… it was after he would have been injured. Then unfortunately, very shortly thereafter, his life imploded, and Sega cut all ties at distance themselves from him. It'd be in my journals. I've just gotta know where my journals are.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was it just that one meeting or two? That you attended?'''<br />
<br />
With the team, yeah, it was just the one that we know of. I don't want if he came other times to talk about doing the music. That was the only time we met him, the only time the only time I knew he was in the building. I remember they put little footprints after he left, they put little footprints where we walked. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Oh that's really funny.'''<br />
<br />
One of the things, when I when I moved back up here, is I drove over and didn't know Sega had moved. I drove over because I hadn't been there in 20 plus years and hardly recognized it because there's so many new buildings and everything. I looked at the building, I wondered who's in there. Same thing when I drive past the STI offices that are off the 101 here, if there's any gamers in that building that know what was created in those rooms… If you had a Sonic fan and they're actually sitting in the room where ''Sonic 2'' was made or where this is made or that was made, I always just wondered, "Do they know or would they care?"<br />
<br />
My favorite celebrity story was for the big release for ''Sonic 2''. So it's a huge party at… a Toys "R" Us or FAO Schwarz? It was a big toy store in New York City. They flew the team out. The morning of the event, I go downstairs from the hotel and there's a limo waiting. I get in the limo and I've got a denim ''Sonic 2'' jacket [on that] they'd given the team. I get in the car and there's Dylan Taylor Thomas [Jonathan Taylor Thomas], the middle son on the TV show Home Improvement, in the car. Home Improvement at the time was a big show and Sega had brought in a bunch of the big kids TV celebrities to play ''Sonic 2'' for the cameras. So he was there. He was already in the car waiting and I go in and I get in the car with him and his mom's there, and he looks at me and he goes, "Oh, are you security?" I went, "No, no, I'm one of the artists." And he's like, "Really? Can I have your autograph?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ah, that's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
So I would see him on a TV show and be like, "He asked for my autograph. He asked for MY autograph." Then later that night… there was the TV show Saved by the Bell, they had the character name was Screech. Kid's name was Dustin [Diamond]. He was there as well. A bunch of us ended up having dinner with him and his dad, and then his room with the hotel was just down from mine. So we come back from dinner, we're sitting there walking and talking, I said, "Good night" and they walked down the hall. I go into my room, I just flip the TV on and there he is. It just happened to turn on to Saved by the Bell with him, and I'm like, "That's weird." That was just really bizarre. Like, "Wait, I just had dinner with you. That's weird." Yeah, every time I see Taylor Thomas I'm like, "Yeah, he asked for MY autograph."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an awesome story, holy crap. [laughs] So to move onto Insomniac, what was early Insomniac like? Because you were there from the very early days.'''<br />
<br />
From the very beginning, from the almost very early beginning, yeah. I left Hector's office, called Mark, and Mark said, "Yes, I need an artist," But I thought he's still here in the Bay Area He's like, "Oh, but I'm in L.A. I do have a team, they've never made a game." But they need an artist, and we're talking and I said, "Well, I can't come to L.A." My son was six years old. I'm divorced, but I'm right here with my son, he's six, I can't move to L.A. Mark said, "Well, tell you what? If you can come down for just three months, and help them finish the game, we'll put you up while you're down here and we'll fly you back to San Jose every weekend." "Hey, OK, I can do that for three months, that'd be kinda fun."<br />
<br />
I flew down, I met Ted and the Hastings brothers and really liked them. [I] wasn't overly impressed with ''Disruptor'', the game they were working on, it was just a ''Doom'' clone. There's no way I would have gone down to work with these guys, who've never made a game, on a ''Doom'' clone, except I really wanted to work with Mark again. Mark's one of those people who I think either you really enjoy working with or you really don't like him. I really enjoyed working with him, luckily.<br />
<br />
I went down for three months, and we're doing ''Disruptor''. I was learning 3D, learning Maya, Alias on the fly. I'm kinda learning Photoshop on the fly, because I really didn't know Photoshop very well yet, and then flying back and forth. ''Disruptor'' was originally for the 3DO platform. Mark's superpower is seeing the future and knowing what the future needs. You can start work on it now so that it's ready when the future needs it. That really is his superpower. He says, "Okay, at 3DO… this is not going to work. Let's go start talking to Sony and the PlayStation." We didn't have to do much art change, but we had to rework some stuff.<br />
<br />
At some point, shortly thereafter, Ted asked me if I wanted to go permanent with them, as opposed to just my three month contract. Flying back and forth was fine. I talked to my son about it. Like, "Okay, we'll just keep doing this. I'll just keep flying back and forth." So that three months flying back and forth… ended up [as] 25 years in L.A. Ten of that with Insomniac. I never planned on moving to L.A.<br />
<br />
We did ''Disruptor'', which got wonderful reviews… and didn't sell, because Universal didn't advertise it. No one had ever heard of it. Also, ''Tomb Raider'' came out at the same time. And ''Dark Empires'' [''Star Wars: Dark Forces''] and ''Doom''. ''Star Wars'', which was actually a good game on the PS1. ''Doom'', which was almost unplayable on the PS1, but it was ''Doom''. Then ''Tomb Raider'', which is ''Tomb Raider''. ''Disruptor'' didn't sell. No one ever heard of it.<br />
<br />
It was after ''Disruptor'' that… at that point, it was just the two Hastings brothers (Alex and Brian Hastings) and Ted Price who'd started the company. I was their first employee. They had one contract artist in before me that I left shortly after I started. I think it was just me and the contract artist and the Hastings and Ted, and there was Michael Johns and Mark, with Mark's little company Cerny Games. That was it.<br />
<br />
That game shipped. At that point, there's just the four of us. There's just the Hastings, Ted and myself. Ted said, "Okay, everyone go take two weeks and come up with a game and come back, we'll all pitch them to each other, and we'll decide what we do next." So I think Al Hastings came back with like this Martian… no, this off-road racing game, which came from the fact that, on ''Disruptor'', when you're running around Mars, there's these rolling sand dunes you're running across, and it was really fun just to run around out in the desert and catch air on top of the dunes. He was thinking, "Okay, we can make a game out of that." I'm pretty sure Ted pitched an alien invasion game, that I'm guessing eventually became ''Resistance'' on the PS3. I don't remember what Brian pitched.<br />
<br />
Then I pitched this game where you get to be a dragon, as opposed to riding or slaying a dragon. You are the dragon. In the original pitch, you started out as a hatchling, you started out as an egg and it hatches, and the premise is that as the game progresses, you get bigger and bigger and bigger and become more powerful. The gameplay is you need to leave your little den and go out and gather gold and gather treasure and bring it back, but then you also have to protect it, it's your lair, and you've got to protect it against various people coming in to try and steal your treasure. Then that changes throughout time as you live to be… you can live for thousands and thousands of years. The world, so to speak, would change through eras in time.<br />
<br />
I pitched that idea to Ted and the Hastings and everyone said they liked the dragon idea. We polished it up and then pitched it to Mark Cerny and Universal Studios. This is where Mark's superpower comes into play is… Universal liked it. Mark liked it. But he said, "Two suggestions. Keep the dragon the same age. Because sequels will be easier." Wow, yeah, never occurred to me that we'd be making two of these. Then the other one was him looking ahead knowing it's going to take two years to make this game. In two years, who's going to be buying and playing the PS1. He said, "Keep him the same age and keep the game cute and a little more family friendly," because your average player age is going to drop a couple of years by the time you guys get this game out.<br />
<br />
That's when we did another rework and we ended up with this little dragon named… once again, never his real name. People always think it's his real name. His working title name was Pete because it was a play off Pete's Dragon. It just drives me nuts, where people say, "If you named him that Disney would sue you." It's like, "No, the dragon in Pete's Dragon is named Elliot. That's the little boy named Pete. That's the joke here, people. We're not going to name him Pete." But by the end of it, I really did want to name him Pete, cause after 18 months… once again, that naming thing, it took forever to find a real name. By the time we got around to it, I liked Pete.<br />
<br />
We reworked it and brought in Charles Zembillas as a contract artist, just to do some character design, cause he also did all the character design for Naughty Dog. ''Crash Bandicoot'' and the other stuff for Naughty Dog. We brought him in and I think he was there just for an afternoon or morning, early afternoon. Then we couldn't decide… he did a whole bunch of drawings. He's incredible. He did a whole bunch of drawings, but no one liked any one drawing as our little dragon. We had pieces we liked. I took the ones we liked, photocopied them, then I cut the head off of one and I either shrunk it down a little bit, or I blew it up bigger, and I used some Wite-Out and I taped these things all together. I took a photocopy of that and I brought that into the conference room and everyone went, "That's our dragon. That's our character." That's one of the scans I still have, that cut and paste Spyro.<br />
<br />
He was originally green. I did the color comp and he's green. But we very quickly realized that he's green, and for a lot of the game, he's going to be running around on grass. So that's not going to work. Plus there was Gex and Croc and at least one other… Yoshi. There's all these other green reptile mascot characters. "Y'know, maybe not green." That's the one of the other things I still have is this 25 year old videotape of Spyro in all these different colors, trying to find what would look good. We ended up on purple, and that's how we ended up with a little purple dragon.<br />
<br />
I remember the very first time Al Hastings had it up and running. Literally just a flat green plane. I think maybe it had like one little square in the middle for a reference point, and it was just this flat green plane with a grass texture on it. But you could run around with Spyro and it was fun. You could sit there and just run around and chase your tail for ten minutes and have fun. I remember telling somebody, "Okay, this is our game to screw up. Cause this is fun with no gameplay and no world. If this is not fun when we're done, WE'VE screwed up." That was the beginning of ''Spyro''.<br />
<br />
Of all the games I've worked on, ''Spyro'' is the one that's near and dear to my heart. If I hadn't been at Sega, somebody else would have done the artwork on Hidden Palace on ''Sonic'', or if I hadn't been around later on at Insomniac, somebody else would have done ''Ratchet and Clank's'' artwork, and maybe it wouldn't be as good, maybe it'd be better. Had I not been at Insomniac when I was, there would be no little green dragon or a little purple dragon. You would have an off-road racing game or an alien invasion game that may or may not have been a hit.<br />
<br />
He's near and dear. Ted was always really good at- anytime somebody would ask him, "Why did you guys make a game about a dragon?" he'd always say, "Well, Craig Stitt said he always wanted to make a game about dragons. Craig said he's always liked dragons." That was awesome at the time. I really appreciated the fact that Ted always made sure to mention my name. I think as time went on… you say something enough and that becomes fact. I think as time went on, all Ted thinks I did was say, "Dragons are cool. Let's make a game about a dragon."<br />
<br />
No, there was this whole concept and there was so much more there. It's gotten to be a little frustrating that there wasn't more acknowledgement. As years went by at Sega and Insomniac… there was some crap going on there, and it literally broke me. That's why I left in 2005 was I basically had a nervous breakdown and pretty much lost the ability to paint or draw. Which I'm just now starting back after 2015 years. It was very hard when Insomniac wanted, or I should say needed, to leave Universal Studios, because it meant leaving Spyro behind, because Universal owned the IP.<br />
<br />
Ted didn't have the emotional connection I had to Spyro. But he did have to deal with the BS of Universal on a regular basis, which I guess was just nonstop. They finally had to break ties. Then after ''Spyro'', Sony is like, "Hey, you guys come over here!" Before, when we sent out for resumes during ''Disruptor'', trying to staff up for ''Spyro'', it was really hard to even get resumes. We're sort of this no-name company and "Who's going to send their resume in?" Then after ''Spyro'', we're stealing people from Disney, we're stealing animators from Disney, we're getting stacks of resumes. It really helps to have a little name recognition and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Sony really wanted… for their new game, they wanted a character that had hands. I think the game designers did as well, because it was it was problematic trying to figure out ways to get Spyro to do things since he was a quadruped. Then ''Spyro'' ended and then we did… there was another game that would have been really awesome. At this point, Insomniac is now off the lot from Universal, we've got our own building, floor of the building.<br />
<br />
Paul… what's last name… he was one of the game designers and pitched an idea called ''Monster Knights'', like Knights with a K. ''Monster Knights''. The play dynamic was the character, all of his power-ups and weapons and tools, so his shields and his armor and his guns or his bows or whatever, were actually monsters of different kinds that he would use as a shield or as armor or as a weapon. Beautiful art, great concept, and some reason, you know, Ted and the Hastings didn't like it.<br />
<br />
Then somebody… I think Al pitch this game that ended up just being called a ''Girl with a Stick''. Our working title was ''I5'', Insomniac's 5th game. These beautiful worlds where this girl with this magical stick would run around, fight monsters, and she'd plant her stick in… you get to certain locations and you could activate these huge spells for these big boss fights. The worlds were gorgeous. We're working really closely with Naughty Dog, sharing the same tools and kinda the same 3D engines between each other. The game was gorgeous. I really wish I had videotape of particularly this one level I did. It was just… it was a painting. It was gorgeous. But the game wasn't very much fun.<br />
<br />
We worked on it for like, eight months, or even more maybe, and Ted finally comes in and says, "Okay, everyone, I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is we're canceling ''I5''. The good news is we're canceling ''I5''." Everyone, Sony, everybody was just like, "This is beautiful. But it's just not fun."<br />
<br />
Then pretty quickly thereafter, ''Ratchet and Clank'' popped up. I'm not sure who pitched that idea. Was it Brian? It may have been Brian. That one fell into place very quickly as far as names and characters, all the front end on that, at least from my perspective, which I had (from a frustrating point of view) almost no input on. It was very frustrating to go from being at the ground level, inputting ideas and being in all the meetings as you're building up a new concept, to literally not being invited to the meeting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oof.'''<br />
<br />
That just got worse as time went by. If I had to do it all over again, I would have quit after ''Ratchet and Clank 1''. I should have quit after ''Ratchet and Clank 1''. Right in the middle of ''Ratchet''… like, during ''Spyro'', I remember, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night, I'm at my desk banging away on something on behind schedule, and Ted would call me into his office. "Hey, Craig, can I talk to you?" and I'm like, "Oh man, I am so busted." I'd into to his office and I'm getting ready to get chewed out, and Ted would go, "Hey, Craig, just want to thank you for being here. We couldn't do this without you. Here's the raise."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's nice!'''<br />
<br />
"Okay! Oh, okay." Then I'd go back to work. Then like a year later, another late night, I'm at my desk, I'm behind schedule, like everybody always is. Ted says, Hey, "Can I see you at my desk?" I'm like "Crap, I'm busted. I'm in so much trouble." He goes, "Hey, Craig, couldn't do this without you. Thank you. Here's a raise." "Oh, okay."<br />
<br />
Then jump ahead to… halfway through ''Ratchet and Clank'', this time during the day. Ted says, "Hey, can I see you in my office?" "Yeah, sure." This time I'm not freaking out. Like, "Hey, I'm getting a raise." I go in and Ted says, "If you're behind schedule again, we're gonna have to fire you."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[shock] No.'''<br />
<br />
That was so asinine, it was such a bizarre statement, my brain didn't register it. I just went, "Oh, well, I'll work harder. I'll put some more hours in," and I went to lunch. I'm sitting at lunch and all of a sudden I'm like, "What the fuck? Did he just threaten to fire me?" It didn't register until halfway through lunch. I go back into his office, and I go "Ted, did you…?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't react." I'm like, "Yes, because it's asinine. Everybody's behind schedule!" At the time, I think I was writing the schedule. So I said, "Okay."<br />
<br />
Then the next level is that Metropolis [Metropolis, Kerwan] from ''Ratchet 1'', which is that level that I working with Tom on, which he was having a hard time [on]. I ended up pretty much doing the whole level that was impossible to do. It was three times the size it should have been, that we'd all agreed on. I remember pointing it out to Ted. At the meeting, they rolled the thing out on the floor because it's so big. I immediately go, "They've gotta cut at least like sixty percent." Because these are literally just still just paper… Was this still just paper taped together, or were they finally printing out stuff using Illustrator? It used to just be hand-drawn graph paper taped together.<br />
<br />
Ted just came in like, "Tough, do it, figure it out, make it work." I did. This is also the level that… When we pitched ''Ratchet'' to Sony, we use the ''Spyro'' engine. With all this forced perspective, and all these tricks, made it look like a PS2 game. There's all this trickery going on. It looks incredible, would love to have that videotape. "Okay, this has to look good. This is the level we sold the game to Sony on."<br />
<br />
It's still the flagship level of the series to this day, to the best of my knowledge. So that's done, and I remember Ted looks at me, he just gives me this nod and this wink like, "Yeah, you're good. Don't worry about it." But I wasn't. I was continually not invited to meetings and left out of stuff and given crap and I just got the feeling that they would love to fire me because they could hire three college kids out of college for what they're paying me. I should have spoken up. They'd hire somebody and have to give them some responsibility, so they'd take one of my responsibilities away. They just kept putting me down into smaller and smaller responsibility. I still had a half dozen artists under me and whatnot. It was just… it was getting bad.<br />
<br />
The end of the story is during ''Ratchet Deadlocked'' is they've already broken off a handful of people to start working on ''Resistance'' for the PS3, cause that's a whole new system, you gotta learn everything over again. So we finished ''Deadlocked''. I remember I sat down, I learned how to use the new tools and do everything new. Then I go and I sit down and I teach my team, the environment team, how to use these new tools and how things are going to work. Then I go back and I go and I sit at my desk and… I can't do it. My brain just doesn't. The simplest decision. I can't decide do I want 10 polygons or 20 polygons on this curve. I just can't make the simplest decision. A little time goes by and I get called in by Ted. "Craig, can I see you in my office?" And it's, "We are firing you." You can either resign and we'll give you half of the upcoming bonus or we're firing you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sounds like you had to deal with more than you deserved there.'''<br />
<br />
I don't know where their mindset was. I look at what they've done for other employees who were having problems, that they bent over backwards for. Maybe if I had approached them and said, "Hey, there's something going on here. It's not that I'm not working hard enough or that I'm lazy. Something is wrong." Yeah, I should have left after ''Ratchet''. I should have left when they threatened to fire me that very first time. I should have said, "Fuck you." [laughs] I really should have. I would probably have my sanity.<br />
<br />
They really messed me up. Although I was telling part of that story to a coworker… Currently, I'm working at a children's museum and I'm just on the floor. I just play with kids. I'm a camp counselor. I just sit and draw and play with the kids and do games and silly stuff. So not management. I'm on the floor. Most of my coworkers are like 20 years old or in high school still. This started in L.A. after I hadn't worked for a number of years, and a friend kept saying that I really need to come work at a children's museum in L.A. It was a long drive and I was like, "I don't know…"<br />
<br />
I just went down and went to one of her special events at the museum and just sat there for a while and talked to everybody and played around the museum. "Yeah, I need to be here." So this is my new calling. I was talking to this employee and I said, "You know, I wonder where I'd be if I had quit when I should have?" I love their response, because I said, "Well, if I had, I'd probably still be making games." He goes, "Yeah, maybe, but you wouldn't be here." I went, "Oh, yeah." I prefer this. I don't make near the money I make making video games, you make stupid money making video games. Here, I'm basically making minimum wage. But this is good. This is keeping me healthy, healthy and happy.<br />
<br />
My times at Insomniac were a real mixed bag. They went from incredible to literally breaking me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah…'''<br />
<br />
I remember they took me out on a cruise once. At that big party on the cruise, Ted's going through the history of Insomniac, and he briefly mentions and moves on. Which is okay, it's fine, it's a big company and it's got a lot of history. But it kinda bugged me. Once again, it's like I'm very curious… I'm trying to not let too much ego get in the way here… I'm curious where Insomniac would be if there was no ''Spyro''. Who knows what they would have done without it. ''Spyro'' was in the top five for the PS1 of overall sales. Cross-generational, cross-gender, beyond what we ever expected to have it be.<br />
<br />
So Ted's talking, and Al comes over… Al, very quietly (Al is very quiet) says "Thank you." He says that and it really touched me. "We could not have done this without you." It was just so nice to hear that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine… What changes do you feel could have been made which would have helped you avoid that burnout? That's kind of a big question.'''<br />
<br />
If I stood up for myself. So when they started taking responsibilities away… Like in one game, I would be in charge of something or I would have come up with the idea for something. Then the next game, I wouldn't need being invited to that meeting. It's like, "Okay, it's not like I did a really crappy job. I don't get to do it again." It's like, "No, I did a very good job. So why am I not even invited the second time around?" When we hired new people, if I had stood my ground a little more and said, "No, those are my responsibilities, find something else for them to do."<br />
<br />
This goes all the way back to the very beginning. When we first hired John Fiorito, who was the other art director at Insomniac in the early years… so they didn't really have an art director because there were just two artists and a couple programmers and Ted. As ''Spyro'' got going, Ted was telling me, "OK, you're going to be art director on the next project." But he never officially made it official. But when they hired John, all of a sudden, it's like, they've got to keep John happy. John's a great person and an incredible artist, and he's also a really good manager. I'm a sucky, horrible manager. He was a good manager.<br />
<br />
Instead of willingly saying, "Oh yeah, we'll just split up my responsibilities and John will take this and I'll take this." I wish I had said, "No, no, no, Find something else for John to do." John and I worked really well together and there was a nice division of responsibilities there, but that was the beginning of "Oh, we've got something new. Let's take some of Craig's responsibilities." I don't know what their motives were. I try not to be too hard on myself. "Well, John's a better artist than I am." John's definitely a better manager than I am.<br />
<br />
If someone's work sucks or isn't working right, and you need to say, "You're not going home until this is fixed." or "You're working extra because this needs to be fixed," I would point out what needed to be done or that it wasn't right. When they didn't fix it before they left, I would stay late and fix it. Which would put me behind on my schedule. That's why I'm a shitty manager. I would have done that as we hired more people, and I would have said, "Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being asked about these things? Why are these no longer my responsibilities? Were you not happy with them? You never said anything."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like they had an inclusion problem.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I don't really know why. At first, I was definitely treated like the golden boy the first couple of years because I was the only person that made a game. I already had a couple of million-selling titles under my belt. I really tried to not act that way. I really tried not to be cocky or arrogant or to feel like I could get away with things. But I think it must have come across that way to some people. The only thing I remember getting called out on prior to "You're behind schedule" is… I actually was verbally told by Ted, "You are in charge here. You are the art director on this." This would have been on ''Ratchet'' or ''Spyro 2''. "You're in charge of the art." At least for some small piece of it, because there was John still.<br />
<br />
Chad Dresden was there and I remember he was a great artist, really fast, and I did (as a crappy manager) make the mistake of asking him to fix bugs and fix things and do things that I didn't have time to do. He always had time because he was always ahead of schedule because he worked his ass off and he was fast. He started to resent the fact that because he was ahead, I was always asking him things to do. He talked to Ted and Ted called me into his office and chewed me out for always dumping stuff on Chad.<br />
<br />
It was bad on me. I take that one. It wasn't fair to Chad. That's the only time that anything had been said that I think… I don't know. I don't know. If I stood up for myself earlier, and if they gave in, then great, I would have had what I wanted. And if they didn't, I would have left earlier.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you handled it as best you could within what you were given.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I was still flying back and forth every weekend. I'd be curious to see what Ted's memories or perspective is on this, but… not that it matters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So while you were telling me that I wrote down a couple more Spyro questions, if you don't mind me hopping back a little bit.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, please. I can get off my sob story and actually get back to talking about games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no, you're good. That's an important part of it. That's an important part of your career.'''<br />
<br />
One more thing really quick here. Something I tell people, regardless of where they're working, is the mistake I made at Insomniac is: I thought of them as family. I had been there since the beginning. I was their first employee. I thought Insomniac is family. Work is never family. You are an asset. You are a tool. You're a cog in their machine. You are loved and taken care of as long as they want to take care of you, but you are not family. The second something changes, you're just replaceable. Don't make that mistake of thinking of someplace as family or home when it's not.<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to questions about ''Spyro''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I did want to say on the topic of burnout. When I asked you what changes could have been made, I was more referring to the company, because even though you took it on yourself and you were very noble in saying, "What could I have done differently," I was thinking more of… because if you're undergoing burnout, that can be personal issues, but I feel like the company also has a responsibility to address, on their end, what's causing that issue to be saddled on you in the first place.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at the few other people that I know had some diagnosed physical issues that made it very hard to work. Insomniac bent over backwards to keep them and make sure that they were happy and healthy and content. Chad's very talented. He was a good art director. When he needed to leave the company and go back to family in North Carolina, they opened up another branch of Insomniac in North Carolina that he could work from there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez.'''<br />
<br />
I'm like, "Okay?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"So you can't understand my position on this, but you can open up an entirely new branch in a different state?"'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. For the longest time, for the first number of years… Insomniac fired a couple of people, but nobody left Insomniac because where would you go that was better? We were making incredible gains. The coworkers were awesome, the perks and the food and everything in the office was awesome. There was literally nowhere else you could go. Then as the company got bigger, and they got more corporate, it turned into just another company. Ted kept saying, "We're never going to go corporate, we're always gonna stay the same." Then it got as corporate as it could be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So to hop to a couple questions I wanted to ask about ''Spyro''. You said that originally, there was the concept for him aging and… because dragons are really old, the world would evolve around him. To jump back to our ''Dark Empires'' discussion, that's a theme in ''Dark Empires''. You have both dragons and the world evolving around the player. Is there any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
Not consciously. But now that you say that? Yeah, there's definitely that transition there. I don't know if that was subconsciously still in my brain, that part of my brain liked, or… Yeah, that wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you eventually settle on the name Spyro?'''<br />
<br />
We went around with that. Names are so hard. It took forever to find a name for the company because Insomniac was named Extreme Games when I first went down. We went on forever… It was like last minute. We needed to do press releases for ''Disruptor'', and like, "We need a company name." Finally got Insomniac. Another company… We had Insomniac games, and there was another Insomniac Studios that had filed. You have to… the first one to get a product on the shelf can actually lock the name down. So we were in a race with Insomniac Studios to be the first one to ship and we beat them. I feel sorry for them because now they got to start over.<br />
<br />
''Spyro'' is the same way. Pete was… I think it's one of the Hastings came up with Pete. It's like, "Yeah, perfect." But you're always thinking. We get closer and closer and then Sony starts pushing like, "OK, we need a real name." We're throwing all these different names out. I know Pyro got put out early, but it was too on the nose. Also we don't want parents getting pissed off because their kids are lighting fires. Finally, pretty close to the shipping of [the game], we're "We've got to have a name." Somebody at Sony pitched Spyro.<br />
<br />
Everybody liked it, except for Brian Hastings, who went, "Hey, wait a minute. I pitched that name like three months ago, and nobody liked it." We're like, "Oh, really?" So he was always a little pissed that he'd pitched it and we hadn't liked it. Somebody at Sony came up with Spyro. Luckily it passed all the tests.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One final ''Dark Empires'' question, and I appreciate you letting me hop around here.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no worries.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So we noticed that the ''Dark Empire's'' ROM, the existing ROM, doesn't have any sound. Do you recall if anyone was planned to be assigned to do music and sound for it?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
It's weird. I'm trying to remember if there was sound on… Well then again, it's been 35 years? 1990, when? 30, 35 years. [laughs] Since I would have last played that. Yeah, not that I know of. Sound effects, I guess, would have done in house. Then music… I know for ''Kid Chameleon'', they brought in somebody outside to do the music. Actually, he did some of the sound effects, too. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Going back to ''Spyro'' here. Of all the original Spyro games, or I will say, of all three of the original Spyro games, which did you enjoy working on the most?'''<br />
<br />
It's down to 1 or 2. It's a trade off because, short answer, the first one, just because it's new and it's this wonderful, beautiful world. But then, the second one, because… all the hard starts, all the hard, unfun stuff about the being the creative process, is done. Now you're just having fun. You know the tools, you know the world, and you can just build. So it's hard [to answer]. My favorite level of all the levels is Badlands, Skelos Badlands. Is that in 1? Just something about that one, I really like the artwork. I like skulls, if you can't tell from some of the other games I worked on. That was the first time I got to do skulls and bones in a Spyro game.<br />
<br />
The other interesting thing, that was my big surprise on ''Spyro'', is the skies. Al Hastings came up with this way of doing skies with polygons where you're lighting the vertex and then the computer will gradate between whatever is on this vertex to the next vertex, so you can get these gradations. By shaping your polygons, you can create clouds or whatever you want in the sky. Ted did the first one or two. He then asked me to take over doing the skies. I really didn't want to. It was very tedious. They weren't particularly pretty. I didn't think there was much creatively you could do with it. The tools were really just very basic. The first couple were just a lot of work and a lot of manual, intensive, just not fun computer work. But as the tools improved, in the end, of all the different things I did in ''Spyro'', doing the skies is my favorite.<br />
<br />
I really learned how to push what could be done with the tools and with polygons and vertex lighting. Jump ahead 30 years, and get talking to people… the people who find me or find out find out that I worked on ''Spyro'' they always bring up the skies. The skies were one of their favorite things.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
That means so much to me. I've talked to a couple of different people who talk about how they didn't have the best childhood. ''Spyro'' was their escape. Particularly, there was at least at least a couple different times that people have told me that they had spots, their favorite spot, where they would just go sit and listen to the music of ''Spyro''. The music of ''Spyro'', you can't beat. They would just go sit and listen to the music and look at the sky. I'm like, "Wow."<br />
<br />
The worlds were fun to build, and I've got some favorite places and favorite things and had a lot of fun building the world. But the skies. I look back at those… I just recently here just came across this picture of a tattoo that's one of my skies. It's very clearly made to look like it's polygons and a vertex-lit tattoo of the sky, with a crystal dragon from ''Spyro 1'' on top of it. This beautiful tattoo, it kinda freaked me out in a good way, because I've seen lots of tattoos of Spyro and different games I've worked on. I built the crystal dragon and I built the sky. I'm looking at this person's tattoo. "That's my artwork on your body." That is cool. That is wild.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It must be rewarding hearing feedback like that.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, it is. It really, really is. I'm trying not to cry right now. I gotta learn the word in Japanese, but there's a Japanese word that means your reason for being [Ikigai]. It's four different things. It's a Venn diagram with four circles. The first one is doing something that you enjoy doing. The second one is doing something that you're actually good at doing. The third one is doing something that they actually will pay you to do. And the fourth one is doing something that enhances or gives back to the world.<br />
<br />
I look at my time at museums, when working with kids, I'm like, "Okay, I enjoy doing it. I'm good at doing it. They pay me to do it. And it's definitely helping the world." That's a good reason for being. Back when I was making games, and was making really good money, and I had a lot of friends who were working like two or three jobs to barely keep paying the rent… I felt really guilty that I'm sitting around listening to music, drawing monsters all day, and I'm getting paid money. My one friend pointed out like, "No, what you're doing is important. It is affecting people. These are more than games to some people." I really understand that now. From talking to these people and seeing the way people's eyes light up, when I'm talking to someone and they find out that I worked on ''Spyro'', and they just light up.<br />
<br />
Actually, at the museum down in L.A., every Thursday, they have 15 minutes in the morning for like, you could have a show and tell. You could sign up and bring in something to talk about a trip or a knee surgery or your favorite whatever. People kept asking me to bring in some artwork and video game stuff. So I did. My boss knew I'd made games, but that he didn't know anything beyond that. As I'm going through my artwork, and I pulled out the Spyro stuff, his eyes literally opened up and his jaw literally dropped and he's staring at me. Afterwards he comes to me and goes "''Spyro''! That was my game, that was the game." It's so weird to watch him try to be my boss and not go all fanboy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] That's really sweet.'''<br />
<br />
I really had a very fortunate life. Not only did I get to make games, I got to work on some of the best base games out there. ''Sonic''. I mean, come on, my second game ever was ''Sonic the Hedgehog''. Then ''Spyro'' and ''Ratchet and Clank''. They're still making Ratchet and Clank games. Sonic's got movies, Spyro's got a TV show. Although he's kinda butt ugly in it because ''Skylanders'', but it's still Spyro. Ratchet and Clank's got a movie. ''Comix Zone'', the rights got sold to make a movie.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh!'''<br />
<br />
I don't know if anything ever happened to that, but somebody bought the rights. So yeah, very fortunate life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What advice would you give to young artists entering the industry?'''<br />
<br />
What would I tell people? Because I do get asked that a lot. I do encourage people. It's as much luck and being in the right place. People ask me how I got into the industry. If I answered "An ad in the newspaper that said wanted artists, no experience necessary." I mean, come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's not going to happen nowadays.'''<br />
<br />
What kinda bullshit lazy writing is that? I had a sign on my desk for years. Well, I had two signs on my desk. I had KISS, K-I-S-S, which is 'keep it simple, stupid.' [laughs] To remind myself to keep everything simple. I need to make a sign here for my projects here. The other one was, 'if you love your job, you'll never have to work a day in your life.' I've felt very fortunate that that's almost my entire life, other than shoveling fries in high school, I've had jobs where I was really enjoying the work.<br />
<br />
When I talk to people, I tell them to pursue something that you really enjoy, because if you can get that, if you can make a living at that, it's not work. It's very hard, and there's not many people that can manage to do it, but if you can… Then I follow that up with my cautionary tale. "Don't be blinded by that." Because that will mess you up. But just have faith. It does happen. It happened to me, it can happen that you can you can follow this and do it.<br />
<br />
People ask specific suggestions on the game industry now and I just tell them, "It's changed so much. I can give you some generic stuff that worked 30 years ago, but it's so different now." It's changing again here with AI stuff coming in. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the art. Actually, it'll be interesting to see what happens to games across the board.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting new time.'''<br />
<br />
My nephew was just showing me this game that is entirely AI generated. It's huge, because it's just this computer continually creating worlds that you can fly to. It'll be interesting. It's not a bad thing. It's just a new tool, but it will be interesting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you could return to game development, what kinda game do you think you'd most want to make today?'''<br />
<br />
I would love to make that original dragon game I pitched. Let's say we had made that. Let's say Mark had went "Awesome. Perfect." I think it would have been an incredible title, would have been a really fun game. It would have been kinda niche though. Moms and grandmas and girlfriends and four-year olds all want to play ''Spyro'', but you also didn't lose the 15 year old boys. Where if you had this more realistic looking dragon, it would have been a good game, but it wouldn't have been with this worldwide hit. I would still love to play that, would love to make my original dragon game. What'd I call it? ''DragonSpan''.<br />
<br />
Or I would love to finish up ''Astropede''. That one could have maybe happened. I was talking to Ken, and we're bouncing back and forth like "How do we… what do we do here?" because we both wanted to see it finished. I would love to see that, because I still think… there were some technical problems and gameplay issues that we had never got to the point to where we had resolve, they were going to be a real problem, that I think now wouldn't be a problem. Just because resolution's higher on games now.<br />
<br />
I would love to make the original dragon game, where you're protecting your hoard and fighting off D&D adventurers coming in, but you also gotta go out and kidnap the princess so you have something to eat. Have you ever see the movie Dragonslayer, 1982?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's vaguely familiar. I don't think I've seen it.'''<br />
<br />
One of the most wonderful- it's not the most realistic dragon still to date, but the dragon in it is incredible in most scenes. That movie was definitely at the forefront of my brain as I was thinking of the original pitch for ''Spyro''. That and Lord of the Rings; Smaug. By the end of the game, you're Smaug. Even more so, you're this D&D magic-using, talking, powerful dragon that's casting spells and all sorts of stuff. I would love to do that. And the artwork for that would be fun. That's right up my alley again. [laughs] Monsters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course. Looking back at all of your work in the game industry, what are you the most proud of?'''<br />
<br />
[thinks] ''Spyro''. My favorite artwork that I'm the most proud of… I'm really glad it got cut from ''Sonic 2'' because it made it more than just another level, is the Hidden Palace artwork and the Hidden Palace level. I'm really proud of that. It's kinda taken on a life of its own. Then ''Spyro''. Specifically in ''Spyro'', the skies. The rest of the artwork in the game is beautiful and fun, but after having talked to so many people about the skies… and then myself going back and looking at them. Cause people have gone through with various editors and pulled the skies out. I'd love to see the meshes without the vertex lighting. I'd love to see the meshes of these skies.<br />
<br />
I'm trying to explain to people and they're like, "What?" "Oh, I can just show you." Somewhere, there's a magazine article that has a single screenshot with and without the light colors. I've been going through and looking at these panoramic views of the skies and just… Once in a while, I'll do a piece of art, and I step back and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that?" I've got one painting, the Calvin and Hobbes painting, which is up on that DeviantArt link. The Calvin and Hobbes painting, that's one where I finished and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that? It wasn't you. Who did that?"<br />
<br />
I look at the Spyro skies, and I'm like, "Yeah, wow, those are gorgeous. Who did those?" It's nice. I like that feeling of, "Oh, I can actually look at that and I don't see all the flaws." You know, most other artists and people in general on anything, they look at something they did and all they can see is "Oh, I didn't get this right, I didn't get that right." I look at the skies and it's like, "Wow, yeah…"<br />
<br />
Talking to these people, it's surreal. That tattoo… Wow. "You did something that touched people."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your work had a huge influence.'''<br />
<br />
There was a special about these guys who went to Spain because they were huge fans of the spaghetti Westerns, in particular, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. They were going to hike around and they were going to find all the filming locations. Are you familiar with the movie?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it all the way through, but I'm familiar with spaghetti Westerns.'''<br />
<br />
You gotta watch it. It's a must-watch movie. It can be a little long, but yeah, it's classic, and it's Clint Eastwood. At the end of the movie, there's the three bad guys. There's the good, the bad, the ugly. There's this three-way Mexican standoff gunfight in the middle of this big circular cemetery with gravestones all around it. Incredible music playing, classic spaghetti Western gunfight. These guys are looking for that location, because it wasn't a real cemetery. It's a place they built out in the middle of Spain. During this special, they're talking about these different things and meeting people who were extras and whatnot, they get talking to Hatfield, lead singer from Metallica, James Hatfield, who loves the movie. In fact, Metallica starts every one of the concerts with the song that plays right before that gunfight.<br />
<br />
They're talking to him and he said something that really hit home with me. He says, people come up to him either at concerts or just on the street, and tell him how much his music means to them or how it changed their lives. He said he used to just say "Thank you very much," but then he realized that he doesn't see his music the way they see his music. To him, part of it's just a job, it's just what he does. To them, it's so much more. It can be the spiritual thing. It literally changed their lives. When he's talking to these people, he says he tries really hard to remember that, that this is more than just his music to them.<br />
<br />
As I'm listening to him talk, and I'm just starting to talk to all these people about ''Spyro'', I'm like, "Oh, yeah." I mean, I'm not a huge gamer. I've got other things I spend way too much time and money on. This realization is like, for some of these people… like the look on my boss' face and these other people. It's huge. Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Thanks again for the patience with this long interview, we're almost about done here.'''<br />
<br />
No worries, I enjoy it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can tell.'''<br />
<br />
It's cathartic for me. Sonic, Spyro, Insomniac… see where I am on that. Like, "Oh, no, I've still got to work on that." Well, my brain's dealing with that. It's all good. Like I said, I know how much some of this stuff means to different people. One of the things I really want to do is… I've been putting my artwork out there for quite a while. It's in like game forums and places where like the gamers are going to find it, but I know there's the casual fans that don't go online looking for these stories, that would love to hear these stories and see these pictures and know some of this stuff. That's not where they spend their time digging into the Internet.<br />
<br />
I want those people to find some of this stuff and hear some of these stories. I want to get out there. I'm getting older. [laughs] I want to make sure it's out there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah… How do you feel about the influence Hidden Palace Zone had on the larger gaming community? Obviously, they named the game preservation group after it, but Hidden Palace has become kinda the symbol for like mystery in games. That must be a good feeling.'''<br />
<br />
It's another one of those surreal feelings. Once again, it makes me feel glad that it got cut from the game. Had it not been cut, it could be on somebody's ranking list of… "What's your favorite level in ''Sonic 2''?" would be really the only place it'd ever be discussed. It's part of the whole industry now, especially within the Sonic world. It's surreal, very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it means quite a lot. That's all the questions I had to ask you. I appreciate so much again that you've given me all your time. We've been talking for almost three and a half hours here. That's incredibly gracious of you.'''<br />
<br />
I'd be putting off what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. [laugh] I'm accomplishing something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, actually, one last question. Speaking of Hidden Palace, you had previously donated ''Segapede'' to Hidden Palace for preservation, and they did a big history post about it and they were able to study it. If you don't mind, could we do the same with ''Dark Empires''? Get it uploaded, write a little history post about it?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Once again, for the people that are going to be interested that stuff… I wish I remembered more about it. I remember doing the sketches and the only reason I remember doing those sketches because I still have those sketches. Maybe it'll trigger somebody else's memory now from something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I was so happy that you were sharing names, and part of the reason I was asking about names, was because I was actually going to reach out to get more information on just all the projects that we talked about, with all your former coworkers.'''<br />
<br />
I can't remember what I was asking Bill about… I know I talked to him or texted him probably a decade ago now. If you can track Bill down, he would definitely be able to give you more. I'm trying to think, who else… I think was Bill I contacted about ''Treasure Tails'', and he said he didn't have anything to do with it, but I think he said Hoyt did. I don't think I… did I ever get a hold of Hoyt? I can't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I'd love to track him down.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I'd like to remember more about ''Treasure Tails''. I do remember I do have my notes in my journal that talk about being excited about this kinda stuff. Then all of a sudden, "Eh, it's being cancelled."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you're ever able to find that journal again, please shoot me an email. As you said, there's probably tons of juicy information in there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think in the relative STI days, I actually scanned in those pages. I've been meaning to go through and pull out… because the other thing is in the landfill and Redwood City. I was busy doing this, because I was really pretty good about writing in a journal every morning or whenever, and decided that I was going to have two journals. I was going to have my personal journal, about just likes and thoughts and dating, whatever. Then my other journal about work, I was going to do at work, and I was going to do it on the computer. I'd sit down every morning and type for a few minutes.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, that journal, the typed journal on the floppy disk, is probably in a landfill somewhere because it got left behind. It didn't get brought with me. As opposed to my books, I still have my books. Unfortunately, they're mostly full of who I'm dating at the moment. The key moments and dates are still in that, so that at least allows you to get some anchor points to lock in… I'm almost sure it'll have the date of Michael Jackson's visit.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] I mean, that's low priority, but I appreciate whatever you're able to dig up and send my way.'''<br />
<br />
But you think… okay, so the accident [Michael Jackson had]. Knowing it's in March of 93, did you say was his accident…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, so March of… Just to give you an overview of what we know from other developer statements. Brenda said some of this, David Javelosa said some of this. There was at least one meeting before he sprained his ankle because Brenda said that she remembered him not on crutches. That would have put in January or February 1993 or earlier, but probably January, February '93. Then there was a second meeting where he was on crutches that you saw him, so we think that might have been mid '93.<br />
<br />
That first meeting was him discussing ''Sonic 3'' off crutches. The second meeting was him discussing ''Sonic 3'' more, just discussing doing it. He was on crutches, so that was March or later. Then there was a third meeting where he was also on crutches, that was later in '93 because he was dropping off materials to STI for ''Sonic 3'', probably demos or tracks like that.<br />
<br />
If you can find a date… no worries. We're just always like to piece together timelines on Sonic Retro.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, every little piece of information leads to the next little piece of information.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, it's like archaeology.'''<br />
<br />
It literally is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like assembling… It's like you have a bit of pottery and you just assemble pieces and then you put some pieces in place and say, "Oh, the outline for this piece looks like this other piece." It's almost like a puzzle that way.'''<br />
<br />
There was something recently here… that somebody pointed out something online. I had made a comment on Reddit or somewhere. Somebody came back and they had they said something else like, "Oh, I thought this," or "I've seen this written." Actually, they posted a link to another article. I'm reading that and went, "Yes!" All of a sudden it flipped something that I remembered. These little pieces, like "Okay, that can't work because this is here now." So you have to change what was happening. Then all of a sudden, these other memories come back, because now you remember things in the correct order and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it's archaeology. It's piecing together. Occasionally, you look at the paleontology and look at some of the early drawings of dinosaurs like, "Wow, that is so wrong."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, they were trying but it was wrong.'''<br />
<br />
"You were trying. I can see why you got that. But that's not how it was." Then wait another 100 years and I'm sure they'll be looking at our drawings doing the same thing. They'll watch Jurassic Park and go, "What were you guys thinking?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. History is an interesting thing.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, if you've got any more questions, go ahead and shoot them to me again. I'm always more than happy to do what I can and try to remember what I can.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, we really appreciate the openness.'''<br />
<br />
You've done this a couple times today. Where you're just asking a question, and I'd go, "No, I don't remember anything." But there'll be a certain word, you'll say a certain thing, and "Oh, wait!" Like the fiery forest thing. I'm like, "Oh, wow." I don't initially remember anything, but I now know that was a thing. Because I can remember trying to remember how to do flames on branches… weird.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, whatever you remember you can always find my way as well. I'll probably be following up this interview with maybe a couple more questions that I either forgot or I look at the interview and I'm like, "Oh, shoot, I should ask that. Something like that."'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, my pleasure. It really has been my pleasure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, this was wonderful speaking with you. Again, you gave me over three and a half hours of your time. I cannot thank you enough for everything that you gave us today.'''<br />
<br />
[laughs] But now you've got to edit this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, my gosh, yeah. So with transcriptions… Because I do my own transcriptions, it's about two to three hours for every one hour of recording. This might be a nine hour project. So I was going to say, I'm going to take about a week to two weeks to transcribe this, clean it up, get it all together, and then I'll publish it, and then I'll send you a link. If you see any minor issues or if I got a name wrong or something, you can just let me know.'''<br />
<br />
Okay, yeah. Well, good luck, and thank you. I enjoy this, and I'm happy to do it. I'm more than happy to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Craig. This is absolutely wonderful again.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Well, talk to you later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Talk to you later. Bye bye.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
:''[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas Originally published on Sega Retro on August 7, 2025].''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28_interview)&diff=177364Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28 interview)2026-10-11T22:30:19Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Created page with "{{Interview |image=DanHess.png |image2=WesHoffman.png |name=Dan Hess |name2=Wes Hoffman |status=Released |interviewer=CartridgeCulture |subject=Nintendo 64 |date=2026-05-28 }} :''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 sho..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=DanHess.png<br />
|image2=WesHoffman.png<br />
|name=Dan Hess<br />
|name2=Wes Hoffman<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Nintendo 64<br />
|date=2026-05-28<br />
}}<br />
<br />
:''Part 1 conducted on 2026-03-25''<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Dan. This is Ashley. How you doing?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hi! How are you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Good! Doing good over here.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate you giving me your time today.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, no problem.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. ''Pilotwings'' was one of my earliest gaming memories, I think. I loved that. Your music had a big part of that.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That looks good, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Do you hear that a lot?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I did a little bit of research.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It'll go down as historically notable, which it is. Absolutely. Speaking as a historian.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, Ashley. Appreciate that, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. Just to get started here, could you tell us a little bit about growing up in Michigan, I believe?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sure. What do you want to know about it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I guess your musical background and how you first got into music, and your early inspirations.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When were you - oh, I'm sorry, go ahead.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Real funk.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that whole world is pretty much gone.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, so sad.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I always like to say that the interviews are a good way to preserve some of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, maybe, maybe. You hope.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We hope. Yeah, Detroit was a place to grow up. It really was.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was your first introduction to, I guess, synthesizers and/or electronic music?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's incredible that you're largely self-taught. You had the piano training.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. What other kind of music did you listen to when you were growing up, like influences?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's normal to you.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the cultural zeitgeist used to be a little smaller, and everyone was on the same page about it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, you had to be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was also regional.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''With the socks.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Especially at the age that you were at.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Skeleton Crew. Okay, gotcha. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Pretty persuasive.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beyoncé.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, before that, though - her band.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It was Destiny's Child.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Destiny's Child. Yeah. Oh my god. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, right. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Baddest of Blues."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Of all songs, we recorded our version of "If I Were a Boy."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man, I would love to see her react to that. I'm sure she'd have a pretty good -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I would too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It was later than that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was that around the rise of YouTube, when you could start sharing this music easily again, you think?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The game magazines and stuff?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's like an email.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: One email. That's the entire game. All the graphics, all the code, all the sound effects -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, and to get that all sounding nice and not compress your samples into bit-crush.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which they crushed the crap out of, because they only gave me 800K.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's nuts.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. No, they're really - as you said that, I was like, I wonder if I can think of any examples.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I can think of one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One. Yeah. What's yours?'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it's great.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Unbelievable in the groove. Oh my god. When you add the fact that they did that on a Sega Genesis - mind-blowing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You later worked with Greg, right? Later on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's so good.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Do you have some other ones you would say are groove-based that would come to mind?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, I remember -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Martin Iveson.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You remember his name? I don't. I'm horrible at that. That's great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: A little "funhouse".<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A little funhouse, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No objective. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They actually went down to Texas.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They moved there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oyagi, and I'm going to - I can't remember the other guy's name.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, can you give those two names again? You said Wada and someone else.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Only because my best friends were running the company, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That was Paradigm Simulation, that split, and then it was Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're working remotely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The purple box that cost a billion dollars.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ridiculous. Then in six years they're worth $100 on eBay.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The software licenses.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're all scrolling games.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
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'''Like a development software?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
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<br />
'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''It wasn't just audio software or audio work, it was all kinds of code for the - oh, that's crazy.'''<br />
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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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''In '94? Oh my gosh. Yeah, no wonder. No one would've been familiar with 3D at all.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
''''94 was super early.'''<br />
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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.<br />
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'''SGI built the dream team list? SGI was the one that suggested -'''<br />
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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?<br />
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<br />
'''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?'''<br />
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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.<br />
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<br />
'''Not really, no.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Original ''Pilotwings'' on Super Nintendo. Yes.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: I had a Super Nintendo -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's crazy, because they're very similar.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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'''Oh, that's all right. All of this feeds into the same story anyways.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
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<br />
'''You were working remotely throughout the entire ''Pilotwings'' project. Is that true?'''<br />
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Dan Hess: No.<br />
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<br />
'''Oh no, you moved to Texas for the last six weeks.'''<br />
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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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Building your libraries.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. There's a date.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah. Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's the Rocket Belt demo.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''From the initial concept art?'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''An hour.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Floaty, fluffy, yeah.'''<br />
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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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's smart. Was Birdman the one with something like 20 rejected drafts?'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because you were the only ones that could actually -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Modes?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, this is the same.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's the menu, I think.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The real synthy thing that really pops.<br />
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<br />
'''Talk about that.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: One second, let me see. I'll find this stuff.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm actually going to pull up the ''Pilotwings'' soundtrack on my side.'''<br />
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Dan Hess: Number one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's the intro. It's the opening theme. Then there's the title demo, which is 20 seconds. Game menu.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Game menu. Which game menu?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's it. Yeah. Oh, because that one - yeah, that's the menu.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Groove-based in a different way. It's not funky, it's synthy. It's funky, but it's not -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is a little funky.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Replay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The replay one. I get a lot of comments on that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Wave Race''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. They're not overlapping either, a lot of times.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You're not even playing the game at that point.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No. Replay, and the one we talked about - whatever that -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Menu.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think that comes across. I think you can hear that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You weren't actually mailing anything, because you kept saying "came down with." You were working on your demos -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Good point.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I hear that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No software. No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's Minoru Arakawa, I'm assuming you're referencing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
By the way, this is a 30-year reunion, a 30-year anniversary. Did you know that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow. Really? 30 years? Yeah, 1996. Oh, wow. Okay. That's why I'm doing this interview.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: There you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You're very good with your questions, brother.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What do you got?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. Sure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, perfect.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I never know. We're just kind of going off the cuff here.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I tend to space too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Dang it. What were we talking about?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, that's on me. I'm the interviewer, I shouldn't - remembering where we are in the -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm just saying that I got lucky that I was able to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, all the Birdman.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Which one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Birdman?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Outside of what you already told me?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an incredible story. The 20 or so conservative demos that were rejected - was that before that point or after that point?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you still have any of these old demos, or any of this old material?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: [shakes head] I'm so mad at myself.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
Okay, I got it. Yeah, here it is. Yep, that's it. Isn't that funny?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I like how they made it. It looks so vintage.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's hilarious. Let me see if there's anything I forgot. Oh my god, Cannonball. I forgot about Cannonball.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It happens.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Live and learn.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Just like the Star Search thing, I'm sure no one's actually reading - people don't read these interviews.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. Exactly.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall shipping ''Pilotwings'', or knowing that it shipped? Or was there a launch party or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's super cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, we need to find that out, because he was great. I feel guilty, but remember, it's been 30 years.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yamashiro. Shigeki Yamashiro.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yamashiro. Yes. There you go. It was Yamashiro, Wada-san, and Oyagi-san.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You've talked a lot about Wada. What was working with Oyagi like?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It is a little hard. Yeah. It doesn't let up on the simulation aspect at all.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, good point. Yeah. If you're an actual pilot, you have a big old yoke that you can do -'''<br />
<br />
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]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're like, "Ugh."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's not forgiving, man. It's not forgiving at all.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All my hard drive songs, and I have no idea what I did with them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, those ones.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely. We're buds. We are forever friends, us three.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Awesome. Sounds great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like every note.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Very much.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Acoustics, and balancing, and all of that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Crazy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Absolutely. That'll be super fun.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, thanks, man. It was a great time for me too. Awesome. Reach out and we'll figure it out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right, I will.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thanks, Dan.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
:''Part 2 conducted on 2026-03-28''<br />
<br />
'''Hey Dan. Sorry for being late. I just got in the door about two minutes ago.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sat down. I get it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. I've got all the questions in chronological order, and I marked where we left off.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would imagine that the impact you had was more widespread than you would imagine. I think we did talk about this last time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We created the emulation software.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Possible.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: What was possible. The sound system was nonexistent. Hold on one second.<br />
<br />
Franci, going in or out? You going out? Okay. It's a beautiful day here, 82 and just a spectacular evening.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty nice here too.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nice.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's only 109 out here. We're okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, geez, dude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's dry heat, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Dry heat. Not a lot of wind sometimes, or too much wind.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We tease all you guys out there for that. "Oh, but it's dry heat."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right. No, trust me, I'd still take Orange County.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It really only feels like 103. Good for you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, pretty much. You really do get used to it after a little while.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I had a lab in Santa Fe for several years where we were making holograms for a 3D display system we invented.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was another thing I was going to ask about. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Figure it out.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''At least it's something you're familiar with.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like origami.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wada-san sounds super cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please. That was going to be one of my questions - just anecdotes about cross-cultural differences.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, yeah. The sound system - I realized, okay, they gave me 800K. Do you even know what K is?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that's 1,000 bytes. You had to fit that in 800,000 bytes.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's just for fitting it in the box, guys. You still have to make it and then compress it.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god, it's so bad now. I don't know if you still use it, but it's so bad now.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, exactly.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You shouldn't take that much resource. Google Chrome takes an enormous amount of resources.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Chrome is ridiculous, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's a freaking browser.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no examples.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We're like, okay.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''This is the bomb.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Development systems.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It was solid.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Give them all the support - we have only one left.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Merit?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On why you guys co-founded Paradigm.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very dynamic.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes. It's very, very tough to do that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, like a song, and the speech.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A bed.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Fade it out really quick.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I got to get that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back in the studio.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You told me to. You guys had me - yeah, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To do it on the beat.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Which could be immediate, or it could be three seconds later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Isn't that the whole point of what they asked you?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He asked me, but she didn't -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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''?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We had sold the company, I think.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Infogrames?'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Boy, we got diverted. I can't even remember whatever -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I asked you about the impact of seeing ''Super Mario 64''.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right, seeing and hearing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes. You could hear what it's capable of when you play ''ToeJam & Earl''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Sure.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It would do a lot more for me, but they didn't. Whatever.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The N64 doesn't have any kind of non-sample capabilities?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's no PSG equivalent? Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Those are just samples?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's interesting. I'm listening.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you end up writing any of the N64's audio documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It seems like you would've been a good fit for that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was he also responsible for the sound recording for the voices?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You know what? I have no idea who did that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?"'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if that's a pit boss.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.'"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
'''[Microsoft SAM voice] One cheese pizza, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, I like that a lot.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Then he was able to fill in the blanks. We had to choose three or four emphases, three or four modes...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Tones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Tones, yeah, emotions, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like excited, bummed.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's crazy.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I thought they were full samples too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, you get to hide it in the walkie-talkie.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Exactly. That's what it sounded like. It worked out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On F1, did you interact with Video System very frequently?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm way below all that stuff, but I can tell you some stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, please, please.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was just going to ask.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shoot-'em-ups, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think this was new to them too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way, really?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He went to all these places, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wish I had.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How do you get away with a company vacation that nice? That's my next question.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Aero Fighters Assault''. Oh my god, yeah, that was -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes considers that the worst game they ever worked on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's pretty rough.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Aero Fighters''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you involved in that one?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I don't think so.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Nope. Different developer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There were some rumors - actually, I was going to ask about it - that Video System -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It is. It's Video System.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this for ''Aero Fighters Assault'' or something?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, god forbid, no. Don't even put my name in the same sentence.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sorry. [laughs]'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, like a milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How long did they give you?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Plus -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Plus I'm hourly, so bring it on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, right, absolutely. Take that triple time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think he was producer on that, and director, I think.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They just wanted to push you guys?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Except Wes. Wes wasn't having an amazing time.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, really?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Like a sound ID list or something?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''He's literally seeing him every night.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, the freaking co-founder's waiting for you.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You already know where the conversation's going.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Before I could even say anything, Jason tried to blame me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes is behind him.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's in front of me. I saw blood, dude. I saw red.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Everybody's like, "Oh my god."'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''We had LaserDisc. Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As you're calming down.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Back then, hundreds of dollars was a lot more.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
I should probably put a light on here. Hold on, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's okay.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's so nice. The crickets are chirping.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I love the nature in the background.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can you hear it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I did for a second there. Mostly just seeing the tree in the background is nice.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Can we bring him in?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got his voicemail. [texting] He's like, "Can I call you later?" I'm like, "No, interview time."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hey, if he can't make it, no worries. I'm sure he'd be okay with meeting with me individually.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It'd be fun having him here, though.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I was going to say, then I can pit you guys against one another.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, we did, yes.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Marvin Gaye.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned a couple other ones.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Sly and the Family Stone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've never actually seen Taxi.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wes.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Hey, Ashley.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Hi, nice to meet you. Thanks so much for hopping on.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Check you out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're at an ourdoor plaza... Wow. Oh, I love it. Where are you?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm in Puerto Rico.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Beautiful. Gorgeous.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, it's gorgeous. Hey, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much for joining us.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What are we doing here?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Questions I can't answer, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''''Harrier 2000''?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''After that, I couldn't blame you.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They still owe me a lot of money.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez. Yeah, that you'll never get back. I don't think Video System is around anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't think so.<br />
<br />
No, I think that was around the same time they were going through financial troubles. Maybe that was it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about the fake milestone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh gosh, that was really crappy. The fake milestone.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes, yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: This is what happens when you lie in business.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Rude.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, just before that was even a thing.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Big purple ones.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Big purple ones. Now you can probably put about six of them in your phone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my gosh. What was it, like $20,000 licensing per computer, something like that?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, per seat for a site license, or per-seat license.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Eight years later, all that's outdated. I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, we worry about the sound engine last, we just kind of find a way to fit it in.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. Yeah, there was some audio in there too, I think. We'll do the sound first.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I got a guy. Got a guy.<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Really? No documentation?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You're dealing with assembly code, and there's no debugging system, there's no anything, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was there a developer support line? Could you call someone at Nintendo to be like -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No. We were the developers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. That's terrifying.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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..."<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. After a month, I'd be partying too.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We were just trying to see a polygon. One polygon. One triangle. Anything, to do something.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my gosh.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the name of that one? I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Makes sense.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. They were the ones that came to you with the idea for a flight simulator game in the first place?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. It was basically a reboot of the original ''Pilotwings''.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Wes, did your SDK get used by all the other companies that were building their games?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, that was all internal.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Everybody did their own SDK?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We didn't sell our technology.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The military's a whole different world when it comes to scale.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. That was cheap. We took out all the competition because we were like a third of their price.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. I'm just imagining a $100,000 seat license too.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, I don't even know if we actually gave it a name.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The system before that was AudioWorks and VisionWorks.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: VisionWorks turned into Vega, and Vega turned into - yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, it wasn't Fusion 64, was it?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was later. That was a commercial one, right?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That was the one we used to do the commercial stuff. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay. You were talking about the -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: In any case -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, continue, I'm sorry.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, no wonder they liked you so much.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. That was 120 hours a week of me sleeping under my desk.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh my god.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Smelling like - I'm starting to smell myself. That's not good.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would that have been running on an SGI Onyx or something?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh yeah. We had to have the - was it the Onyx, or wasn't it the smaller one after that?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The Indigo.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Indigo? I think it was the Onyx. I think it had to be back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Was it the SkyWriter?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would love to see a single screenshot of that egg with a mohawk. That sounds hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: ''Beetle Adventure''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love ''Beetle Adventure''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I just sent you the ''Egghead Shred'' link, by the way.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, perfect. Oh, look, yes, they're calling it an N64 game, which I wouldn't -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Which it definitely was not.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Okay, gotcha. Whoa. Oh my. Okay.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: 1993, maybe.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. We had the motion trackers on the hands, so you could kind of steer with -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. That's so fascinating. Those T-poses.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They actually had the motion trackers on them, and then you just stand in front.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, someone's preserved it. They've got it running. If you wanted to - ooh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That's got to be Aaron Hightower. Probably is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I'll have to look into that a little later. That's hilarious.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Nobody did that back then.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, they were in mono. Fortunately, mono.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. I guess - oh, sorry, go ahead - this is the 30th anniversary of ''Pilotwings''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, it is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. '96, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We're not that old.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no, no. Not at all. You guys are young forever.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You weren't even born when we wrote that game, were you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Fair enough.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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''.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I think so too.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The cars lining up on the road.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think the amount of technology we packed into that game at that time was incredible for what we had to use.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him about Jason Rice, and I told him about -<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, did you?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I did hear about that. Yeah, that good story.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: He actually blew out his eyeballs, he was screaming so loud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, he did. Yeah, he was like - oh, they can hear me from down the hall.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I'm still pissed. He had the audacity to try to blame me. What an idiot.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: What an idiot.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, that's rough. You've got to take responsibility for your actions.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Did you tell him about John Vitale and all the audio?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Some stupid amount of memory. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I told him we got Gordon, the producer of the studio, to be our vocal talent.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The Scottish guy?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, she did a double role.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: The key thing is -<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: She worked for Paradigm.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A hundred percent. "No, I'm just filtering it out for you."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Blow the engine.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, I bought a video game. I didn't buy a real-life F1 car driving experience.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does it actually do that in the final game?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, no. They decided that wasn't such a smart idea.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, they backed off really quick on that one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, the second year, like, "Okay, I'll make this other company do it and then you can deal with them."'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That sounds so fun, to be placing all that.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah. Wes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you have any cowboy hats? Oh, I already know the answer. You guys have one.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They did manage to total three cars.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Because they weren't used to driving in America?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Driving in general, I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gosh.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Remember we were supposed to meet them at the sushi restaurant?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, their favorite restaurant, Tokyo or whatever.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Where are they? Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Man.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I bet. Oh my god, all the pre-washed, pre-cooked rice we have.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes. This is coming from the Japanese grocery store.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the name of that flight simulator?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I think it was just called Magic Edge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay, it was just Magic Edge. Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the company that - I'm sorry, did that ever actually get put into Wonder Eggs, or was that just a proposal?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, good point.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wait, why were they stopping you from leaving?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Because we weren't done yet. We'd only been working for 16 hours.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, they were stopping you from leaving to go back to the hotel?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. Blocking the door?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''These were Namco guys?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Namco guys, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''They're probably just trying to be helpful.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They were trying to act like they were contributing something to the equation, I guess.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, true, true. Yeah, got to be useful.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I could just see them all going back to the boardroom and doing their reports, flipping through their English-to-Japanese dictionary.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. From 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "He's pulling his pickle."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh my god. In some official logbook somewhere from 1994, "jerking the gherkin."'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I don't really want to tell that story.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's my favorite thing you did to them. It's evil.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Is this a psychological test? Oh my god.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Oh, it was, yeah. That was probably the meanest thing we did to them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All in good fun, right? It's an amusement system, it's a ride, you're having fun.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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"?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no. You're dealing with Americans now. We're a meritocracy.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the lawsuit about, if you don't mind? If you're not able to tell, or if you need to speak generally -'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, I probably shouldn't be talking about that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. That's a good comparison.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. By like 1998, everyone's computers could do half of what SGI machines could anyway, and give it another 10 years.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh wow, I didn't know that. Thank you, I appreciate the insight there.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah. I probably should have invested in that company back when they started.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: ''Skies''?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't remember ''Skies'' either. What is that?<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: That might've been after we sold the company.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually, I think - Paradigm. ''Skies'' is an unreleased online - Michael Layne Turner, comics. No, maybe...'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I don't recognize that.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: No, we got halfway through a Dreamcast game and then they shut down the Dreamcast.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa, what game was that?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you know what staff member I would be able to ask more about that Dreamcast project?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Mike might remember that, yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha. Yeah, this would've been '99-ish. I'll ask Mike.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You do another interview with Mike and you've done three of the founders.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah, him or maybe Dave Gatchel.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dave Gatchel.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, Dave would know.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We actually had a development Dreamcast, and then they ended up shutting down the hardware before our game came out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, like 2001, I think. Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: You mean - were you over there? We did a French version, a German version, a Spanish version, and a Japanese version.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were those games - your N64 games - bug-tested by Mario Club in Japan, or did you have local Western bug testers?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No one's ever going to do that.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: "I just made five bucks, and now it's a bug."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: We couldn't do what they do now.<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Triaging.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dude, oh, I'm so glad you brought that up.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Do you remember this? It was the ice cave.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It was a mirror texture thing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, just a random texture. It just happened to look like Jesus. During development they actually saw that it looked like Jesus.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: They saw Jesus. Yeah, that was one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Baby Jesus.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm sorry, continue.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did they catch that right away, or did that take a little while?'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: It sounds very Hawaiian.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What do you remember about that one, if you don't mind me asking?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They brought in an American team that time. The guy that interfaced was an American. Do you remember him? Tall guy.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren?<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That sounds right. He had reddish hair, brownish-blond hair.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Darren was kind of like their handler when he was in America.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: The guy I dealt with told me he wanted the soundtrack to be modeled after - oh god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Guitars?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, yes and no. Who did "Ants Marching"?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"Teddy Bears' Picnic"? No.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, not that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You said "Ants Marching," I thought "Teddy Bears' Picnic."'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: '90s song. Huge '90s artist. He's from Australia or something.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Dave Matthews.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, right. You'll never get the '90s again. It really was a special time.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Right.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you treated your staff well.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: We hired good people. Yeah, they were all very talented except for one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very good talent. I got that story. Unless you're talking about Dan.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: All right, guys.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Wes. I appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Okay, Ashley, we'll see you.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Bye, bud.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, bud. What do you think of my hair? It's getting kind of crazy, isn't it?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I love it. It's freaking awesome, dude.'''<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: I'm going with everything. I'm chilling. I'm going with the Big Lebowski look.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Down there it rains randomly, so you never know, right?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes, yes. All right, guys, we'll talk to you soon.<br />
<br />
Wes Hoffman: Bye, thanks so much.<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Oh, that was great.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that was cool. Thank you so much for bringing him on.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: They do. More than music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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 -"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''My pilot school?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: All that stuff. I get hundreds of people telling me that. Literally crazy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's so freaking cool.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You're telling me he was a nice guy, right?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Super, and super shy. Then we beat Beyoncé. My band beat Beyoncé.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yeah, absolutely.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Whoa. Okay, I got the right one then.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''14 songs.'''<br />
<br />
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?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No way.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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 -'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A couple. You had a few. You had ''Spy Hunter'' and -'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You should ask Wes about ''Spy Hunter''. Oh my god.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, you did. [pulls out Dan's YouTube page] Is it ''Pilotwings 64'' Rocket Belt Demo? No...'''<br />
<br />
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 -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That funky little piece.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Every note.'''<br />
<br />
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."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The "Funky Little Fusion Thing," yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, absolutely. Right off the bat. Yeah, with the pianos and just that really funky bass.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Yes.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So powering, keeping the beat going. I like that picture of you too. That's a good one.'''<br />
<br />
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''.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I like it. That's a good photo. ''Spy Hunter'' on the PS2 - why didn't those tracks get used?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, maybe. I apologize, I should have had the original interview printed up next to me.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Wow. Good stuff.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Back in the day, my friend.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Okay, we appreciate it.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, okay. Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I said, "Dak, I'm thinking of doing it." He's like, "No way, let's do it." I reached out to -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're a legend.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's very cool.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's been years, and I haven't done it, so I'm going to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, that'll be huge. Shoot. When is MAGFest this year?'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The name is familiar. I don't know him personally.'''<br />
<br />
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?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What's his name? Ian?'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Ian Cowell, C-O-W-E-L-L. He does all remakes of video game music.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yeah, okay, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: He's a great guy. A ton of fun. He'd be good at it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Very cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Please. You'd make a lot of people happy that way.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: That's funny, man. That's crazy stuff. Really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You literally are a legend.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: It's nuts.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Thanks, man. Thank you, I appreciate that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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?'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It might still be on the Wayback Machine.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're part of this planet.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, there's no origami anymore.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: No, there's not. There's no more of this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Hey, you know what? Maybe with this interview, people start paying attention to the pit boss system more.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: I doubt it, but it's cool talking about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''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.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'll also lean on you for that for Mike and Dave. That'd be pretty cool.'''<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Dan. This was a lot of fun.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: Hey, whenever, whenever. All good. A pleasure, bud.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I really appreciate it.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: See you, man.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Have a good night.'''<br />
<br />
Dan Hess: You too.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=File:WesHoffman.png&diff=177357File:WesHoffman.png2026-10-11T22:11:05Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Category:Photos of people</p>
<hr />
<div>== Summary ==<br />
[[Category:Photos of people]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=File:DanHess.png&diff=177356File:DanHess.png2026-10-11T22:11:03Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Category:Photos of people</p>
<hr />
<div>== Summary ==<br />
[[Category:Photos of people]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Interview&diff=177354Template:Interview2026-10-11T21:58:48Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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|}{{#default_form:Interview}}</includeonly><includeonly>[[Category:Interviews]]</includeonly></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Interview&diff=177353Template:Interview2026-10-11T21:56:07Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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|}{{#default_form:Interview}}</includeonly><includeonly>[[Category:Interviews]]</includeonly></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Ryan_White_(2026-03-21_interview)&diff=177351Ryan White (2026-03-21 interview)2026-10-11T18:26:54Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=RyanWhite.png<br />
|name=Ryan "RWhiteGoose" White<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Speedrunning<br />
|date=2026-03-21<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Ryan. Good morning. Actually, is it morning for you?'''<br />
<br />
Ryan White: Good day. It's the afternoon, two o'clock.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's very cool to be speaking with you, popping up on the other end of my screen here.'''<br />
<br />
Nice to speak with you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As well. It's very cool. Sorry, I don't have words.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, no worries, man. Look, I've been around online for a long time. I know exactly the feeling, so it's all good. We're just two nerds hanging out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. I talk to a lot of people who are my heroes, including yourself, and I never quite get over the celebrity feel of, "Oh my god, I'm talking to someone who's a celebrity, or someone that I really look up to." It still happens after all these years.'''<br />
<br />
It is funny. Maybe we'll get into it in the conversation, but the first time I felt it was chatting with the big Boss man in 2005. As it turns out, he's this very shy, meek, quite autistic nerd. To have that nervous feel and then, in hindsight, realize, oh, he's almost like our little brother nowadays, in terms of how we towed him around the community and built up his confidence. You realize later that maybe it was kind of funny or silly to have that feeling in that moment. Yeah, there you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. I never quite let that go, because I think, at least with what I do, having a little bit of fanboyism is important because it shows you're excited. I'm calling it fanboyism, but there are deeper words for that. I think being excited for what you do, just being passionate, is at the core of all of this. I'll be as professional as I can, but I'll never stop being passionate about it.'''<br />
<br />
That is a good way to put it, and we'll probably get into something like that as well in our conversation. You're right.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I assume you've probably had a lot of people reaching out to you asking about speedrunning questions and GoldenEye questions. Obviously I'm going to touch on quite a lot of those, but I really wanted to focus on Gamer Folklore because I'm very impressed with what you've done with it. As I mentioned in our email, there was just something about the cicadas specifically: that kind of ephemeral quality, all of the memories that are alongside the main memories that make those bigger moments more important.'''<br />
<br />
'''I love the transitions you have with the power lines against the sunset, just all of these little things. As I said in my email, that is such a difficult memory to grasp visually, and it's difficult to communicate. Man, you nailed it, and you nailed it so effortlessly. It was natural to you. I'm just going to keep gushing here, but I was super impressed with that.'''<br />
<br />
Awesome. That's cool to hear. I appreciate hearing those thoughts about the cicada transitions and whatnot. What's funny is I never really watched anime, which is where all that stuff is from. Certainly in this sphere, the online gaming sphere, a lot of people you associate with, your friends, do. Sometime during COVID, a couple of my buddies begged me to watch Evangelion. I watched the main season and one or two of the movies.<br />
<br />
I forget when the first time I used that cicadas and power lines transition was, but it would've been sometime around then. I was doing it as a half-hearted joke reference. I don't know anime too well, but I know that's sort of a classic transition there. I just put it in, and it really hit home for a lot of people, which is cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. I'm surprised to hear it's an anime thing. Maybe not entirely, because I'd imagine that kind of stuff also comes from you drawing on your own personal memories.'''<br />
<br />
That's it too. I have many vivid memories of sitting in the backyard. I grew up in a residential area in a big city. When I was a kid, I didn't know what those cicada sounds were in the summer. I thought, is it the electricity pulsing through the wires? That's where you get that association between the cicadas and the power lines. As it turns out, it was cicadas.<br />
<br />
I don't know, there's just something about this whole idea of continuing to play these old games, whether competitively or just out of trying to find more enjoyment from them, and connecting that with younger, brighter days. Certainly those summer days with cicadas in backyards are some of those days. We get into other elements too, like the sound of the mourning dove, which is a pretty well-known nostalgic sound from back in the day, or even old fast food restaurants. Just the nostalgic vibes that I think a lot of people connect to more than ever these days.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I definitely agree. I think nostalgia is the strongest way to get people to pay attention, especially in this space, but it also makes it personal. That was another thing I liked about your work, especially with Gamer Folklore: you never forget the human element. That's important, obviously, because we're all human, but I think putting in those little things makes it more meaningful. I was always very impressed with how well you were able to hit on the actual history, the objective facts and what you need to say, but also the way that you do that and wrap it all up. I've always been impressed with your production.'''<br />
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'''Having Princess Peach in place of the MGM lion is such a perfect little fun thing. Man, I hope you never stop doing all those fun little transitions and sound effects. After you say something notable, you're like, "Bam, sound effect," and it's something from an N64 game. You use a lot of Wind Waker sound effects, Mario Kart 64, Ocarina of Time. Man, I'm going to get to a point where I don't have anything else to say other than gushing, but it's very impressive.'''<br />
<br />
I appreciate it. A lot of it is borrowed or inspired stuff. The Peach in place of the movie studio logo actually came from a guy who goes by Sweetner now. He was the main editor of what we called the Kapap Trilogy, which was the first set of hoarding videos in the Elite. At the start, three guys got together, set a bunch of golden icons, saved them for a few months, and then made almost like a feature movie revealing them all.<br />
<br />
It really took on a life of its own and got to a point where hoarding, playing secretly and then posting your times later, kind of became the standard in the community. That certainly has its drawbacks and detriments, but the first three were really cool, and that's what inspired so many people to do it. Sweetner was the guy who first did the Peach in place of the movie studio intro. I took inspiration from that, made my own version, and ran from there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think it worked out really well for you. Just to actually get started here, because I'll definitely just gossip my way halfway through this interview: could you tell us a bit about your background growing up in Toronto?'''<br />
<br />
About my background growing up? Yeah, okay, sure. I would say I had a pretty normal upbringing. I was fortunate to have a stable home and a loving family. Growing up in the '90s, at some point I got video games as a gift here and there. My first console was actually the Sega Genesis, believe it or not, which a lot of people don't know, and my first really big game to dive into was Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I played a lot of that when I was five, six years old, and then I got the N64.<br />
<br />
Mostly what occupied my time as a kid was hockey. I played single-A hockey, which is the third highest level from the top when you're a young lad. I wasn't up there up there, but it was still a serious and competitive mode of hockey. From five to 13, and really until 17 through high school, most of my time was spent going to school, playing hockey, which would be three or four times a week in the winter and fall, and then video games. That was mostly my life, and video games were there, I guess, to keep me quiet and in the house.<br />
<br />
I can almost envision the arcs of my childhood playing various games at various points. Like I say, I started with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. When I got an N64, my first game was actually NHL 99, hearkening to the hockey. I grinded that. I remember doing crazy challenges, like playing as Canada against Poland on super easy and trying to see how many goals I could get, winning 60-nothing in a 60-minute game. I guess doing these challenges and seeing where I could push games was always a big part of growing up.<br />
<br />
In the summertime I would play a lot of video games as well. I had a cousin who I played with, and he was not very skilled, so it often was just me showing him how to beat a game or whatever. I didn't have brothers, so I didn't have anyone to play Smash Bros. With, and that's why that game is a big black hole of knowledge for me. I really don't know much about Smash at all. It was a lot of single-player stuff, just filling the time between school and hockey.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You said you were already making your own challenges with your first N64 game. To push back even farther, do you know where the idea came from of you sitting down and going, "Okay, I'm going to make my own challenges in this game, I'm going to take it to the next level"? Do you know where that part of yourself came from, the want to challenge something?'''<br />
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The want to challenge myself in video games specifically?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, specifically when it comes to video games.'''<br />
<br />
I do remember specifically playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles and seeing that there's a timer on screen, which is not uncommon for games, but not every game has one. Even at five or six years old, the thought was, okay, there's a timer, therefore beating it more quickly is good. That association, which is really what speedrunning is, was just natural to me. Maybe it's the luck of the draw on what game I had, or the way my brain is wired: okay, this makes sense, beat the game quickly. In Sonic 3, you even get more points for beating the level quickly, to a certain point. What's the highest score? How fast can I go?<br />
<br />
I also remember being seven years old and watching the '96 Atlanta Olympics. I have a vivid memory of watching the men's 100-meter dash in my grandmother's house, which she had my whole life, from the '70s, well before I was born, up until only a couple of years ago after she passed. This is a house that was in my life for 30-plus years. I vividly remember watching the 100-meter dash and watching Donovan Bailey win for Canada.<br />
<br />
I do love the Olympics and sports. Sports are an interesting thing. Especially when you look at people who succeed at sports, obviously there's a ton of work that gets put into it, but there's a large element of luck: being in the right place at the right time to be given the resources, to be pushed in a certain direction. When you're 14 or 15 years old, you can't conjure money and find the discipline and time to go to the arena and train or go to the golf course or whatever. You have to be along for someone else's ride to a large extent.<br />
<br />
Sports are kind of like that. I played hockey and that's what I did, and I loved it. I had a great career. In terms of finding an element where I could push myself and do something interesting, a challenge, video games were right there. That inspired me to go that direction.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. Almost like a natural athlete's desire, but video games, especially speedrunning, don't quite have the same barrier to entry. I don't think the investment of having to know someone and having all these resources is quite there. It obviously is to some degree, but with video games and speedrunning, you can start on your own, by yourself in your living room or bedroom, which is why I think this is so special. Obviously all massive sports journeys start from a very intimate, personal place, but that's part of why I like video games: because they are so intimate and personal.'''<br />
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'''Most of the time you're playing them by yourself. A lot of times you'll play multiplayer, but most of my experiences with video games were very personal, by-myself experiences. To be able to take that from an intimate bedroom experience to, okay, now I'm an athlete and I'm doing this professionally, especially in the span that you did - actually, I'm getting a little ahead of myself, so let me hop to GoldenEye here. GoldenEye came out in '97. Do you remember when you were first exposed to GoldenEye as a child?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it is a bit of a funny thing. Certainly when I was younger I was a bit more of a contrarian. When all my friends were playing GoldenEye and Ocarina of Time, I remember specifically being like, oh, I don't want to play those. I have no interest, whatever. You guys think you're cool and so on. It actually took me a few years to get into those games. I do remember getting GoldenEye about a year later, I believe in 1998. I was in Michigan on a family trip and we got it from a Target there, I think in about May '98 or so. About a year after it came out, I started playing it.<br />
<br />
Of course, this is also around the dawn of the World Wide Web. My dad had a decent job in a typical downtown office, and every now and then I would go in with him. When I did, I would browse the internet, and naturally I would browse for video game codes and cheat sheets and stuff. I'm there at nine, ten years old in a formal office setting, looking up GoldenEye on some office computer in the early internet. That's kind of funny, but it's how I learned about various strategies that were new in that day, as well as the early version of the Elite speedrun community for GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.<br />
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I always had it in the back of my mind: okay, there are these guys out there who speedrun, isn't that kind of interesting? At the time I'm 10, 11 years old, so I didn't get involved yet, but I certainly remembered that this was a thing that existed, and at some point the inspiration struck to revisit it a few years later.<br />
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<br />
'''Can you recall when you first started taking GoldenEye speedrunning seriously? When you transitioned from playing it casually, and that interest first built up to where you're like, okay, now I'm going to start hitting for times?'''<br />
<br />
It's kind of a funny thing. I'll preface this by saying that when I was, say, 13, 14, 15 years old, I remember playing Mario Golf and feeling like I was wasting my time. You're 13, you're 14, you're thinking, "Man, I'm still playing video games. This isn't cool." All my friends are out there being cool and going to parties and dating and that kind of thing, and I'm here playing video games. You feel a certain way about that. At some point I realized, okay, if I'm going to play video games, I should try to make the most out of it one way or another. That thought sat with me: this is a waste of time unless I'm doing something with it.<br />
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I do vividly remember it was Canada Day 2005, July 1st. I was 15, not quite 16 years old. My cousin came over, and as a summer throwback we put on the N64 and played some GoldenEye. That was the point, in July 2005, when I realized, okay, we're in 2005, we're two generations removed from the N64. If I'm going to start playing GoldenEye again, of all things, then I'm going to look up the speedrun community, join, and try to do something. That's exactly what happened. By September 2005, I was on the rankings and starting to grind and play for records.<br />
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<br />
'''That's crazy. Would you have ever imagined yourself getting on the records so quickly after joining?'''<br />
<br />
Not really, but I think everyone has that journey now. We've seen it play out so many times in the GoldenEye speedrunning community, where people get inspired to play one way or another, join the ranks, and see their name on the cool website. The website is like no other. I think that is a large appeal of it; it is the best ranking system around. You see your name up there and you think, okay, well, I can improve this and that. Oh, maybe I can get this first, easier world record. As it turns out, some of them are not that difficult to get early on. Every era has its easy world records.<br />
<br />
In October I had achieved my first tied world records, Runway Secret Agent 23 and Depot Agent 26, which were ones that dozens of players had achieved by that point. Did I think I would get them that quickly? Probably not, but one thing leads to another and you just keep rolling with it.<br />
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<br />
'''When you first started, what kind of reference was there for strategy? This was so back in the day. How did you learn at the very beginning? How did you first get started when it comes to strategy and technique?'''<br />
<br />
It was super early. YouTube had just been invented and there were barely any videos on it, because there were fewer people online, and people didn't even know that YouTube would stick around. The main GoldenEye videos that I watched were hosted on Speed Demos Archive, and they're actually still there to this very day, which is cool. I think every two or three years, someone from the GoldenEye community who was friends with the guys at Speed Demos Archive was like, "Hey, here's an updated list of all the world records. Here are the videos, you can host them."<br />
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There were a bunch of runs on that website, particularly the Aztec runs of Wouter Jansen, the Dutch legend, with Aztec 00 Agent 1:56. Unbelievable record to see back in that day. I'm reminded of the joke, oh, this phrase would do harm to a Victorian child. That run, Aztec 00 Agent 1:56, to a young Goose just does something. It was truly shocking. With these runs you could at least see the routes, you could see what the world record or close to it was, you could see where to strafe, where to look down.<br />
<br />
Then of course on the GoldenEye Elite forums, there was some conversation about strategies and techniques and people posting about their adventures to improve their times. It was almost like a rite of passage back then to read the entire history of the forums, which, as someone who's hanging out on the internet, why not? You spend weeks doing so and catching up, and you learn the ins and outs of what people experienced and how they improved their times.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What were the early forums like from the very beginning?'''<br />
<br />
That's something that I've pondered doing a deep dive on every now and then. It is fascinating, because you can get these glimpses of the early forums where there are posts from the day of September 11, 2001, and what the actual live reaction of a bunch of gamer teenagers was on that day, for example, and posts about new consoles coming out and expectations and anticipation for that. You just get a very raw, unfiltered view of what a bunch of guys who were, say, 15 to 23 years old were talking about on the internet back then.<br />
<br />
Obviously communication moved way more slowly back then. A lot of people had dial-up internet. You could make a few posts a day, so every message was a lot more meaningful, and a lot of them are still there. There's actually a bit of Elite forum lore where a bunch of posts from 2003 and 2004 are missing, because it was on a platform called ezboard and then it got transitioned to one called Yuku. During that transition, about two years of forum posts mostly got lost. You almost get into the lost media of forum posts, let alone movies and videos and so on. A lot of stuff has survived from 2001 on.<br />
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It's just a bunch of dudes hanging out on the internet, which is in a way not too different from today. Back then it was just so much more intentful and meaningful because of the slow nature of the internet.<br />
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'''Right, right. I love that: because the internet was slower, everything was more meaningful. We were talking about YouTube, and the Elite and the GoldenEye community starting to upload videos. That's actually something you've talked about on the record quite a lot: the difficulties and unique challenges of trying to upload a video in that 2005 era. All the mailing around of VHS tapes, having them sit at someone's house, or whoever was super shy and couldn't walk down to the mailbox to drop off his tapes. It's incredible that we have so much material from that time, considering all the difficulties that people had to go through to get it there.'''<br />
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Very much so. At the same time, there are a lot of missing pieces where you just wonder, what if? I guess that's no different than history. You imagine, what if we had footage of this battle from 200 years ago or whatever. To your point, with my early videos, we had a family digital camera with maybe a four-megabyte memory card. I could record either one-minute videos in a bit of a higher quality or four-minute videos in worse quality, no sound. I'm 16 years old, I have no idea how to do it, so a lot of them are kind of freehand, a bit shaky, and just remarkable stuff.<br />
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There was a time, in the early Twitch era, when I was a bit more of a stickler on the quality of capturing your runs. Looking back now, there's certainly an affection for the true early era of this. Any remaining artifact of these runs is amazing to see.<br />
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<br />
'''Right. I think artifact is the proper term, because as history goes on - this is like the Indiana Jones thing. If I bury something in the desert, it doesn't make it an artifact, but if I wait 200 years and take it back up, it's suddenly valuable and worth something. I think as time goes on, having those kinds of files and those kinds of artifacts - so much of history is archeology. You're given four or five little broken pot shards and you can kind of see the curve on them, and you're like, okay, well, we can tell that they made a vase. We can tell that it was probably shaped like that, but we only have four or five pieces, so we just have to fill in the shape of it with guesses.'''<br />
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'''That's why I think oral history is so important. Oral history is giving us so many more pieces of that vase, especially in the video game community. Just to speak on my side: so many people will think of history as ROMs and prototypes, something you can download, something digital and tangible. No, the oral history is so much more important, because I guarantee you the ROM will not be there. I guarantee you the floppy disk will not be there. That got thrown out 20, 30 years ago, but the memory in people's heads never goes away.'''<br />
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'''That's why I think it's so important that you're doing all this, because god, someone needs to write it down, and you're really the first person who's attempted to do that in any kind of popular format. I'm sure you're not the only one to document the history of speedrunning or GoldenEye speedrunning or the community or the Elite or all those things, but there's the way that you do it, in a format that's easily digestible and entertaining and fun. Also, personally, I feel you're just a great communicator of history. I think that is so dang important. I'm getting a little off topic here, but some of the stuff that we still have from back in the day is incredible, considering all the circumstances that had to be in place to get it there.'''<br />
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Two quick things to that point. One: you talk about the builds of games and the ROMs and whatnot. Something that comes to my mind in GoldenEye is that when the developers were making the game and wanted to put in the All Bonds mode, and eventually withdrew that because they anticipated perhaps copyright or likeness issues -<br />
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<br />
'''Licensing, yeah.'''<br />
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They played a first-to-100 deathmatch using all four Bond characters. Neither the first-to-100 option nor All Bonds mode is in the game, and presumably that ROM was never saved. No one can play that except those four developers on that day, and yet we have the oral story of them doing it. That's really, really cool, because you can very much imagine what it would be like in their office in the countryside at Rare, playing that match that day. It's very remarkable. As the story goes, it was like 99 to the third and fourth guy, so it came down to the last kill, which is unbelievable. [Note: source reads "1999 to the third and fourth guy"; interpretation unclear.] That's one thing that's truly amazing. I had a second piece, but I'm sure I'll cycle back to it later.<br />
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<br />
'''For sure. Just to hop forward a little bit here: you had an interview with Dr. Doak. He reached out to you, I believe, is that correct?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, this was 2017, in the early days, just when I was starting SpeedLore and catching a lot of people's attention. He reached out, and eventually we connected, and I was able to pick his brain on a lot of things about the game. Two things that I particularly wanted to talk to him about, to see if they could be broken for speedrunning purposes, were the nature of out-of-bounds clips and the nature of Natalya's timer on Control.<br />
<br />
As it appears, Natalya on Control sounds like it will probably never be broken. She has to hack away at the computer terminal for about two and a half minutes, and the game literally asks, "Have two and a half minutes elapsed, yes or no?" There's no way to speed that up. If there was, we could save six minutes of total time on Control. That's always kind of been this holy grail in GoldenEye. The other thing is out-of-bounds clips. It sounds from that conversation that out-of-bounds clips are rare in GoldenEye. They are possible, but you would have to find a way to clip back in-bounds, which is this ultimate... We're getting into a fourth, fifth dimension kind of tier, just so far-off, insane things that will probably never happen.<br />
<br />
That was cool. In the past year or so, I've been trying to revisit some of my old content that didn't make it as public as perhaps it should. That was one interview. The audio was really bad when I first recorded it, since again, I was kind of new to all this, and I had a guy remaster it, then I put it aside on SoundCloud. I just figured I would post it on YouTube to a wider audience a few months ago. It's cool. Part of the archeology is not only finding an artifact buried, but where can you display it and share it with people so they can learn from it too?<br />
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'''Right, right. I'm very happy that you shared that on YouTube, because it's going to get so much more of an audience that way. The whole point of communicating history is to actually communicate it. I think you made the right choice there. I'm very surprised that he reached out to you personally. As someone who interviews people, that's a rare and flattering thing.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. 2017 in speedrunning content was really this kind of crazy era. The Twitch boom came about in late 2012, 2013, and got a lot of people interested in speedrunning. We had these streams with hundreds or thousands of viewers of people speedrunning games for the first time, giving exposure to all this. The GDQ marathons took place in this era as well. People were pumped and excited and it got a huge audience. At the same time, a lot of people didn't really know what they were watching. People would ask why this was great: "Oh, Streets Agent 1:12, amazing," but they didn't know what made it amazing. I felt called to explain what goes into it and why it's cool.<br />
<br />
At the same time, I know there were guys like Summoning Salt and Bismuth and the late ApolloLegend and a couple others. Early 2017 is when we all started doing that. I guess it was so new and novel at that time that a lot of the developers took notice. It was almost the first time, maybe, that something they had put so much life, energy, and passion into was being delved into by someone else who also had passion, but from a different angle.<br />
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<br />
'''Right, I can definitely see that. You'd be surprised how many developers and former staff are so excited, and have so much energy and things to say about their old projects, and just never get a chance. I'm very surprised that he reached out to you personally. Would you ever be interested in doing further GoldenEye interviews with additional staff?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, certainly. There's an endless amount of questions and things to ponder, and different people remember different things. It would be amazing to chat with anyone else about the game. Certainly the Rare games and N64 games are my bread and butter. Anyone like that, it would be amazing to talk to.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When you interviewed Dr. Doak, did you have questions prepared, or were you doing that off the cuff?'''<br />
<br />
I had a few questions, particularly about the out-of-bounds, the Control skip, and a few other things. I did send them to him beforehand, and I think he messaged one or two of the other developers to ask if they remembered anything about those elements.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, wow. You should see if you could reach out to some other developers. I could absolutely see Gamer Folklore having an interview format, once a month, or more realistically every few months with the work that you need to put in. You have a platform for it. With Dr. Doak, you can go to him and be like, "Hey, those other developers that you were talking to, are they interested in coming on the show and speaking for an hour or so?" I think that would be super cool.'''<br />
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'''It's also another thing that I personally deal with in my own work: having to speak about something I'm very passionate about, but always doing so from a secondary source. Being able to speak to the person who actually did that thing and move that source from secondary to primary, especially someone with your perspective and your audience, I think that would be super cool.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. One thing you find out talking with developers, and I've seen it a few times on other platforms when a developer calls into a marathon setting, is that oftentimes the speedrunners actually end up knowing more than the developers, or at least equivalent information from a different angle. There's this interesting song and dance: oh, the speedrunners discovered this bug, something that maybe the developers are a bit ashamed of at first, and the developers are like, okay, this is probably why that happened. That's always cool to see.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. Oh, we didn't set our surface collision quite properly enough, and now they've been exploiting it. God, I don't remember what GDQ it was, but it was Blast Corps on the N64, and they had one of the developers from Rare hop in and comment on the entire run. That was a blast.'''<br />
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'''When you said that, I think of... I want to say they had an EarthBound speedrun where they had some of the original developers, like Shigesato Itoi, watching, and it was very cool. I remember the speedrunner saying something like, "God, this game is so broken." To them, they meant we know a lot of exploits and we can do a lot of things with that game. You go to a Japanese developer and you say, "Hey, that game that you love, that you put so much work into, it's broken." I was just like, oh, oh no, no, no. You could see the developers trying to argue against it, like, "Oh, well, we didn't know it was broken at the time." I'm like, guys... I'm getting off topic here, but man, it was hard to watch.'''<br />
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Right. It gets into the tact of these discussions. It doesn't come from a place of any ill will. It just comes from different perspectives.<br />
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<br />
'''Right. There's a language barrier there and all that stuff. Realistically, that's not the responsibility of the speedrunners to navigate. There should have been a host who said something, or maybe someone who goes to the speedrunners in advance and says, "Hey, listen, you're dealing with a language barrier here. Maybe don't call the game broken. Say that the community has learned lots of exploits and has a lot of techniques that we can apply." I don't want to sound like I'm poo-pooing anyone there.'''<br />
<br />
You touched on another interesting point when it comes to communication about these things: not everyone has it in them to communicate in that kind of clear and tactful way. Certainly when I was first making videos about speed and history, I realized that a lot of it was just translating stuff that had been poorly communicated over the years into a more palatable way.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. Communication in history is a big problem, which is why I like your channel so much. When you focus on the human side, it's a lot easier. Because we're all human, it's easier to fall into a polite and natural tone of speech. You don't really run into that problem as much when you're speaking about it, especially speaking as someone who actually knows the stuff. I also like that you know most of the people you're speaking about, either personally or on some intimate level. They're not just some guy you looked up on Wikipedia. This whole interview is just going to be me praising you for stuff, but I love that you do that.'''<br />
<br />
That's true. I always try to keep my stories more like that. Look, there's always the latest internet drama and some crazy scandal in speedrunning, and I've never tried to chase those too much. I did earlier in my career when I was trying to get my footing, but then I realized, okay, I have no unique perspective to offer on this story. Anyone could replace what I have to say about it, so it's much less meaningful. I would much rather tell stories where I have a unique insight, or at least a platform from which to speak more authoritatively.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah, definitely. Also, just from a giving-back-to-the-community perspective, you put in so much work. There aren't really a lot of people doing oral history stuff, and there aren't people looking at the human side. So much gaming history is limited to the digital domain: the Sonic 2 Simon Wai prototype and Hidden Palace Zone and all the digital stuff. All the oral history stuff, all the more human memories, get shoved to the side. That sucks, because there's only so many bits in a prototype ROM. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here.'''<br />
<br />
It's okay. What do these bits represent on the human level? One thing I love talking about lately, and I mean in a handful of videos like this, is the unique childhood memories as they pertain to these games. One example that jumps to mind is this guy who couldn't beat Wizpig in Diddy Kong Racing. He played dozens and dozens of times in that race, and then finally Wizpig fell off the track and got stuck, and he could beat him. As far as I know, that's never been replicated, but what is there in the bits of the game that shows it could happen? If you know about the game and you know about Wizpig's model and stuff, it makes enough sense.<br />
<br />
It's like, what happened on that day to that person to experience that? Can we revisit that memory? Does it matter? What does it represent? I just think that part of it is so cool: these things that are rare, but sort of weirdly shared memories between a very small handful of people.<br />
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<br />
'''Definitely. It seems like as time goes on, that shared group of people, especially for the N64 in particular, gets smaller and smaller. Do you ever get that feeling that your audience is shrinking, or that you need to do more to retain the audience you have?'''<br />
<br />
To some extent, but at the same time, I know a lot of the guys who watch my content are guys my age and older, and life just gets busier. I certainly experience that too. At the same time, I like to put stuff out there so it's there and can be referenced later. Look, no one is still alive that remembers the French Revolution or Roman times, and yet we still find that history intriguing and compelling. With World War II, we're getting to a point where very few people are still alive from that, but that history is still important. Is the history of speedrunning equally important to these things? Of course not. In a weird way, I'm fortunate that I can do it for the sake of doing it to a large extent, and whatever comes from that is whatever comes from that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it's a good way of looking at it. You were from about 2005 to maybe 2012 - let's start at 2012. You returned to the game, and I think a large part of that was Twitch happening. How did you feel Twitch changed the landscape of speedrunning, as someone who had been there to experience it without Twitch?'''<br />
<br />
Twitch changed it immensely. At the same time, I also wonder how much of it was just improved internet speeds and people being more online, but they all go hand in hand. You can't have a live stream platform like Twitch without people being online more and better internet speeds. It just completely gave a newer, wider audience to speedrunning. The biggest stream at this time was Siglemic doing 120 stars in Super Mario 64. That's a very palatable, easy speedrun to follow, because a lot of people have played this game. You collect all 120 stars; very simple to follow.<br />
<br />
I thought, how do I translate something like that into the GoldenEye realm? It doesn't translate as well, but beat the game as fast as possible, sure. Beat it on Agent difficulty from Dam to Cradle; let's say it takes about 20 minutes. Then I coined the 100% category: beat it on 00 Agent and get all the cheats. That doesn't flow very well either, because you have to go back and play levels for the target times. One or two guys had done that before in the community, but literally only one or two guys.<br />
<br />
Especially at that time, SpeedRunsLive was another website that served as a main community hub, in a way we don't really see anymore. Things get so fragmented these days. There are so many different groups and people who stay disparate. For anyone who speedran on Twitch, SpeedRunsLive was the hub. If your favorite streamer wasn't live, you would go there and find someone streaming a game you liked and watch that stream and hang out. It became this perpetual hub, certainly for one or two years, maybe more, where everyone was connected in it together. That's just not something we see on the internet these days anymore.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No, no. Community is important, especially with the Elite. Do you feel the Elite was one of the earliest, more tightly knit game communities that's still around?'''<br />
<br />
Absolutely. I know there are a handful. The Mario Kart guys have a really tight community for Mario Kart 64, and all the other Mario Karts flow from there. There are a handful of others. Especially to have a stable website, a stable forum, to have this kind of community hub and have these characters, your few main cast characters and supporting cast who weave in and out of the community at various times, you can weave together this overarching story of what happened there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I like the term cast, because I think, especially through your videos, a cast and a family would be a good way of describing the GoldenEye speedrunning community. I thank you for showing the human side and the familial side of the community.'''<br />
<br />
I appreciate that. It's just like a large town or community. Who are all the people? What are they like? You get into these endless interpretations of life. At the end of the day, it just is life in a microcosm. What does it all mean? Why are we here? What are we doing? These are the same questions we ask about life, and that's what it comes down to.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. The Elite is also interesting in that it's caused you a lot of personal stress and drama, but I'm sure it's also been there for you for a lot of your own trying times.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. Believe me, there are many nights where I ponder, what if none of this happened? What if I went on and just lived a normal life and never got involved in any of this gaming stuff?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ryan, the attorney.'''<br />
<br />
Right. Who knows? At the same time, you wonder about life and destiny, as silly as that sounds, because at the end of the day we're talking about video game history online. There's nothing like it online. Well, there's probably things like it, but they're getting further and further between in the modern age. That's something I wonder about my work too: can I make some kind of community that fills that void that is missing from the modern era? How do we go about all that?<br />
<br />
Look, I had something like over 20,000 forum posts on the Elite, and in the various chat rooms over the years, I'm sure hundreds of thousands of lines of text. What does all that history mean? There are others who have had contributions of that size. Obviously you live your great moments, great successes of achieving world records or whatever, but also not-as-great moments where you got in a spat with somebody, or you spilled your guts in a way you look back on and think you shouldn't have. Two hundred years from now, if it's preserved, I think that's almost an important part of the greater good: to be able to look back and see what life was like in this era, sort of at the dawn of the internet.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, definitely. It's also going to be funny in 200 years, when we're both gone, what's preserved of us. If you look at what's preserved from an ancient civilization, ancient Egypt or Sumer or something, none of it's really community drama. You're working on cuneiform tablets or whatever. You have to write about the taxes and the grain. You don't have time to talk about how so-and-so was upset by whatever.'''<br />
<br />
'''Now, so much of what's preserved of us is forum posts and messages and all this online digital record, and so much of that is going to be, unfortunately, drama. It makes me think about the presence that I'm leaving behind. If someone looks back on me and tries to chronicle Ashley in 200 or 500 years, are they going to see mostly drama? Are they going to see mostly other work? It's something I think about a lot.'''<br />
<br />
Me as well. That's certainly why, especially in the last handful of years, probably almost a decade now - I guess you grow up to a large extent, and it's like, okay, let's try to put goodness out there rather than getting involved in all this drama and flame wars and stuff. Although I say that, and then it's like, you read the thread about what is the ultimate truth, and these flame wars between Marc Rützou and Karl Jobst. Man, there's a reason why drama and gossip have prevailed in human history. It has an appeal that does something to us on some level. I try generally to put out goodness and reason in recent times, and I hope to mostly do that for the rest of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You were always a fairly stable member of the Elite, relatively. You did have your rambunctious stuff, but for the most part there were definitely bigger, hotter personalities. You've seen those personalities at their youngest and most volatile, causing all this drama, and now you're still talking with those people, or you've seen them grow up and now they're adults. I don't really have much of a question here, but I just think it's very fascinating to know someone who was crazy in the community and now they're a father or something.'''<br />
<br />
Sure. I suppose in grand terms, if you grew up in a small town or a middle-sized town, you might have these memories of someone in high school who was absolutely crazy, and now they're a responsible father and member of the community. I guess it's not that different from the real world, and there's some element of respect to leave a bit of the past in the past.<br />
<br />
A good example is I met TrueFaith Clemens once in my life, in 2017. We went to see the solar eclipse of 2017 in Kansas City. This is a guy who I'd had many flame wars with over the years. We competed in GoldenEye, where he usually got the better of me, with many intense discussions and trolling and so on. When we met in the Kansas City airport, we just shook hands and agreed: look, the past is in the past. It's all good. We hung out and had a great time together for those few days. I think that's what it's all about. There is that element of respect that I hope most people still have these days.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. Being there in person, it's a lot easier to understand the human element, that the other person is actually a human being. Without that experience, they're text on a screen. You lose everything. Obviously I don't need to tell you this, but being able to see someone in person does so much, which is why I'm a big fan of video calls like we're doing now.'''<br />
<br />
I agree. It's not even just that they're text on a screen; they're almost like a reflection of your world at that time. It's almost like a sparring partner. It's almost like finding Dark Link in the Water Temple. These other people are just text avatars, and you might be in a dark place or a lonely place, in a basement on your computer in the year 2009 or whatever. Everyone is just kind of looking for a punching bag, or whatever the case may be, and it can lead to not-amazing places. Getting out there and meeting people and interfacing with people does make a positive difference.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. With your YouTube channel, you've had it since 2006, but you were mainly using it to host a few GoldenEye videos. Then I think you had a technique video, and I can naturally see the progression to you hopping on your mic and starting to narrate. Was there a conscious decision in switching to a more documentary style of content?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of things happened there. Being someone who's online, I've been active on a lot of websites here and there. When social media comes out, you make an account and see what it's all about. I had YouTube since back then and posted mostly raw speedruns, to share with the community or post them as video proof.<br />
<br />
Then a couple of things happened around 2014, 2015. One is that at that point in my life, in my mid-twenties, I went back to school, to college, to do a broadcasting program. In a lot of ways it was, okay, I'm streaming on Twitch and making content, but it was a more official way to appease your parents to a large extent. I actually did get a lot out of going back to school for a two-year diploma. I learned the Adobe software suite, which Adobe kindly gives out to college students to get them hooked for life, and I learned about content making and editing, just the basics.<br />
<br />
Then at AGDQ 2015, and I talked about this in a video not too long ago, I met a fellow who went by Ari2929, and we engaged in that whole International Track & Field 2000 arc where he set a world record in the back room of the GDQ. Ari had a monetized channel on YouTube back then. He was doing montage compilations, Call of Duty snipe montages. He showed me the ways: this is what you do. That added another element of how I can do this at a more professional level, or at least at some kind of revenue-earning level, which certainly helps. That meeting, and then going to school for it, is sort of what really ramped me up to start producing on a more serious documentary-historian level.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was SpeedLore your first attempt at a show or a format? What did the process of creating the first content on your channel look like?'''<br />
<br />
Two other main pieces of content come to mind before even SpeedLore, probably from about 2015. I did one video, kind of a pre-SpeedLore pilot, about Streets Agent 1:12. Lockwood gets Streets 1:12, an amazing video, and a reaction comes of it, but people don't really know what's going on. So I did a video explaining that level.<br />
<br />
Then, also in 2015, I think it was September or so, one night online people were discussing who is Cowan Haines, who is Dark Light 93. I did an impromptu fireside recording sharing what I knew about that character: someone who made a hundreds-of-pages-long fake speedrun wiki article detailing this fantasy career about getting hundreds of world championships in various games. I went over that. Those were my two kind of impromptu pieces of content that just took off.<br />
<br />
Then in early 2017 I decided, let's have a go at this. Owing to the Streets 1:12 video and that pilot SpeedLore episode, I thought, how can I parlay off that, how can I keep going? Frigate Secret Agent is a level with a lot of history, so I dove in from there, and it worked out, and I just kept rolling with it.<br />
<br />
In terms of preparation for a general SpeedLore episode: go to the world record history page, which I'm thankful the Elite has in great detail, so a lot of that work is done for me already. Go there, open the tab of every single world record ever achieved, fill in any gaps, open those tabs and videos and forum posts, go through them, and tell the story. I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but that's really all there is to it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I get it. How long does it take you to write your scripts?'''<br />
<br />
SpeedLores are generally completely unscripted. When I was doing them, I would do an introduction and an outro, "Hello, my friends, welcome to SpeedLore," but generally they were completely unscripted. It was just an hour to sometimes three hours of me talking with the world records on the screen. In the modern era with Twitch chat, I can kind of banter back and forth with chat, and a lot of times someone in chat brings up something, or I add in a run to the SpeedLore. That's always been a cool part of it too.<br />
<br />
In terms of writing a video script, it depends. Some scripts I work on for years and barely come back to. Other times I'll write a whole 15-minute video in the course of one night. I guess, as a typical writer does, sometimes you're on and sometimes you're not.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On that note, and I've said this before, you do have some real talent in storytelling, and oral history in particular. Where do you think those skills in communication, with a history lean, came from in you?'''<br />
<br />
I was going to say it's hard to say, but something does come to mind. It connects to maybe the very beginning of this conversation. On one hand, I was not really a huge reader of novels, generally speaking, after the age of 10 or 11. I kind of got bored with them, but I was able to read from a young age, from about four years old. I would read typical books that young guys read, like the Hardy Boys, and various factual books, atlases and almanacs too, which is a nerdy thing for a four - or six-year-old to be reading. I think a lot of this storytelling probably comes from reading about trivia and watching videos about hockey from back then.<br />
<br />
One thing that jumps to mind: I had a video from 1997, when I would've been eight years old, about the story of the 1972 Summit Series, which was this massive Cold War on ice between Canada and the USSR in hockey. An eight-game series, full of lore and just this insane competition. Four games took place in Canada, four games took place in the Soviet Union, and there was the assembling of this Team Canada against the Soviets, who had been playing together for years, and how it all played out. There was this great multi-VHS set that I had as a kid, and I watched that story play out and learned from it.<br />
<br />
I had other hockey videos too, about early Hall of Famers from the 1920s and stuff. In a way, these were sort of early proto-YouTube. Someone could do a deep dive today, a three-hour deep dive on the 1972 Summit Series. I would say learning about sports and hockey as a young boy is probably what taught me a bit of the storytelling: how to lay out stories in a competitive setting. What were the stakes? Who were the competitors? How did it play out?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I almost wonder if the sports nature of hockey and that whole vocabulary, talking about competitors and stakes like you were saying, played into how you speak about GoldenEye now.'''<br />
<br />
That's exactly what jumped to mind when you asked me that question. It was something I would get into flame wars about back, say, 10, 12 years ago: comparing speedrunning to sports. A lot of people online on Reddit and Twitter hated whenever I would do it, but there are certainly comparisons to be made. Tons of them, right? It was just internet nerds being internet nerds.<br />
<br />
I grew up watching sports. I played the majority of my early speedrunning career on this 27-inch tube CRT that only had a coaxial input, no composite, so it was terrible. On that TV where I got my early world records, I also watched Tiger Woods's 2005 Masters, where he chips in on hole 16 for a birdie against Chris DiMarco and then goes on to win in a playoff. I watched these insane sports stories play out in that same spot where my early speedrunning career took place.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you still watch a lot of sports? Do you still consider yourself a big sports guy?'''<br />
<br />
I do. Sometimes I wonder, should I make a sports channel? It may end up coming to that. Again, I was talking about speaking from a unique perspective, so I kind of go in a more niche direction. I was watching the Olympics there in 2026. I actually have a whole Olympics iceberg made that I've been meaning to do for years, but it'd be a three - or four-hour video, and the IOC is extremely fussy with copyright and stuff. It's like, how do I present this in a good way, and delve in from the basics of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt to these obscure controversies, like the 1948 Olympics where the ice conditions were terrible, and stuff like that?<br />
<br />
I do love sports and sports history just as much as gaming history, maybe even more. It just so happens that gaming is where I'm more directly connected and where I tell those stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. Man, you should absolutely do a sports channel. I know we were talking about it earlier with the hockey stuff, but I would be so much more interested in sports if someone talked about it like speedrunning.'''<br />
<br />
It's a good thought. What comes to mind there is the channel TierZoo, who talks about biology and evolution from a gaming and Smash perspective. How much do you lean into the gimmick, I suppose? Is my voice and the music I use familiar enough to carry these sports stories? Perhaps, perhaps not. It's something I certainly hope to get going. I've been meaning to do it for five years, so hopefully not too much longer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''At some point you rebranded your YouTube channel from OurWhiteGoose to Goose's Gamer Folklore and broadened the focus beyond just GoldenEye, which is how we get the modern channel. What was behind that shift?'''<br />
<br />
A lot of it is, how much can you talk about one game? That's certainly a large factor. I had been doing a bit of non-GoldenEye stuff even before then. One thing I noticed with myself in comparison to my contemporaries, guys like Summoning Salt and Bismuth and others: they were really, really good at focusing on the technical aspect, which is great, and people certainly want to see that. I often found the technical stuff a bit too dry, or it wasn't my strength, or frankly, I didn't want to edit 100 layers in Premiere with all these keyframes to show some technical thing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A hundred percent.'''<br />
<br />
I would get a bit of criticism for it. Some people would be like, oh, the technical explanation isn't exactly correct. It was kind of a way of me leaning into, okay, the focus on my channel's not going to be on that. It's going to be more about the broader stories and what they mean. I also wanted at some point to have a consistent handle across all platforms. At that point I was figuring out post-Twitch thoughts about expanding beyond just Twitch and YouTube, and I settled on the Gamer Folklore name.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To touch on that, there's only so much to talk about with GoldenEye, and this is something you've even theorized about with your theoretical 0.00 speedruns: the thought that there's only so much to the game, there's only so much you can do in it. I'm just curious about your thoughts on the limitedness of GoldenEye, the finiteness of what you're able to do in the game in terms of community, because it's something that's been on your mind, I feel.'''<br />
<br />
That's been an interesting course of discussion over the past year or two in the community itself. We touched on it a lot during the recent quest to break the 1:10 barrier in the game: how much more can we push it? I guess the conclusion a lot of people came to is that there may still be a fair bit of juice to squeeze from the game. When there was this push to cut a few more seconds and get under one hour, ten minutes total time, all of a sudden we cut six seconds in the course of a couple months and found this new strategy on Train Agent, which is insane. Nobody thought this was possible.<br />
<br />
I just described it as that kind of asymptote that you're always approaching but never getting to. I think that's true of almost every speedgame to a large extent. Some of them are more in the first vertical slide, where there's still a ton to do. It's like approaching a black hole: you only see how much more there is as you approach it, and time slows down. Certainly there will be a time when there's nothing left to do.<br />
<br />
Then you get into these ideas of, well, what if there's some record that you could achieve, like Aztec 00 Agent, pinball through the glass, surviving the one-in-a-billion run that would take you a lifetime of attempts? Is it worth it for any human to go about and do that? What does that mean? A lot of guys in the game are playing these sort of side leagues now, enemy rockets, fast animation, and having fun with that. Then you take a step back and look, like, well, this is one game. There are tens of thousands of games. Could they all be played like this? You kind of step into this endless ocean of infinite content that you can never even begin to approach over the course of a lifetime. At the end of the day, I guess it just is what it is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I think that is where the heart of the question is: do you want to get out of the kiddie pool of GoldenEye? You can see the edges of the pool; there's only so much there. I think for a lot of people, they've spent most of their lives building up the muscle memory for this one specific game and its inputs.'''<br />
<br />
'''It almost makes me want to say, okay, go to the Rare guys, get a few developers together, give them some game design software or something, and let's make a GoldenEye 2: same control scheme, you can use all the same muscle memory, but new levels, new stages. Have you ever considered the GoldenEye community and their abilities applied to GoldenEye ROM hacks? That isn't something you really see too much of, I don't think.'''<br />
<br />
That's been a big question for me too, because I look on YouTube and I see these guys doing really well with Mario and Zelda ROM hacks. I think, what if we could make a bunch of GoldenEye ones? There are a handful out there, no doubt, but for some reason they just don't translate in the same way. They're kind of too unfamiliar. When you play a Zelda or Mario ROM hack, it feels like the same game, whereas in GoldenEye it kind of doesn't. I think so much of GoldenEye is tied to that memory of those specific levels from back in the day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When you change those levels -'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. When you change the stage entirely, it's like, well, what are the objectives? It's less meaningful, in the silliest way, because is any of it meaningful? Then it becomes, well, what's the point in grinding for a hundred hours on this level that some other person made up? I do remember back in the day speedrunning and going through the cycle of levels and thinking, I wish there were more levels to play. Of course, if there was a GoldenEye 2, it'd be great.<br />
<br />
Now, someone would say that Perfect Dark is the GoldenEye 2, and maybe The World Is Not Enough is the GoldenEye 3, which I have tried to rejuvenate recently to some success. It's been cool to see some developments in that game from a speedrunning perspective. At the end of the day, you also wonder, okay, this was all great. Is it time to go outside and just go for a long walk instead?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I almost wonder if seeing the end of GoldenEye makes people consider what they've been doing with it and ask questions that maybe they're not immediately ready to answer, in terms of the investment that's taken them there.'''<br />
<br />
Right. It's this very weird thing. The meaning of anything is such a weird thing to contemplate. There's some belief that GoldenEye and Mario and Zelda sold millions and millions of copies, so to compete at one has some meaning, because a few million people in this world understand what it's like to play it or experience it. When you get to a ROM hack, well, maybe a few hundred people at most understand it. Does that inherently mean the meaning of it is less significant? The ROM hackers are cool, and sometimes I watch these ROM hack GoldenEye stages, but it's just something you can't help but feel when you're playing and experiencing that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. I don't know if there's a way to ever get around that. A lot of the appeal of the Elite and GoldenEye speedrunning is trying to find creative ways to get time saves in a shorter and shorter window. The effort that you put in increases as that starts to shrink, but it means that the people who do actually make time saves in that small window are doing so more creatively.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. You kind of approach this last frontier of that ability to save time, especially with the modern emulator tools. We see this handful of characters who really sink their teeth into decompiling the ROM and looking at exactly what makes things tick. I see a lot of this in Pokémon Snap lately. There's this fella Icy, who was a big GoldenEye and Perfect Dark delver in that sense, and now he's taking Pokémon Snap and really diving into what makes the characters spin a certain way, what setups are viable for a high score.<br />
<br />
It's kind of like you only get one crack at the can before you solve everything, and then it's like, well, what's left? I know some people wonder about artificial intelligence and machine learning on these games. For some reason, I just don't think that's going to be very fruitful.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Agreed.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I don't know if they're going to be able to understand what it's like to play these games and solve them in any more meaningful way than we already have. Maybe in 10 or 20 years we'll laugh at that, but I don't know. I think the decompilation of the ROMs and looking into the code is the last frontier of figuring out these games, and we're there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Once we run out of technical hurdles, what's left? Do we go back to the way it originally was, just creating new rules and new categories? Is that how you keep the game alive once you've pushed all the technical things?'''<br />
<br />
Right. That's what the GoldenEye community is faced with lately by doing these side leagues. People have thought about doing seasons, like, oh, you do a fresh rankings reset and this season -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's a great idea. Holy crap. Right.'''<br />
<br />
You can do that over and over. If you were so inclined, you could do it with any game. You could even do sports: a regular season of six months where whoever has the best eight times goes into a playoff showdown format.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would watch that. They have esports - what's it, Rocket League? There must be millions and millions of dollars dumped into Rocket League. Take one hundredth of those millions and dump it into GoldenEye. I think that would be so... Obviously there are licensing things, and that's why I think Rocket League has taken off so much: there are no weird licensing issues. Man, if you weren't making money off of it, if you were just doing it on YouTube, that's a fricking great idea. GoldenEye seasons.'''<br />
<br />
There are really endless ideas to keep competition going if you were so inclined, rather than just grinding out for one more second on the most difficult stage with the most difficult strategy. There's no end to making fun and competing if you want. Another question, on the total flip side, is: is it okay to let a game die? Is that okay, and everyone moves on? We've seen a lot of games that have basically died over time, and sometimes they get revived and sometimes not. In the course of your life, I guess that's just a philosophical question of what you want to do and what you don't want to do.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You eventually moved to Gamer Folklore. With the Gamer Folklore videos, I'd assume those are scripted to a certain degree, correct?'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. The main channel videos are almost entirely scripted. I've been experimenting lately with maybe scripting the first half and then just free-thinking the rest of it, and that's worked to some extent. Usually the fireside videos are unscripted as well. I'll have a loose outline and just tell a story by the fire about something. For the main channel videos I'll sit down and write a script, narrate it, and then edit the visuals on. The SpeedLores, where I'm going through the tabs and watching the videos live, are the unscripted ones.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was including the human element a conscious part of Gamer Folklore? Was that something you wanted to do going in, or was that just a result of you speaking personally and the way all this stuff naturally came out?'''<br />
<br />
I think more of the latter. It's just how I learned to tell stories, and what makes the stories, frankly, more interesting is sharing at least a bit of the background of these people. That is something I balance with as well, because a lot of the speedrunners didn't sign up to be public figures. How do I balance that on YouTube? How much of the backstory do I go into with these guys, and how much do I leave a bit of anonymity? I'm always trying to weigh that. Look, it's well known with YouTube that thumbnails with a face in them get more clicks than those without. The human story is always the most important story, no matter what.<br />
<br />
A great human story that comes to mind, which I've never really delved into, a quick one, is PerfectAce, the greatest player in GoldenEye and Perfect Dark history. He joins the forums at 10 years old, claiming he's from Pakistan. This is an unbelievable story at the time. No one from Pakistan is on the internet, let alone having a Nintendo 64, let alone speedrunning GoldenEye. What went into all that? As I know him more and he becomes a good friend of mine, I learn bits of the story. We both wondered, could he have had the only N64 in Pakistan in the early 2000s? The answer is he may actually have.<br />
<br />
You could almost make a legit award-circuit documentary on that: his journey going to England as a young boy and coming back to Pakistan and playing N64 as a sort of refuge from the world. That to me is more interesting than the frame on which the guard opens the gate, although that can be an interesting story in its own right in the right place.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh man, I would absolutely pay for an Elite movie. You know it has enough history, and there's enough story there to make a full documentary.'''<br />
<br />
Eons upon eons of content. Something that comes to mind on the internet is this idea that the notorious Chris Chan is the most documented person on the internet, and people have made dozens of videos about that. You could easily make dozens and dozens of videos about the Elite and everything that's gone into the people speedrunning the game and playing it and where we are now. There's no doubt in my mind. If I had all the time in the world and more, you could make a hundred-part series about this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh man. Okay, so that's the next project for you, right?'''<br />
<br />
Potentially. There are so many projects that I want to do that you just don't have the time for. I've certainly been planning on bringing back GoldenEye SpeedLore, the live presentations on stream, and I wonder, should I revisit the levels one by one again, or is there another format? Dive into them on a character-by-character basis, so the early records of Marc Rützou, the middle records of Marc Rützou, the later records of Marc Rützou, and paint that picture, going through character by character. Go through the community forum month by month: what was it like in January 2001, and the next month, and so on. These are things that I ponder deeply as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would do all of them. That sounds like a great idea. I like your content and I would just love to see more of it. Another thing that I would love, and this is maybe just me as an interview person, is for you to do community interviews, because you would be the best person for it. You already know how to do an interview. You can do one without a script, which is fricking incredible. You already have a connection to all these people. Everyone trusts you and everyone likes you, and you already have the channel for it. Man, I would love to hear you sit down with a speedrunner, maybe once every few months.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. I actually had a plan to meet up with Ace over the winter break and do exactly that, and dive into all this kind of stuff. It didn't pan out, unfortunately. Hopefully it will in the future. In terms of that kind of content, I do have ideas to do it more as a one-off here and there, but as a series it could happen. There has been a guy in the community, Cal, who did a series called Mate Chat, where he would sit down with other Elites and have great conversations. Of course, it's a much smaller platform and it's niche content in itself, so it's hard to grow from just that. There are good conversations with community members that have gotten a few hundred views on YouTube, and they're cool things to check out. He does a good job with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Also the firesides: I love the firesides. I think they're one of the reasons why your channel and you are so special in the first place. One of many. I understand that you've had issues with access to the cabin and then you had to do them in a different place. Could you tell us about the firesides?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. The first handful I did were in the old family cabin, which was my grandmother's cabin. Basically, back in the '60s in Canada, a lot of people bought these lots outside of the city for a thousand bucks, which is about $10,000 today. These lots are $300,000 now, so a different time. They slowly but surely built these old cabins on them. Cottages: you'd have the family up in the summer and so on and so forth. A lot of my childhood summers were spent there. Every summer we'd go for two or three weeks, and I had a great time. It became this very special place to me.<br />
<br />
That setting, sitting by the fire telling a story, is literally as old as humankind. I would tell a handful from there, and they were wonderful. Then, as time goes by, especially with my grandmother, there's more extended family involved, and you get into the kind of family drama, estate drama and whatnot. My grandmother did pass a couple years ago now. Unfortunately, the cabin has left my side of the family. It's no longer mine, which is unfortunate.<br />
<br />
It becomes this chase: how can I get back to a similar cabin? I have been in one. I'm in one right now, actually, believe it or not, and I haven't been recording too many firesides. I did earlier in December. I'm here for a couple more months, so I could do some more. There's this chase of how to get to a permanent place and setup where I can tell these as more of my regular storytelling. Frankly, a studio like that, and really set it up well.<br />
<br />
Especially in the latter half of having that place, I was always kind of rushed when I was there. I couldn't stay there for too long, so I couldn't get the technical stuff set up, and that kind of hindered my storytelling ability.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. A studio would be super helpful. I think at this point you would benefit crazy from it.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. Give me two seconds, I'm just going to grab a beverage. I'll be right back.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, totally.'''<br />
<br />
I agree. It's the great chase: when and where and how can you make it happen? Sometimes I almost think about getting just a flophouse cabin, even six hours up north in the wilderness of Ontario, and literally just setting it up as a fireside studio for the sake of it, just to have a place. We'll see.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be actual fire either. As long as I can see something moving on the screen and I can hear the crackling, that good old Ocarina of Time torch crackling sound effect. I know that's not what you use, but I just - god, I love that sound effect.'''<br />
<br />
I get it. Last year I was renting a kind of cottage, and it had a gas fireplace, so there are a handful of firesides from there, and it's cool. The gas fireplace is more consistent, because you just flip it on and it works, so that was easy. Having the authentic wood-burning fire, there's just nothing like it. Then it just makes it so difficult, because everything has to work out perfectly. The tech has to be going perfectly. The fire has to be roaring away in just the right place. You have to give a good performance of telling the story in that particular moment. It's difficult to pull off.<br />
<br />
Again, I have the whole Nintendo 64 iceberg written out, and I did record it from my grandmother's cabin one of the last times I was in there, but it was rushed and I messed up the audio. I've tried to recover it, but been unsuccessful. So it's like, should I do that again from the fireside I'm at right now? The answer's obviously yes, but then at night I'm working on a different video or whatever the case may be, and I just haven't gotten there yet.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you ever get performance anxiety or any kind of stage fright?'''<br />
<br />
Not really. There are some nights where it's like, oh, I should record a fireside tonight, and you just don't feel like doing it, but that's more motivation than stage fright. Every creative and every person goes through that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you have issues with motivation or finding the time or the energy to put in the work for this?'''<br />
<br />
Sometimes, yeah. Certainly two years ago, I was really unmotivated and I was not posting a lot of videos, and one way or another I lit a fire under my ass and got out there. That's when I started renting these cottages in the wintertime, when they're a bit cheaper. Normally in Canada, a cottage is something you go to in the summer to go swimming and on the lake, so in the winter you can get them for a relatively cheap price. That's what I've been doing the past two winters, just a way to get myself out the door and do something, and get at least a fireside where I can record by.<br />
<br />
Certainly since the first year I did it, I did okay. This year, in the past nine months or so, I've been much more motivated and posting a lot more frequently, so I've been able to help that to a large extent.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The channel has over a hundred thousand subscribers. Did you ever see yourself taking off this much when you first started the channel?'''<br />
<br />
I would honestly say yes, as crazy as it sounds. Because the first SpeedLore video got a hundred thousand views, and I saw what other people in this space were doing and getting hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views, I knew that such a thing was possible. A lot of my contemporaries have even larger followings. At the same time, on the other side of the coin, there are a bunch of people who make really great content and have never taken off. So there is maybe a bit of luck involved, and then you get into that whole "luck is when opportunity meets preparation" type of mantra. You do see people who haven't taken off, and you see people who have, and you go, "Man, how did that guy get so big?"<br />
<br />
Look, when I'm making videos, it's like, okay, talk about GoldenEye, Mario, or Zelda; these sold eight million, ten million copies. There's that many people who know about the game. When I talk about Beetle Adventure Racing, which I might want to do here and there, okay, it sold 300,000 copies. What's that like? How convincingly can you tell a story when there are fewer stakes, because fewer people know about it? That's something I weigh often in my work.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Please cover Beetle Adventure Racing. You're speaking to someone who was a big fan of the game. I owned it as a kid. There's definitely less at stake with Beetle Adventure Racing than most of the mainline games you cover, but gosh, there's something weirdly charming about it. I want to say it was just a Need for Speed game that they reskinned with Beetles, or something like that. It didn't come from the most creative of studios, but there's something very creative about the end result. Maybe that was just me looking at it, because I was used to the N64 and Japanese-developed Nintendo games, so I started applying that lens to a Western racing game.'''<br />
<br />
You're bang on. I actually have talked about it in two of my more recent videos. In my most recent video I have a segment about it, and then in the comfy winter places one -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The ski lodge one.'''<br />
<br />
Yes. There's literally enough to do a SpeedLore episode on all six tracks of Beetle Adventure Racing, I would say, so that alone could make content. Then the exploration of the game, which is another kind of mini niche that I sometimes delve into: there's a lot of cool stuff in that game too. You're right, it was a Need for Speed 64 that got reskinned into the Volkswagen Beetle, but Paradigm Entertainment was involved, big Pilotwings guys. There are all these cool hidden spots in the game to appreciate.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh man. There's a handful of videos that could certainly be made about Beetle Adventure Racing that I hope to incorporate soon.'''<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of Paradigm, I'm actually going to be talking to... I don't know if you know the soundtrack for Pilotwings 64, the jazzy, smooth jazz soundtrack? That was Dan Hess. I'm speaking to him next week or in the next couple of weeks, and I've never spoken to anyone from the early... I think they called it the N64 Dream Team, all those third-party Western developers that they got to support the N64. That'll be fascinating.'''<br />
<br />
'''You know me, I'm a Sega baby, so I can tell you all about the early Genesis and all that stuff, but the N64 was super out of my wheelhouse. Also, like you, I got started doing something very specific, and now I'm just at a point where I'm starting to branch out of Sega interviews. Perhaps that's why I'm so interested in speaking with you: because I'm applying what you've done to my own career at this point.'''<br />
<br />
That's cool. Pilotwings was one I never played growing up, but my pal Grav was one of the top runners of the game. Sometime during COVID, when the Nintendo Switch Online came out, I played Pilotwings. The Hang Glider theme is just unbelievable. A lot of people love Birdman, but Hang Glider is just so good. I played the game and beat it. I've done a few videos about that, and I have a few more on my master list.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All I have to ask him about is the inspiration there. I think the early N64 library, especially the introduction to 3D for a lot of Nintendo kids who had never seen 3D before - just establishing that sense of place and that level of quality. That actually ties into my next question, because you had a tweet in August 2024 that says, "The world you grew up in no longer exists." That is so very relevant and touching to me. Could you expand on your thoughts there?'''<br />
<br />
It is a bit of a common meme format. You see it in various niches; it almost becomes a bit of a cliche. One of the first usages of it is a little girl with the Twin Towers in the background, and that's where it comes from: the world you grew up in no longer exists, just a sign of how things change.<br />
<br />
I think in particular, something a lot of people discuss these days online is that this nostalgia for the '90s and early 2000s is so strong and palpable, more so than for other eras. Not to get too much into the real world, but a lot of people feel like a lot in the real world is on the decline one way or another, and so the '90s and 2000s were the last great era of humankind. Are we, the people who grew up in that era, the last arbiters of what the old world used to be like before whatever happens? Maybe that's the case, and maybe that is what calls to this nostalgic era, what evokes these powerful thoughts.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm right there with you. I think as time goes on, it's easier and easier to forget the past, because those memories get farther and farther away. Part of why I reached out for this interview is that there aren't many people keeping those memories alive. There are people talking about the digital stuff and the programming and the code of the games, but so much of what made the '90s special is all of the oral history stuff, the cicadas and the sunsets and all that stuff, yet no one outside of you is doing it, or preserving any of that, on this level. I wish there were more of you. I wish there were 10 more of you.'''<br />
<br />
I appreciate that. Look, I do too, to get more done, and also if they have a unique perspective. I've never had any PlayStation console, for example. That's a huge blind spot for me, because the PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast and whatnot have these similar memories and vibes.<br />
<br />
This gets into something that I love talking about every now and then, which is the kind of playground rumors and urban legends about games. Mew under the truck is the classic one, but there are these more obscure niche ones where it's like, why do so many people remember this game this way? Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64 without rails, for example. Can we combine the two, the oral history with the code, and figure out what was going on there, and why someone saw it that way or remembered it another way?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, more interviews always help. Has your relationship with games, particularly GoldenEye, changed after so many years of documenting them as opposed to playing them?'''<br />
<br />
This hearkens back to earlier in the conversation, where I talked about being 14 and 15 and playing the games, thinking this is pointless and stupid, what am I doing, trying to find some meaning in it. I was streaming and actively playing the games quite a bit in 2017 and into 2018, after starting SpeedLore, and then I kind of stopped streaming and actively playing them. Look, that was a lot of fun. I was grinding for times and I got some amazing records in that era. On Dam 00 Agent I almost got the world record, and that was the whole story. I got Streets Agent 1:11, a few things like that.<br />
<br />
Sometime around 2018, I realized my time is better spent telling the stories and documenting it. I'm not Ace or Clemens or Marc Rützou. They're the ones better off playing the game, so I'm better off telling the story about it. You do see this in the field of sports too. The guys who write books or do the content and the broadcasting and the podcasts are often guys who weren't the star players, but played with the stars on some level. They were the third-liners in hockey, or the goalies, or whatever. They had that perspective. They were there, but maybe their talent is better spent telling the stories instead.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. I definitely get that. Where do you see Gamer Folklore in five to ten years?'''<br />
<br />
Look, who knows how the YouTube landscape will be, for one. I hope to be posting even more consistently and have greater stories. I've been meaning to make websites to document this further and more iron-cladly archive a lot of stuff, as well as the folklorization of it all, because archiving the primary sources and whatnot is important in terms of being able to pull from that and tell the stories. It's hard to say.<br />
<br />
The thoughts get to me of trying to build some kind of community like the old internet, to at least have the kind of heyday where people can seek a refuge from the rest of the world online. Continue to tell these stories and document this stuff. Look, maybe by then getting into other slightly more modern consoles as well, like GameCube and Wii and whatnot, but who knows how it'll all play out?<br />
<br />
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'''Yeah. From all your years communicating game history, what's rubbed off on you the most, or what's the most surprising takeaway, as someone who's been communicating it for so long?'''<br />
<br />
On one hand, I want to say just that so many people are interested. I do feel blessed that I can tell these crazy stories of sometimes just one or two guys who played a level in a video game for fun, and tens of thousands of people are listening and enjoying it. That's pretty cool, to just know that there are people out there who also appreciate that sort of thing. I would say really that's the ultimate takeaway.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, sometimes someone says, "Oh, you inspired me to play GoldenEye," and they've sunk hours and years into the game. In a way, sometimes I feel a bit melancholy about that. They're thankful for it, and I'm like, "Man, I'm sorry. I wasted your life." That kind of thought muddles with me sometimes as well, but not enough to stop doing what I'm doing, for sure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You had talked about meaning, and the importance of finding and making your own meaning. I think, like you just said, you establishing this channel allows others to find meaning in what you're talking about or in these old games. I'm a personal believer that you can learn things about yourself and better yourself from interacting with old games and understanding what you get out of it. So I think just you having your channel allows so many people to find their own meaning in it.'''<br />
<br />
That is a good way to put it, because perhaps when I mentioned that sometimes I feel bad about encouraging people to play the game, you're right, I'm prescribing my own interpretation of meaning to them. For them, the meaning might be something completely different, and might be something much more valuable and significant. I've heard from a lot of people who say they picked up GoldenEye speedrunning during a hard time in their life, when they were transitioning from one thing to another, or they were out of work, or going through a breakup or whatever. I guess if the meaning was meaningful to them, then that's important.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. I think that's one of the benefits of having a show: it's art. You don't know what other people are going to get out of it. I think you just being personable and so forthcoming in your own personality and what you're talking about really invites a lot of people into establishing that meaning. Whatever you're doing with your show, I think you're doing it right. I think you're succeeding.'''<br />
<br />
I very much appreciate that. I have no plans to stop anytime soon. In fact, only to accelerate. So there you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Awesome. What are you working on right now, just in your life or with the show in general? What's Goose up to?'''<br />
<br />
Literally right now I'm working on editing a video about the real-world geography of GoldenEye's locations. It'll be up in the next couple of days. That's the video I'm working on right this second. It starts with, is the Byelomorye Dam real? Is Severnaya a real radio facility? I delve into that. I just have piles of other videos that I'm always working on. Like I said, I have these icebergs on the back burner. There's never an end of ideas and formats to make. Sometimes they're just on the back burner for years, but I certainly have a list.<br />
<br />
I'm just trying to wade through it all and make what I feel inspired and inclined to make. On YouTube these days, these compilation videos and longer videos do well, so I'm always thinking about assembling those. I like to put in a bit of new information alongside some old classics. I'll probably make a few more of those coming up. Revisiting SpeedLore in some way, which I'm still trying to figure out, is certainly on my plate for the next little while.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Out of everything you've accomplished with the channel specifically, what are you the most proud of so far?'''<br />
<br />
Man, it's hard to say. Some videos really stick out. My 1080° Snowboarding Deadly Fall video is what I consider my masterpiece. My Top 10 Speedruns of the Decade was also one I put so much work into. It took a solid month and it really was a great video. I love that one. It's kind of a reference point: when people look at the 2010s in speedrunning, they can see what I picked as the most important speedruns of that era. So that one's really good as well.<br />
<br />
The Chicago Ghost video is amazing too, because that's a reference point: this perpetual mystery that may never be solved, but has evidence that it was something people experienced. Those three stick out as my three best. Then of course the whole SpeedLore series as a whole is pretty cool. At least giving the oral history of GoldenEye fairly completely at some point in time is pretty cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You do receive a lot of feedback as to how the fans are enriched and appreciate your work.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. Sometimes maybe too much. When they start playing themselves, people want to get involved and be in the next SpeedLore. That's a thing that happens too. They want to say, "Oh man, how can I be the character whose story is told?" That's what inspires a lot of people to pick up the controller and play.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. All right. That was actually all the questions that I had, and we're just going over our time here, so we hit that perfectly. Did you have any questions for me before we hop off?'''<br />
<br />
Not really. I look forward to the interview being posted in whatever format you're going to do that. I was looking forward to this and I'm glad we chatted. I'm sure we could chat infinitely. Maybe we'll do it again and revisit it with some more topics and questions sometime. That was cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That would be super cool. Just speaking to you has been... I'm not normally this casual. I appreciate the vibe that you're giving off, which is also interesting from my perspective interviewing you, because you are a person I've personally seen on the other side of the screen quite a lot, but you've never seen me. So I kind of have a little bit of a head start: I know how he talks, I got the vibe. Man, I really appreciate you speaking with me today. This was super cool.'''<br />
<br />
Look, I appreciate it too. I've come across your site a few times doing research and whatnot. It's something that I'll try to pull from a bit more going ahead. I look forward to seeing it all posted. It was a pleasure. I appreciate the questions and the thoughts. I didn't know I was going to get so much into the sports stuff, but when I really think about it, it truly is a part of the origin story. So I appreciate you being able to pull that out as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. So much of GoldenEye, and by extension speedrunning as a whole, because of all the influence there, is sports-based in the vocabulary we use to talk about it. Maybe some of that is coincidental, but I think there's a very interesting lineage to be drawn between sports and speedrunning, and the Elite and GoldenEye are a very core part of that, I think. That'll be for another conversation, but there's a very interesting story there.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. We'll see. Who knows if I'll be able to lay some of that out in my future work.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. If you need any help with anything Sega, just give me a call, give me an email, whatever. If you ever need Sega episode topics, which isn't really in your wheelhouse because you're an N64 guy, but if you ever do stray there, let me know. I can throw so many crazy mysteries at you. I'm getting prototypes and stuff too, so if you ever need content, I'll give you some juicy exclusive stuff.'''<br />
<br />
That'd be cool. Sometimes I make these compilations or whatever, and a handful of Sega mysteries would be sick, because it takes me years to get to them. Still, just to know of them and ponder them when I come across them would be cool. I'll send you an email a little bit later, and I'd love to hear a handful of that kind of stuff.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I'll definitely do that.'''<br />
<br />
Awesome. That's great. It was great to chat today. I certainly hope to keep in touch and chat again in the future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Thank you so much again. I super appreciate this. You're wonderful. Thank you again.'''<br />
<br />
You too. It was amazing. Thank you, and stay true.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Ryan_White_(2026-03-21_interview)&diff=177349Ryan White (2026-03-21 interview)2026-10-11T18:25:58Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Created page with "{{Interview |image=RyanWhite.png |name=Ryan "RWhiteGoose" White |status=Released |interviewer=CartridgeCulture |subject=Speedrunning |date=2026-03-21 }} '''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Ryan. Good morning. Actually, is it morning for you?''' Ryan White: Good day. It's the afternoon, two o'clock. '''It's very cool to be speaking with you, popping up on the other end of my screen here.''' Nice to speak with you. '''As well. It's very cool. Sorry, I don't have words.''' Yeah,..."</p>
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<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=RyanWhite.png<br />
|name=Ryan "RWhiteGoose" White<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Speedrunning<br />
|date=2026-03-21<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hey, Ryan. Good morning. Actually, is it morning for you?'''<br />
<br />
Ryan White: Good day. It's the afternoon, two o'clock.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's very cool to be speaking with you, popping up on the other end of my screen here.'''<br />
<br />
Nice to speak with you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As well. It's very cool. Sorry, I don't have words.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, no worries, man. Look, I've been around online for a long time. I know exactly the feeling, so it's all good. We're just two nerds hanging out.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. I talk to a lot of people who are my heroes, including yourself, and I never quite get over the celebrity feel of, "Oh my god, I'm talking to someone who's a celebrity, or someone that I really look up to." It still happens after all these years.'''<br />
<br />
It is funny. Maybe we'll get into it in the conversation, but the first time I felt it was chatting with the big boss man in 2005. As it turns out, he's this very shy, meek, quite autistic nerd. To have that nervous feel and then, in hindsight, realize, oh, he's almost like our little brother nowadays, in terms of how we towed him around the community and built up his confidence. You realize later that maybe it was kind of funny or silly to have that feeling in that moment. Yeah, there you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. I never quite let that go, because I think, at least with what I do, having a little bit of fanboyism is important because it shows you're excited. I'm calling it fanboyism, but there are deeper words for that. I think being excited for what you do, just being passionate, is at the core of all of this. I'll be as professional as I can, but I'll never stop being passionate about it.'''<br />
<br />
That is a good way to put it, and we'll probably get into something like that as well in our conversation. You're right.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I assume you've probably had a lot of people reaching out to you asking about speedrunning questions and GoldenEye questions. Obviously I'm going to touch on quite a lot of those, but I really wanted to focus on Gamer Folklore because I'm very impressed with what you've done with it. As I mentioned in our email, there was just something about the cicadas specifically: that kind of ephemeral quality, all of the memories that are alongside the main memories that make those bigger moments more important.'''<br />
<br />
'''I love the transitions you have with the power lines against the sunset, just all of these little things. As I said in my email, that is such a difficult memory to grasp visually, and it's difficult to communicate. Man, you nailed it, and you nailed it so effortlessly. It was natural to you. I'm just going to keep gushing here, but I was super impressed with that.'''<br />
<br />
Awesome. That's cool to hear. I appreciate hearing those thoughts about the cicada transitions and whatnot. What's funny is I never really watched anime, which is where all that stuff is from. Certainly in this sphere, the online gaming sphere, a lot of people you associate with, your friends, do. Sometime during COVID, a couple of my buddies begged me to watch Evangelion. I watched the main season and one or two of the movies.<br />
<br />
I forget when the first time I used that cicadas and power lines transition was, but it would've been sometime around then. I was doing it as a half-hearted joke reference. I don't know anime too well, but I know that's sort of a classic transition there. I just put it in, and it really hit home for a lot of people, which is cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely. I'm surprised to hear it's an anime thing. Maybe not entirely, because I'd imagine that kind of stuff also comes from you drawing on your own personal memories.'''<br />
<br />
That's it too. I have many vivid memories of sitting in the backyard. I grew up in a residential area in a big city. When I was a kid, I didn't know what those cicada sounds were in the summer. I thought, is it the electricity pulsing through the wires? That's where you get that association between the cicadas and the power lines. As it turns out, it was cicadas.<br />
<br />
I don't know, there's just something about this whole idea of continuing to play these old games, whether competitively or just out of trying to find more enjoyment from them, and connecting that with younger, brighter days. Certainly those summer days with cicadas in backyards are some of those days. We get into other elements too, like the sound of the mourning dove, which is a pretty well-known nostalgic sound from back in the day, or even old fast food restaurants. Just the nostalgic vibes that I think a lot of people connect to more than ever these days.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I definitely agree. I think nostalgia is the strongest way to get people to pay attention, especially in this space, but it also makes it personal. That was another thing I liked about your work, especially with Gamer Folklore: you never forget the human element. That's important, obviously, because we're all human, but I think putting in those little things makes it more meaningful. I was always very impressed with how well you were able to hit on the actual history, the objective facts and what you need to say, but also the way that you do that and wrap it all up. I've always been impressed with your production.'''<br />
<br />
'''Having Princess Peach in place of the MGM lion is such a perfect little fun thing. Man, I hope you never stop doing all those fun little transitions and sound effects. After you say something notable, you're like, "Bam, sound effect," and it's something from an N64 game. You use a lot of Wind Waker sound effects, Mario Kart 64, Ocarina of Time. Man, I'm going to get to a point where I don't have anything else to say other than gushing, but it's very impressive.'''<br />
<br />
I appreciate it. A lot of it is borrowed or inspired stuff. The Peach in place of the movie studio logo actually came from a guy who goes by Sweetner now. He was the main editor of what we called the Kapap Trilogy, which was the first set of hoarding videos in the Elite. At the start, three guys got together, set a bunch of golden icons, saved them for a few months, and then made almost like a feature movie revealing them all.<br />
<br />
It really took on a life of its own and got to a point where hoarding, playing secretly and then posting your times later, kind of became the standard in the community. That certainly has its drawbacks and detriments, but the first three were really cool, and that's what inspired so many people to do it. Sweetner was the guy who first did the Peach in place of the movie studio intro. I took inspiration from that, made my own version, and ran from there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I think it worked out really well for you. Just to actually get started here, because I'll definitely just gossip my way halfway through this interview: could you tell us a bit about your background growing up in Toronto?'''<br />
<br />
About my background growing up? Yeah, okay, sure. I would say I had a pretty normal upbringing. I was fortunate to have a stable home and a loving family. Growing up in the '90s, at some point I got video games as a gift here and there. My first console was actually the Sega Genesis, believe it or not, which a lot of people don't know, and my first really big game to dive into was Sonic 3 & Knuckles. I played a lot of that when I was five, six years old, and then I got the N64.<br />
<br />
Mostly what occupied my time as a kid was hockey. I played single-A hockey, which is the third highest level from the top when you're a young lad. I wasn't up there up there, but it was still a serious and competitive mode of hockey. From five to 13, and really until 17 through high school, most of my time was spent going to school, playing hockey, which would be three or four times a week in the winter and fall, and then video games. That was mostly my life, and video games were there, I guess, to keep me quiet and in the house.<br />
<br />
I can almost envision the arcs of my childhood playing various games at various points. Like I say, I started with Sonic 3 & Knuckles. When I got an N64, my first game was actually NHL 99, hearkening to the hockey. I grinded that. I remember doing crazy challenges, like playing as Canada against Poland on super easy and trying to see how many goals I could get, winning 60-nothing in a 60-minute game. I guess doing these challenges and seeing where I could push games was always a big part of growing up.<br />
<br />
In the summertime I would play a lot of video games as well. I had a cousin who I played with, and he was not very skilled, so it often was just me showing him how to beat a game or whatever. I didn't have brothers, so I didn't have anyone to play Smash Bros. With, and that's why that game is a big black hole of knowledge for me. I really don't know much about Smash at all. It was a lot of single-player stuff, just filling the time between school and hockey.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You said you were already making your own challenges with your first N64 game. To push back even farther, do you know where the idea came from of you sitting down and going, "Okay, I'm going to make my own challenges in this game, I'm going to take it to the next level"? Do you know where that part of yourself came from, the want to challenge something?'''<br />
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The want to challenge myself in video games specifically?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, specifically when it comes to video games.'''<br />
<br />
I do remember specifically playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles and seeing that there's a timer on screen, which is not uncommon for games, but not every game has one. Even at five or six years old, the thought was, okay, there's a timer, therefore beating it more quickly is good. That association, which is really what speedrunning is, was just natural to me. Maybe it's the luck of the draw on what game I had, or the way my brain is wired: okay, this makes sense, beat the game quickly. In Sonic 3, you even get more points for beating the level quickly, to a certain point. What's the highest score? How fast can I go?<br />
<br />
I also remember being seven years old and watching the '96 Atlanta Olympics. I have a vivid memory of watching the men's 100-meter dash in my grandmother's house, which she had my whole life, from the '70s, well before I was born, up until only a couple of years ago after she passed. This is a house that was in my life for 30-plus years. I vividly remember watching the 100-meter dash and watching Donovan Bailey win for Canada.<br />
<br />
I do love the Olympics and sports. Sports are an interesting thing. Especially when you look at people who succeed at sports, obviously there's a ton of work that gets put into it, but there's a large element of luck: being in the right place at the right time to be given the resources, to be pushed in a certain direction. When you're 14 or 15 years old, you can't conjure money and find the discipline and time to go to the arena and train or go to the golf course or whatever. You have to be along for someone else's ride to a large extent.<br />
<br />
Sports are kind of like that. I played hockey and that's what I did, and I loved it. I had a great career. In terms of finding an element where I could push myself and do something interesting, a challenge, video games were right there. That inspired me to go that direction.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. Almost like a natural athlete's desire, but video games, especially speedrunning, don't quite have the same barrier to entry. I don't think the investment of having to know someone and having all these resources is quite there. It obviously is to some degree, but with video games and speedrunning, you can start on your own, by yourself in your living room or bedroom, which is why I think this is so special. Obviously all massive sports journeys start from a very intimate, personal place, but that's part of why I like video games: because they are so intimate and personal.'''<br />
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'''Most of the time you're playing them by yourself. A lot of times you'll play multiplayer, but most of my experiences with video games were very personal, by-myself experiences. To be able to take that from an intimate bedroom experience to, okay, now I'm an athlete and I'm doing this professionally, especially in the span that you did - actually, I'm getting a little ahead of myself, so let me hop to GoldenEye here. GoldenEye came out in '97. Do you remember when you were first exposed to GoldenEye as a child?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it is a bit of a funny thing. Certainly when I was younger I was a bit more of a contrarian. When all my friends were playing GoldenEye and Ocarina of Time, I remember specifically being like, oh, I don't want to play those. I have no interest, whatever. You guys think you're cool and so on. It actually took me a few years to get into those games. I do remember getting GoldenEye about a year later, I believe in 1998. I was in Michigan on a family trip and we got it from a Target there, I think in about May '98 or so. About a year after it came out, I started playing it.<br />
<br />
Of course, this is also around the dawn of the World Wide Web. My dad had a decent job in a typical downtown office, and every now and then I would go in with him. When I did, I would browse the internet, and naturally I would browse for video game codes and cheat sheets and stuff. I'm there at nine, ten years old in a formal office setting, looking up GoldenEye on some office computer in the early internet. That's kind of funny, but it's how I learned about various strategies that were new in that day, as well as the early version of the Elite speedrun community for GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.<br />
<br />
I always had it in the back of my mind: okay, there are these guys out there who speedrun, isn't that kind of interesting? At the time I'm 10, 11 years old, so I didn't get involved yet, but I certainly remembered that this was a thing that existed, and at some point the inspiration struck to revisit it a few years later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Can you recall when you first started taking GoldenEye speedrunning seriously? When you transitioned from playing it casually, and that interest first built up to where you're like, okay, now I'm going to start hitting for times?'''<br />
<br />
It's kind of a funny thing. I'll preface this by saying that when I was, say, 13, 14, 15 years old, I remember playing Mario Golf and feeling like I was wasting my time. You're 13, you're 14, you're thinking, "Man, I'm still playing video games. This isn't cool." All my friends are out there being cool and going to parties and dating and that kind of thing, and I'm here playing video games. You feel a certain way about that. At some point I realized, okay, if I'm going to play video games, I should try to make the most out of it one way or another. That thought sat with me: this is a waste of time unless I'm doing something with it.<br />
<br />
I do vividly remember it was Canada Day 2005, July 1st. I was 15, not quite 16 years old. My cousin came over, and as a summer throwback we put on the N64 and played some GoldenEye. That was the point, in July 2005, when I realized, okay, we're in 2005, we're two generations removed from the N64. If I'm going to start playing GoldenEye again, of all things, then I'm going to look up the speedrun community, join, and try to do something. That's exactly what happened. By September 2005, I was on the rankings and starting to grind and play for records.<br />
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<br />
'''That's crazy. Would you have ever imagined yourself getting on the records so quickly after joining?'''<br />
<br />
Not really, but I think everyone has that journey now. We've seen it play out so many times in the GoldenEye speedrunning community, where people get inspired to play one way or another, join the ranks, and see their name on the cool website. The website is like no other. I think that is a large appeal of it; it is the best ranking system around. You see your name up there and you think, okay, well, I can improve this and that. Oh, maybe I can get this first, easier world record. As it turns out, some of them are not that difficult to get early on. Every era has its easy world records.<br />
<br />
In October I had achieved my first tied world records, Runway Secret Agent 23 and Depot Agent 26, which were ones that dozens of players had achieved by that point. Did I think I would get them that quickly? Probably not, but one thing leads to another and you just keep rolling with it.<br />
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<br />
'''When you first started, what kind of reference was there for strategy? This was so back in the day. How did you learn at the very beginning? How did you first get started when it comes to strategy and technique?'''<br />
<br />
It was super early. YouTube had just been invented and there were barely any videos on it, because there were fewer people online, and people didn't even know that YouTube would stick around. The main GoldenEye videos that I watched were hosted on Speed Demos Archive, and they're actually still there to this very day, which is cool. I think every two or three years, someone from the GoldenEye community who was friends with the guys at Speed Demos Archive was like, "Hey, here's an updated list of all the world records. Here are the videos, you can host them."<br />
<br />
There were a bunch of runs on that website, particularly the Aztec runs of Wouter Jansen, the Dutch legend, with Aztec 00 Agent 1:56. Unbelievable record to see back in that day. I'm reminded of the joke, oh, this phrase would do harm to a Victorian child. That run, Aztec 00 Agent 1:56, to a young Goose just does something. It was truly shocking. With these runs you could at least see the routes, you could see what the world record or close to it was, you could see where to strafe, where to look down.<br />
<br />
Then of course on the GoldenEye Elite forums, there was some conversation about strategies and techniques and people posting about their adventures to improve their times. It was almost like a rite of passage back then to read the entire history of the forums, which, as someone who's hanging out on the internet, why not? You spend weeks doing so and catching up, and you learn the ins and outs of what people experienced and how they improved their times.<br />
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'''What were the early forums like from the very beginning?'''<br />
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That's something that I've pondered doing a deep dive on every now and then. It is fascinating, because you can get these glimpses of the early forums where there are posts from the day of September 11, 2001, and what the actual live reaction of a bunch of gamer teenagers was on that day, for example, and posts about new consoles coming out and expectations and anticipation for that. You just get a very raw, unfiltered view of what a bunch of guys who were, say, 15 to 23 years old were talking about on the internet back then.<br />
<br />
Obviously communication moved way more slowly back then. A lot of people had dial-up internet. You could make a few posts a day, so every message was a lot more meaningful, and a lot of them are still there. There's actually a bit of Elite forum lore where a bunch of posts from 2003 and 2004 are missing, because it was on a platform called ezboard and then it got transitioned to one called Yuku. During that transition, about two years of forum posts mostly got lost. You almost get into the lost media of forum posts, let alone movies and videos and so on. A lot of stuff has survived from 2001 on.<br />
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It's just a bunch of dudes hanging out on the internet, which is in a way not too different from today. Back then it was just so much more intentful and meaningful because of the slow nature of the internet.<br />
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'''Right, right. I love that: because the internet was slower, everything was more meaningful. We were talking about YouTube, and the Elite and the GoldenEye community starting to upload videos. That's actually something you've talked about on the record quite a lot: the difficulties and unique challenges of trying to upload a video in that 2005 era. All the mailing around of VHS tapes, having them sit at someone's house, or whoever was super shy and couldn't walk down to the mailbox to drop off his tapes. It's incredible that we have so much material from that time, considering all the difficulties that people had to go through to get it there.'''<br />
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Very much so. At the same time, there are a lot of missing pieces where you just wonder, what if? I guess that's no different than history. You imagine, what if we had footage of this battle from 200 years ago or whatever. To your point, with my early videos, we had a family digital camera with maybe a four-megabyte memory card. I could record either one-minute videos in a bit of a higher quality or four-minute videos in worse quality, no sound. I'm 16 years old, I have no idea how to do it, so a lot of them are kind of freehand, a bit shaky, and just remarkable stuff.<br />
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There was a time, in the early Twitch era, when I was a bit more of a stickler on the quality of capturing your runs. Looking back now, there's certainly an affection for the true early era of this. Any remaining artifact of these runs is amazing to see.<br />
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<br />
'''Right. I think artifact is the proper term, because as history goes on - this is like the Indiana Jones thing. If I bury something in the desert, it doesn't make it an artifact, but if I wait 200 years and take it back up, it's suddenly valuable and worth something. I think as time goes on, having those kinds of files and those kinds of artifacts - so much of history is archeology. You're given four or five little broken pot shards and you can kind of see the curve on them, and you're like, okay, well, we can tell that they made a vase. We can tell that it was probably shaped like that, but we only have four or five pieces, so we just have to fill in the shape of it with guesses.'''<br />
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'''That's why I think oral history is so important. Oral history is giving us so many more pieces of that vase, especially in the video game community. Just to speak on my side: so many people will think of history as ROMs and prototypes, something you can download, something digital and tangible. No, the oral history is so much more important, because I guarantee you the ROM will not be there. I guarantee you the floppy disk will not be there. That got thrown out 20, 30 years ago, but the memory in people's heads never goes away.'''<br />
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'''That's why I think it's so important that you're doing all this, because god, someone needs to write it down, and you're really the first person who's attempted to do that in any kind of popular format. I'm sure you're not the only one to document the history of speedrunning or GoldenEye speedrunning or the community or the Elite or all those things, but there's the way that you do it, in a format that's easily digestible and entertaining and fun. Also, personally, I feel you're just a great communicator of history. I think that is so dang important. I'm getting a little off topic here, but some of the stuff that we still have from back in the day is incredible, considering all the circumstances that had to be in place to get it there.'''<br />
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Two quick things to that point. One: you talk about the builds of games and the ROMs and whatnot. Something that comes to my mind in GoldenEye is that when the developers were making the game and wanted to put in the All Bonds mode, and eventually withdrew that because they anticipated perhaps copyright or likeness issues -<br />
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<br />
'''Licensing, yeah.'''<br />
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They played a first-to-100 deathmatch using all four Bond characters. Neither the first-to-100 option nor All Bonds mode is in the game, and presumably that ROM was never saved. No one can play that except those four developers on that day, and yet we have the oral story of them doing it. That's really, really cool, because you can very much imagine what it would be like in their office in the countryside at Rare, playing that match that day. It's very remarkable. As the story goes, it was like 99 to the third and fourth guy, so it came down to the last kill, which is unbelievable. [Note: source reads "1999 to the third and fourth guy"; interpretation unclear.] That's one thing that's truly amazing. I had a second piece, but I'm sure I'll cycle back to it later.<br />
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<br />
'''For sure. Just to hop forward a little bit here: you had an interview with Dr. Doak. He reached out to you, I believe, is that correct?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, this was 2017, in the early days, just when I was starting SpeedLore and catching a lot of people's attention. He reached out, and eventually we connected, and I was able to pick his brain on a lot of things about the game. Two things that I particularly wanted to talk to him about, to see if they could be broken for speedrunning purposes, were the nature of out-of-bounds clips and the nature of Natalya's timer on Control.<br />
<br />
As it appears, Natalya on Control sounds like it will probably never be broken. She has to hack away at the computer terminal for about two and a half minutes, and the game literally asks, "Have two and a half minutes elapsed, yes or no?" There's no way to speed that up. If there was, we could save six minutes of total time on Control. That's always kind of been this holy grail in GoldenEye. The other thing is out-of-bounds clips. It sounds from that conversation that out-of-bounds clips are rare in GoldenEye. They are possible, but you would have to find a way to clip back in-bounds, which is this ultimate... We're getting into a fourth, fifth dimension kind of tier, just so far-off, insane things that will probably never happen.<br />
<br />
That was cool. In the past year or so, I've been trying to revisit some of my old content that didn't make it as public as perhaps it should. That was one interview. The audio was really bad when I first recorded it, since again, I was kind of new to all this, and I had a guy remaster it, then I put it aside on SoundCloud. I just figured I would post it on YouTube to a wider audience a few months ago. It's cool. Part of the archeology is not only finding an artifact buried, but where can you display it and share it with people so they can learn from it too?<br />
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'''Right, right. I'm very happy that you shared that on YouTube, because it's going to get so much more of an audience that way. The whole point of communicating history is to actually communicate it. I think you made the right choice there. I'm very surprised that he reached out to you personally. As someone who interviews people, that's a rare and flattering thing.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. 2017 in speedrunning content was really this kind of crazy era. The Twitch boom came about in late 2012, 2013, and got a lot of people interested in speedrunning. We had these streams with hundreds or thousands of viewers of people speedrunning games for the first time, giving exposure to all this. The GDQ marathons took place in this era as well. People were pumped and excited and it got a huge audience. At the same time, a lot of people didn't really know what they were watching. People would ask why this was great: "Oh, Streets Agent 1:12, amazing," but they didn't know what made it amazing. I felt called to explain what goes into it and why it's cool.<br />
<br />
At the same time, I know there were guys like Summoning Salt and Bismuth and the late ApolloLegend and a couple others. Early 2017 is when we all started doing that. I guess it was so new and novel at that time that a lot of the developers took notice. It was almost the first time, maybe, that something they had put so much life, energy, and passion into was being delved into by someone else who also had passion, but from a different angle.<br />
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'''Right, I can definitely see that. You'd be surprised how many developers and former staff are so excited, and have so much energy and things to say about their old projects, and just never get a chance. I'm very surprised that he reached out to you personally. Would you ever be interested in doing further GoldenEye interviews with additional staff?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, certainly. There's an endless amount of questions and things to ponder, and different people remember different things. It would be amazing to chat with anyone else about the game. Certainly the Rare games and N64 games are my bread and butter. Anyone like that, it would be amazing to talk to.<br />
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<br />
'''When you interviewed Dr. Doak, did you have questions prepared, or were you doing that off the cuff?'''<br />
<br />
I had a few questions, particularly about the out-of-bounds, the Control skip, and a few other things. I did send them to him beforehand, and I think he messaged one or two of the other developers to ask if they remembered anything about those elements.<br />
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<br />
'''Oh, wow. You should see if you could reach out to some other developers. I could absolutely see Gamer Folklore having an interview format, once a month, or more realistically every few months with the work that you need to put in. You have a platform for it. With Dr. Doak, you can go to him and be like, "Hey, those other developers that you were talking to, are they interested in coming on the show and speaking for an hour or so?" I think that would be super cool.'''<br />
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'''It's also another thing that I personally deal with in my own work: having to speak about something I'm very passionate about, but always doing so from a secondary source. Being able to speak to the person who actually did that thing and move that source from secondary to primary, especially someone with your perspective and your audience, I think that would be super cool.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. One thing you find out talking with developers, and I've seen it a few times on other platforms when a developer calls into a marathon setting, is that oftentimes the speedrunners actually end up knowing more than the developers, or at least equivalent information from a different angle. There's this interesting song and dance: oh, the speedrunners discovered this bug, something that maybe the developers are a bit ashamed of at first, and the developers are like, okay, this is probably why that happened. That's always cool to see.<br />
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<br />
'''Right, right. Oh, we didn't set our surface collision quite properly enough, and now they've been exploiting it. God, I don't remember what GDQ it was, but it was Blast Corps on the N64, and they had one of the developers from Rare hop in and comment on the entire run. That was a blast.'''<br />
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'''When you said that, I think of... I want to say they had an EarthBound speedrun where they had some of the original developers, like Shigesato Itoi, watching, and it was very cool. I remember the speedrunner saying something like, "God, this game is so broken." To them, they meant we know a lot of exploits and we can do a lot of things with that game. You go to a Japanese developer and you say, "Hey, that game that you love, that you put so much work into, it's broken." I was just like, oh, oh no, no, no. You could see the developers trying to argue against it, like, "Oh, well, we didn't know it was broken at the time." I'm like, guys... I'm getting off topic here, but man, it was hard to watch.'''<br />
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Right. It gets into the tact of these discussions. It doesn't come from a place of any ill will. It just comes from different perspectives.<br />
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'''Right. There's a language barrier there and all that stuff. Realistically, that's not the responsibility of the speedrunners to navigate. There should have been a host who said something, or maybe someone who goes to the speedrunners in advance and says, "Hey, listen, you're dealing with a language barrier here. Maybe don't call the game broken. Say that the community has learned lots of exploits and has a lot of techniques that we can apply." I don't want to sound like I'm poo-pooing anyone there.'''<br />
<br />
You touched on another interesting point when it comes to communication about these things: not everyone has it in them to communicate in that kind of clear and tactful way. Certainly when I was first making videos about speed and history, I realized that a lot of it was just translating stuff that had been poorly communicated over the years into a more palatable way.<br />
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'''Yeah, absolutely. Communication in history is a big problem, which is why I like your channel so much. When you focus on the human side, it's a lot easier. Because we're all human, it's easier to fall into a polite and natural tone of speech. You don't really run into that problem as much when you're speaking about it, especially speaking as someone who actually knows the stuff. I also like that you know most of the people you're speaking about, either personally or on some intimate level. They're not just some guy you looked up on Wikipedia. This whole interview is just going to be me praising you for stuff, but I love that you do that.'''<br />
<br />
That's true. I always try to keep my stories more like that. Look, there's always the latest internet drama and some crazy scandal in speedrunning, and I've never tried to chase those too much. I did earlier in my career when I was trying to get my footing, but then I realized, okay, I have no unique perspective to offer on this story. Anyone could replace what I have to say about it, so it's much less meaningful. I would much rather tell stories where I have a unique insight, or at least a platform from which to speak more authoritatively.<br />
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'''Yeah, definitely. Also, just from a giving-back-to-the-community perspective, you put in so much work. There aren't really a lot of people doing oral history stuff, and there aren't people looking at the human side. So much gaming history is limited to the digital domain: the Sonic 2 Simon Wai prototype and Hidden Palace Zone and all the digital stuff. All the oral history stuff, all the more human memories, get shoved to the side. That sucks, because there's only so many bits in a prototype ROM. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here.'''<br />
<br />
It's okay. What do these bits represent on the human level? One thing I love talking about lately, and I mean in a handful of videos like this, is the unique childhood memories as they pertain to these games. One example that jumps to mind is this guy who couldn't beat Wizpig in Diddy Kong Racing. He played dozens and dozens of times in that race, and then finally Wizpig fell off the track and got stuck, and he could beat him. As far as I know, that's never been replicated, but what is there in the bits of the game that shows it could happen? If you know about the game and you know about Wizpig's model and stuff, it makes enough sense.<br />
<br />
It's like, what happened on that day to that person to experience that? Can we revisit that memory? Does it matter? What does it represent? I just think that part of it is so cool: these things that are rare, but sort of weirdly shared memories between a very small handful of people.<br />
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'''Definitely. It seems like as time goes on, that shared group of people, especially for the N64 in particular, gets smaller and smaller. Do you ever get that feeling that your audience is shrinking, or that you need to do more to retain the audience you have?'''<br />
<br />
To some extent, but at the same time, I know a lot of the guys who watch my content are guys my age and older, and life just gets busier. I certainly experience that too. At the same time, I like to put stuff out there so it's there and can be referenced later. Look, no one is still alive that remembers the French Revolution or Roman times, and yet we still find that history intriguing and compelling. With World War II, we're getting to a point where very few people are still alive from that, but that history is still important. Is the history of speedrunning equally important to these things? Of course not. In a weird way, I'm fortunate that I can do it for the sake of doing it to a large extent, and whatever comes from that is whatever comes from that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it's a good way of looking at it. You were from about 2005 to maybe 2012 - let's start at 2012. You returned to the game, and I think a large part of that was Twitch happening. How did you feel Twitch changed the landscape of speedrunning, as someone who had been there to experience it without Twitch?'''<br />
<br />
Twitch changed it immensely. At the same time, I also wonder how much of it was just improved internet speeds and people being more online, but they all go hand in hand. You can't have a live stream platform like Twitch without people being online more and better internet speeds. It just completely gave a newer, wider audience to speedrunning. The biggest stream at this time was Siglemic doing 120 stars in Super Mario 64. That's a very palatable, easy speedrun to follow, because a lot of people have played this game. You collect all 120 stars; very simple to follow.<br />
<br />
I thought, how do I translate something like that into the GoldenEye realm? It doesn't translate as well, but beat the game as fast as possible, sure. Beat it on Agent difficulty from Dam to Cradle; let's say it takes about 20 minutes. Then I coined the 100% category: beat it on 00 Agent and get all the cheats. That doesn't flow very well either, because you have to go back and play levels for the target times. One or two guys had done that before in the community, but literally only one or two guys.<br />
<br />
Especially at that time, SpeedRunsLive was another website that served as a main community hub, in a way we don't really see anymore. Things get so fragmented these days. There are so many different groups and people who stay disparate. For anyone who speedran on Twitch, SpeedRunsLive was the hub. If your favorite streamer wasn't live, you would go there and find someone streaming a game you liked and watch that stream and hang out. It became this perpetual hub, certainly for one or two years, maybe more, where everyone was connected in it together. That's just not something we see on the internet these days anymore.<br />
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<br />
'''No, no. Community is important, especially with the Elite. Do you feel the Elite was one of the earliest, more tightly knit game communities that's still around?'''<br />
<br />
Absolutely. I know there are a handful. The Mario Kart guys have a really tight community for Mario Kart 64, and all the other Mario Karts flow from there. There are a handful of others. Especially to have a stable website, a stable forum, to have this kind of community hub and have these characters, your few main cast characters and supporting cast who weave in and out of the community at various times, you can weave together this overarching story of what happened there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I like the term cast, because I think, especially through your videos, a cast and a family would be a good way of describing the GoldenEye speedrunning community. I thank you for showing the human side and the familial side of the community.'''<br />
<br />
I appreciate that. It's just like a large town or community. Who are all the people? What are they like? You get into these endless interpretations of life. At the end of the day, it just is life in a microcosm. What does it all mean? Why are we here? What are we doing? These are the same questions we ask about life, and that's what it comes down to.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. The Elite is also interesting in that it's caused you a lot of personal stress and drama, but I'm sure it's also been there for you for a lot of your own trying times.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. Believe me, there are many nights where I ponder, what if none of this happened? What if I went on and just lived a normal life and never got involved in any of this gaming stuff?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ryan, the attorney.'''<br />
<br />
Right. Who knows? At the same time, you wonder about life and destiny, as silly as that sounds, because at the end of the day we're talking about video game history online. There's nothing like it online. Well, there's probably things like it, but they're getting further and further between in the modern age. That's something I wonder about my work too: can I make some kind of community that fills that void that is missing from the modern era? How do we go about all that?<br />
<br />
Look, I had something like over 20,000 forum posts on the Elite, and in the various chat rooms over the years, I'm sure hundreds of thousands of lines of text. What does all that history mean? There are others who have had contributions of that size. Obviously you live your great moments, great successes of achieving world records or whatever, but also not-as-great moments where you got in a spat with somebody, or you spilled your guts in a way you look back on and think you shouldn't have. Two hundred years from now, if it's preserved, I think that's almost an important part of the greater good: to be able to look back and see what life was like in this era, sort of at the dawn of the internet.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, definitely. It's also going to be funny in 200 years, when we're both gone, what's preserved of us. If you look at what's preserved from an ancient civilization, ancient Egypt or Sumer or something, none of it's really community drama. You're working on cuneiform tablets or whatever. You have to write about the taxes and the grain. You don't have time to talk about how so-and-so was upset by whatever.'''<br />
<br />
'''Now, so much of what's preserved of us is forum posts and messages and all this online digital record, and so much of that is going to be, unfortunately, drama. It makes me think about the presence that I'm leaving behind. If someone looks back on me and tries to chronicle Ashley in 200 or 500 years, are they going to see mostly drama? Are they going to see mostly other work? It's something I think about a lot.'''<br />
<br />
Me as well. That's certainly why, especially in the last handful of years, probably almost a decade now - I guess you grow up to a large extent, and it's like, okay, let's try to put goodness out there rather than getting involved in all this drama and flame wars and stuff. Although I say that, and then it's like, you read the thread about what is the ultimate truth, and these flame wars between Marc Rützou and Karl Jobst. Man, there's a reason why drama and gossip have prevailed in human history. It has an appeal that does something to us on some level. I try generally to put out goodness and reason in recent times, and I hope to mostly do that for the rest of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You were always a fairly stable member of the Elite, relatively. You did have your rambunctious stuff, but for the most part there were definitely bigger, hotter personalities. You've seen those personalities at their youngest and most volatile, causing all this drama, and now you're still talking with those people, or you've seen them grow up and now they're adults. I don't really have much of a question here, but I just think it's very fascinating to know someone who was crazy in the community and now they're a father or something.'''<br />
<br />
Sure. I suppose in grand terms, if you grew up in a small town or a middle-sized town, you might have these memories of someone in high school who was absolutely crazy, and now they're a responsible father and member of the community. I guess it's not that different from the real world, and there's some element of respect to leave a bit of the past in the past.<br />
<br />
A good example is I met TrueFaith Clemens once in my life, in 2017. We went to see the solar eclipse of 2017 in Kansas City. This is a guy who I'd had many flame wars with over the years. We competed in GoldenEye, where he usually got the better of me, with many intense discussions and trolling and so on. When we met in the Kansas City airport, we just shook hands and agreed: look, the past is in the past. It's all good. We hung out and had a great time together for those few days. I think that's what it's all about. There is that element of respect that I hope most people still have these days.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah. Being there in person, it's a lot easier to understand the human element, that the other person is actually a human being. Without that experience, they're text on a screen. You lose everything. Obviously I don't need to tell you this, but being able to see someone in person does so much, which is why I'm a big fan of video calls like we're doing now.'''<br />
<br />
I agree. It's not even just that they're text on a screen; they're almost like a reflection of your world at that time. It's almost like a sparring partner. It's almost like finding Dark Link in the Water Temple. These other people are just text avatars, and you might be in a dark place or a lonely place, in a basement on your computer in the year 2009 or whatever. Everyone is just kind of looking for a punching bag, or whatever the case may be, and it can lead to not-amazing places. Getting out there and meeting people and interfacing with people does make a positive difference.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. With your YouTube channel, you've had it since 2006, but you were mainly using it to host a few GoldenEye videos. Then I think you had a technique video, and I can naturally see the progression to you hopping on your mic and starting to narrate. Was there a conscious decision in switching to a more documentary style of content?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of things happened there. Being someone who's online, I've been active on a lot of websites here and there. When social media comes out, you make an account and see what it's all about. I had YouTube since back then and posted mostly raw speedruns, to share with the community or post them as video proof.<br />
<br />
Then a couple of things happened around 2014, 2015. One is that at that point in my life, in my mid-twenties, I went back to school, to college, to do a broadcasting program. In a lot of ways it was, okay, I'm streaming on Twitch and making content, but it was a more official way to appease your parents to a large extent. I actually did get a lot out of going back to school for a two-year diploma. I learned the Adobe software suite, which Adobe kindly gives out to college students to get them hooked for life, and I learned about content making and editing, just the basics.<br />
<br />
Then at AGDQ 2015, and I talked about this in a video not too long ago, I met a fellow who went by Ari2929, and we engaged in that whole International Track & Field 2000 arc where he set a world record in the back room of the GDQ. Ari had a monetized channel on YouTube back then. He was doing montage compilations, Call of Duty snipe montages. He showed me the ways: this is what you do. That added another element of how I can do this at a more professional level, or at least at some kind of revenue-earning level, which certainly helps. That meeting, and then going to school for it, is sort of what really ramped me up to start producing on a more serious documentary-historian level.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was SpeedLore your first attempt at a show or a format? What did the process of creating the first content on your channel look like?'''<br />
<br />
Two other main pieces of content come to mind before even SpeedLore, probably from about 2015. I did one video, kind of a pre-SpeedLore pilot, about Streets Agent 1:12. Lockwood gets Streets 1:12, an amazing video, and a reaction comes of it, but people don't really know what's going on. So I did a video explaining that level.<br />
<br />
Then, also in 2015, I think it was September or so, one night online people were discussing who is Cowan Haines, who is Dark Light 93. I did an impromptu fireside recording sharing what I knew about that character: someone who made a hundreds-of-pages-long fake speedrun wiki article detailing this fantasy career about getting hundreds of world championships in various games. I went over that. Those were my two kind of impromptu pieces of content that just took off.<br />
<br />
Then in early 2017 I decided, let's have a go at this. Owing to the Streets 1:12 video and that pilot SpeedLore episode, I thought, how can I parlay off that, how can I keep going? Frigate Secret Agent is a level with a lot of history, so I dove in from there, and it worked out, and I just kept rolling with it.<br />
<br />
In terms of preparation for a general SpeedLore episode: go to the world record history page, which I'm thankful the Elite has in great detail, so a lot of that work is done for me already. Go there, open the tab of every single world record ever achieved, fill in any gaps, open those tabs and videos and forum posts, go through them, and tell the story. I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but that's really all there is to it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I get it. How long does it take you to write your scripts?'''<br />
<br />
SpeedLores are generally completely unscripted. When I was doing them, I would do an introduction and an outro, "Hello, my friends, welcome to SpeedLore," but generally they were completely unscripted. It was just an hour to sometimes three hours of me talking with the world records on the screen. In the modern era with Twitch chat, I can kind of banter back and forth with chat, and a lot of times someone in chat brings up something, or I add in a run to the SpeedLore. That's always been a cool part of it too.<br />
<br />
In terms of writing a video script, it depends. Some scripts I work on for years and barely come back to. Other times I'll write a whole 15-minute video in the course of one night. I guess, as a typical writer does, sometimes you're on and sometimes you're not.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''On that note, and I've said this before, you do have some real talent in storytelling, and oral history in particular. Where do you think those skills in communication, with a history lean, came from in you?'''<br />
<br />
I was going to say it's hard to say, but something does come to mind. It connects to maybe the very beginning of this conversation. On one hand, I was not really a huge reader of novels, generally speaking, after the age of 10 or 11. I kind of got bored with them, but I was able to read from a young age, from about four years old. I would read typical books that young guys read, like the Hardy Boys, and various factual books, atlases and almanacs too, which is a nerdy thing for a four - or six-year-old to be reading. I think a lot of this storytelling probably comes from reading about trivia and watching videos about hockey from back then.<br />
<br />
One thing that jumps to mind: I had a video from 1997, when I would've been eight years old, about the story of the 1972 Summit Series, which was this massive Cold War on ice between Canada and the USSR in hockey. An eight-game series, full of lore and just this insane competition. Four games took place in Canada, four games took place in the Soviet Union, and there was the assembling of this Team Canada against the Soviets, who had been playing together for years, and how it all played out. There was this great multi-VHS set that I had as a kid, and I watched that story play out and learned from it.<br />
<br />
I had other hockey videos too, about early Hall of Famers from the 1920s and stuff. In a way, these were sort of early proto-YouTube. Someone could do a deep dive today, a three-hour deep dive on the 1972 Summit Series. I would say learning about sports and hockey as a young boy is probably what taught me a bit of the storytelling: how to lay out stories in a competitive setting. What were the stakes? Who were the competitors? How did it play out?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I almost wonder if the sports nature of hockey and that whole vocabulary, talking about competitors and stakes like you were saying, played into how you speak about GoldenEye now.'''<br />
<br />
That's exactly what jumped to mind when you asked me that question. It was something I would get into flame wars about back, say, 10, 12 years ago: comparing speedrunning to sports. A lot of people online on Reddit and Twitter hated whenever I would do it, but there are certainly comparisons to be made. Tons of them, right? It was just internet nerds being internet nerds.<br />
<br />
I grew up watching sports. I played the majority of my early speedrunning career on this 27-inch tube CRT that only had a coaxial input, no composite, so it was terrible. On that TV where I got my early world records, I also watched Tiger Woods's 2005 Masters, where he chips in on hole 16 for a birdie against Chris DiMarco and then goes on to win in a playoff. I watched these insane sports stories play out in that same spot where my early speedrunning career took place.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you still watch a lot of sports? Do you still consider yourself a big sports guy?'''<br />
<br />
I do. Sometimes I wonder, should I make a sports channel? It may end up coming to that. Again, I was talking about speaking from a unique perspective, so I kind of go in a more niche direction. I was watching the Olympics there in 2026. I actually have a whole Olympics iceberg made that I've been meaning to do for years, but it'd be a three - or four-hour video, and the IOC is extremely fussy with copyright and stuff. It's like, how do I present this in a good way, and delve in from the basics of Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt to these obscure controversies, like the 1948 Olympics where the ice conditions were terrible, and stuff like that?<br />
<br />
I do love sports and sports history just as much as gaming history, maybe even more. It just so happens that gaming is where I'm more directly connected and where I tell those stories.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. Man, you should absolutely do a sports channel. I know we were talking about it earlier with the hockey stuff, but I would be so much more interested in sports if someone talked about it like speedrunning.'''<br />
<br />
It's a good thought. What comes to mind there is the channel TierZoo, who talks about biology and evolution from a gaming and Smash perspective. How much do you lean into the gimmick, I suppose? Is my voice and the music I use familiar enough to carry these sports stories? Perhaps, perhaps not. It's something I certainly hope to get going. I've been meaning to do it for five years, so hopefully not too much longer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''At some point you rebranded your YouTube channel from OurWhiteGoose to Goose's Gamer Folklore and broadened the focus beyond just GoldenEye, which is how we get the modern channel. What was behind that shift?'''<br />
<br />
A lot of it is, how much can you talk about one game? That's certainly a large factor. I had been doing a bit of non-GoldenEye stuff even before then. One thing I noticed with myself in comparison to my contemporaries, guys like Summoning Salt and Bismuth and others: they were really, really good at focusing on the technical aspect, which is great, and people certainly want to see that. I often found the technical stuff a bit too dry, or it wasn't my strength, or frankly, I didn't want to edit 100 layers in Premiere with all these keyframes to show some technical thing.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A hundred percent.'''<br />
<br />
I would get a bit of criticism for it. Some people would be like, oh, the technical explanation isn't exactly correct. It was kind of a way of me leaning into, okay, the focus on my channel's not going to be on that. It's going to be more about the broader stories and what they mean. I also wanted at some point to have a consistent handle across all platforms. At that point I was figuring out post-Twitch thoughts about expanding beyond just Twitch and YouTube, and I settled on the Gamer Folklore name.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To touch on that, there's only so much to talk about with GoldenEye, and this is something you've even theorized about with your theoretical 0.00 speedruns: the thought that there's only so much to the game, there's only so much you can do in it. I'm just curious about your thoughts on the limitedness of GoldenEye, the finiteness of what you're able to do in the game in terms of community, because it's something that's been on your mind, I feel.'''<br />
<br />
That's been an interesting course of discussion over the past year or two in the community itself. We touched on it a lot during the recent quest to break the 1:10 barrier in the game: how much more can we push it? I guess the conclusion a lot of people came to is that there may still be a fair bit of juice to squeeze from the game. When there was this push to cut a few more seconds and get under one hour, ten minutes total time, all of a sudden we cut six seconds in the course of a couple months and found this new strategy on Train Agent, which is insane. Nobody thought this was possible.<br />
<br />
I just described it as that kind of asymptote that you're always approaching but never getting to. I think that's true of almost every speedgame to a large extent. Some of them are more in the first vertical slide, where there's still a ton to do. It's like approaching a black hole: you only see how much more there is as you approach it, and time slows down. Certainly there will be a time when there's nothing left to do.<br />
<br />
Then you get into these ideas of, well, what if there's some record that you could achieve, like Aztec 00 Agent, pinball through the glass, surviving the one-in-a-billion run that would take you a lifetime of attempts? Is it worth it for any human to go about and do that? What does that mean? A lot of guys in the game are playing these sort of side leagues now, enemy rockets, fast animation, and having fun with that. Then you take a step back and look, like, well, this is one game. There are tens of thousands of games. Could they all be played like this? You kind of step into this endless ocean of infinite content that you can never even begin to approach over the course of a lifetime. At the end of the day, I guess it just is what it is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I think that is where the heart of the question is: do you want to get out of the kiddie pool of GoldenEye? You can see the edges of the pool; there's only so much there. I think for a lot of people, they've spent most of their lives building up the muscle memory for this one specific game and its inputs.'''<br />
<br />
'''It almost makes me want to say, okay, go to the Rare guys, get a few developers together, give them some game design software or something, and let's make a GoldenEye 2: same control scheme, you can use all the same muscle memory, but new levels, new stages. Have you ever considered the GoldenEye community and their abilities applied to GoldenEye ROM hacks? That isn't something you really see too much of, I don't think.'''<br />
<br />
That's been a big question for me too, because I look on YouTube and I see these guys doing really well with Mario and Zelda ROM hacks. I think, what if we could make a bunch of GoldenEye ones? There are a handful out there, no doubt, but for some reason they just don't translate in the same way. They're kind of too unfamiliar. When you play a Zelda or Mario ROM hack, it feels like the same game, whereas in GoldenEye it kind of doesn't. I think so much of GoldenEye is tied to that memory of those specific levels from back in the day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''When you change those levels -'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. When you change the stage entirely, it's like, well, what are the objectives? It's less meaningful, in the silliest way, because is any of it meaningful? Then it becomes, well, what's the point in grinding for a hundred hours on this level that some other person made up? I do remember back in the day speedrunning and going through the cycle of levels and thinking, I wish there were more levels to play. Of course, if there was a GoldenEye 2, it'd be great.<br />
<br />
Now, someone would say that Perfect Dark is the GoldenEye 2, and maybe The World Is Not Enough is the GoldenEye 3, which I have tried to rejuvenate recently to some success. It's been cool to see some developments in that game from a speedrunning perspective. At the end of the day, you also wonder, okay, this was all great. Is it time to go outside and just go for a long walk instead?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I almost wonder if seeing the end of GoldenEye makes people consider what they've been doing with it and ask questions that maybe they're not immediately ready to answer, in terms of the investment that's taken them there.'''<br />
<br />
Right. It's this very weird thing. The meaning of anything is such a weird thing to contemplate. There's some belief that GoldenEye and Mario and Zelda sold millions and millions of copies, so to compete at one has some meaning, because a few million people in this world understand what it's like to play it or experience it. When you get to a ROM hack, well, maybe a few hundred people at most understand it. Does that inherently mean the meaning of it is less significant? The ROM hackers are cool, and sometimes I watch these ROM hack GoldenEye stages, but it's just something you can't help but feel when you're playing and experiencing that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. I don't know if there's a way to ever get around that. A lot of the appeal of the Elite and GoldenEye speedrunning is trying to find creative ways to get time saves in a shorter and shorter window. The effort that you put in increases as that starts to shrink, but it means that the people who do actually make time saves in that small window are doing so more creatively.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. You kind of approach this last frontier of that ability to save time, especially with the modern emulator tools. We see this handful of characters who really sink their teeth into decompiling the ROM and looking at exactly what makes things tick. I see a lot of this in Pokémon Snap lately. There's this fella Icy, who was a big GoldenEye and Perfect Dark delver in that sense, and now he's taking Pokémon Snap and really diving into what makes the characters spin a certain way, what setups are viable for a high score.<br />
<br />
It's kind of like you only get one crack at the can before you solve everything, and then it's like, well, what's left? I know some people wonder about artificial intelligence and machine learning on these games. For some reason, I just don't think that's going to be very fruitful.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Agreed.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I don't know if they're going to be able to understand what it's like to play these games and solve them in any more meaningful way than we already have. Maybe in 10 or 20 years we'll laugh at that, but I don't know. I think the decompilation of the ROMs and looking into the code is the last frontier of figuring out these games, and we're there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Once we run out of technical hurdles, what's left? Do we go back to the way it originally was, just creating new rules and new categories? Is that how you keep the game alive once you've pushed all the technical things?'''<br />
<br />
Right. That's what the GoldenEye community is faced with lately by doing these side leagues. People have thought about doing seasons, like, oh, you do a fresh rankings reset and this season -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's a great idea. Holy crap. Right.'''<br />
<br />
You can do that over and over. If you were so inclined, you could do it with any game. You could even do sports: a regular season of six months where whoever has the best eight times goes into a playoff showdown format.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would watch that. They have esports - what's it, Rocket League? There must be millions and millions of dollars dumped into Rocket League. Take one hundredth of those millions and dump it into GoldenEye. I think that would be so... Obviously there are licensing things, and that's why I think Rocket League has taken off so much: there are no weird licensing issues. Man, if you weren't making money off of it, if you were just doing it on YouTube, that's a fricking great idea. GoldenEye seasons.'''<br />
<br />
There are really endless ideas to keep competition going if you were so inclined, rather than just grinding out for one more second on the most difficult stage with the most difficult strategy. There's no end to making fun and competing if you want. Another question, on the total flip side, is: is it okay to let a game die? Is that okay, and everyone moves on? We've seen a lot of games that have basically died over time, and sometimes they get revived and sometimes not. In the course of your life, I guess that's just a philosophical question of what you want to do and what you don't want to do.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You eventually moved to Gamer Folklore. With the Gamer Folklore videos, I'd assume those are scripted to a certain degree, correct?'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. The main channel videos are almost entirely scripted. I've been experimenting lately with maybe scripting the first half and then just free-thinking the rest of it, and that's worked to some extent. Usually the fireside videos are unscripted as well. I'll have a loose outline and just tell a story by the fire about something. For the main channel videos I'll sit down and write a script, narrate it, and then edit the visuals on. The SpeedLores, where I'm going through the tabs and watching the videos live, are the unscripted ones.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was including the human element a conscious part of Gamer Folklore? Was that something you wanted to do going in, or was that just a result of you speaking personally and the way all this stuff naturally came out?'''<br />
<br />
I think more of the latter. It's just how I learned to tell stories, and what makes the stories, frankly, more interesting is sharing at least a bit of the background of these people. That is something I balance with as well, because a lot of the speedrunners didn't sign up to be public figures. How do I balance that on YouTube? How much of the backstory do I go into with these guys, and how much do I leave a bit of anonymity? I'm always trying to weigh that. Look, it's well known with YouTube that thumbnails with a face in them get more clicks than those without. The human story is always the most important story, no matter what.<br />
<br />
A great human story that comes to mind, which I've never really delved into, a quick one, is PerfectAce, the greatest player in GoldenEye and Perfect Dark history. He joins the forums at 10 years old, claiming he's from Pakistan. This is an unbelievable story at the time. No one from Pakistan is on the internet, let alone having a Nintendo 64, let alone speedrunning GoldenEye. What went into all that? As I know him more and he becomes a good friend of mine, I learn bits of the story. We both wondered, could he have had the only N64 in Pakistan in the early 2000s? The answer is he may actually have.<br />
<br />
You could almost make a legit award-circuit documentary on that: his journey going to England as a young boy and coming back to Pakistan and playing N64 as a sort of refuge from the world. That to me is more interesting than the frame on which the guard opens the gate, although that can be an interesting story in its own right in the right place.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh man, I would absolutely pay for an Elite movie. You know it has enough history, and there's enough story there to make a full documentary.'''<br />
<br />
Eons upon eons of content. Something that comes to mind on the internet is this idea that the notorious Chris Chan is the most documented person on the internet, and people have made dozens of videos about that. You could easily make dozens and dozens of videos about the Elite and everything that's gone into the people speedrunning the game and playing it and where we are now. There's no doubt in my mind. If I had all the time in the world and more, you could make a hundred-part series about this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh man. Okay, so that's the next project for you, right?'''<br />
<br />
Potentially. There are so many projects that I want to do that you just don't have the time for. I've certainly been planning on bringing back GoldenEye SpeedLore, the live presentations on stream, and I wonder, should I revisit the levels one by one again, or is there another format? Dive into them on a character-by-character basis, so the early records of Marc Rützou, the middle records of Marc Rützou, the later records of Marc Rützou, and paint that picture, going through character by character. Go through the community forum month by month: what was it like in January 2001, and the next month, and so on. These are things that I ponder deeply as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I would do all of them. That sounds like a great idea. I like your content and I would just love to see more of it. Another thing that I would love, and this is maybe just me as an interview person, is for you to do community interviews, because you would be the best person for it. You already know how to do an interview. You can do one without a script, which is fricking incredible. You already have a connection to all these people. Everyone trusts you and everyone likes you, and you already have the channel for it. Man, I would love to hear you sit down with a speedrunner, maybe once every few months.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. I actually had a plan to meet up with Ace over the winter break and do exactly that, and dive into all this kind of stuff. It didn't pan out, unfortunately. Hopefully it will in the future. In terms of that kind of content, I do have ideas to do it more as a one-off here and there, but as a series it could happen. There has been a guy in the community, Cal, who did a series called Mate Chat, where he would sit down with other Elites and have great conversations. Of course, it's a much smaller platform and it's niche content in itself, so it's hard to grow from just that. There are good conversations with community members that have gotten a few hundred views on YouTube, and they're cool things to check out. He does a good job with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Also the firesides: I love the firesides. I think they're one of the reasons why your channel and you are so special in the first place. One of many. I understand that you've had issues with access to the cabin and then you had to do them in a different place. Could you tell us about the firesides?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. The first handful I did were in the old family cabin, which was my grandmother's cabin. Basically, back in the '60s in Canada, a lot of people bought these lots outside of the city for a thousand bucks, which is about $10,000 today. These lots are $300,000 now, so a different time. They slowly but surely built these old cabins on them. Cottages: you'd have the family up in the summer and so on and so forth. A lot of my childhood summers were spent there. Every summer we'd go for two or three weeks, and I had a great time. It became this very special place to me.<br />
<br />
That setting, sitting by the fire telling a story, is literally as old as humankind. I would tell a handful from there, and they were wonderful. Then, as time goes by, especially with my grandmother, there's more extended family involved, and you get into the kind of family drama, estate drama and whatnot. My grandmother did pass a couple years ago now. Unfortunately, the cabin has left my side of the family. It's no longer mine, which is unfortunate.<br />
<br />
It becomes this chase: how can I get back to a similar cabin? I have been in one. I'm in one right now, actually, believe it or not, and I haven't been recording too many firesides. I did earlier in December. I'm here for a couple more months, so I could do some more. There's this chase of how to get to a permanent place and setup where I can tell these as more of my regular storytelling. Frankly, a studio like that, and really set it up well.<br />
<br />
Especially in the latter half of having that place, I was always kind of rushed when I was there. I couldn't stay there for too long, so I couldn't get the technical stuff set up, and that kind of hindered my storytelling ability.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. A studio would be super helpful. I think at this point you would benefit crazy from it.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. Give me two seconds, I'm just going to grab a beverage. I'll be right back.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, totally.'''<br />
<br />
I agree. It's the great chase: when and where and how can you make it happen? Sometimes I almost think about getting just a flophouse cabin, even six hours up north in the wilderness of Ontario, and literally just setting it up as a fireside studio for the sake of it, just to have a place. We'll see.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, yeah. It doesn't have to be actual fire either. As long as I can see something moving on the screen and I can hear the crackling, that good old Ocarina of Time torch crackling sound effect. I know that's not what you use, but I just - god, I love that sound effect.'''<br />
<br />
I get it. Last year I was renting a kind of cottage, and it had a gas fireplace, so there are a handful of firesides from there, and it's cool. The gas fireplace is more consistent, because you just flip it on and it works, so that was easy. Having the authentic wood-burning fire, there's just nothing like it. Then it just makes it so difficult, because everything has to work out perfectly. The tech has to be going perfectly. The fire has to be roaring away in just the right place. You have to give a good performance of telling the story in that particular moment. It's difficult to pull off.<br />
<br />
Again, I have the whole Nintendo 64 iceberg written out, and I did record it from my grandmother's cabin one of the last times I was in there, but it was rushed and I messed up the audio. I've tried to recover it, but been unsuccessful. So it's like, should I do that again from the fireside I'm at right now? The answer's obviously yes, but then at night I'm working on a different video or whatever the case may be, and I just haven't gotten there yet.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you ever get performance anxiety or any kind of stage fright?'''<br />
<br />
Not really. There are some nights where it's like, oh, I should record a fireside tonight, and you just don't feel like doing it, but that's more motivation than stage fright. Every creative and every person goes through that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you have issues with motivation or finding the time or the energy to put in the work for this?'''<br />
<br />
Sometimes, yeah. Certainly two years ago, I was really unmotivated and I was not posting a lot of videos, and one way or another I lit a fire under my ass and got out there. That's when I started renting these cottages in the wintertime, when they're a bit cheaper. Normally in Canada, a cottage is something you go to in the summer to go swimming and on the lake, so in the winter you can get them for a relatively cheap price. That's what I've been doing the past two winters, just a way to get myself out the door and do something, and get at least a fireside where I can record by.<br />
<br />
Certainly since the first year I did it, I did okay. This year, in the past nine months or so, I've been much more motivated and posting a lot more frequently, so I've been able to help that to a large extent.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The channel has over a hundred thousand subscribers. Did you ever see yourself taking off this much when you first started the channel?'''<br />
<br />
I would honestly say yes, as crazy as it sounds. Because the first SpeedLore video got a hundred thousand views, and I saw what other people in this space were doing and getting hundreds of thousands of views, millions of views, I knew that such a thing was possible. A lot of my contemporaries have even larger followings. At the same time, on the other side of the coin, there are a bunch of people who make really great content and have never taken off. So there is maybe a bit of luck involved, and then you get into that whole "luck is when opportunity meets preparation" type of mantra. You do see people who haven't taken off, and you see people who have, and you go, "Man, how did that guy get so big?"<br />
<br />
Look, when I'm making videos, it's like, okay, talk about GoldenEye, Mario, or Zelda; these sold eight million, ten million copies. There's that many people who know about the game. When I talk about Beetle Adventure Racing, which I might want to do here and there, okay, it sold 300,000 copies. What's that like? How convincingly can you tell a story when there are fewer stakes, because fewer people know about it? That's something I weigh often in my work.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Please cover Beetle Adventure Racing. You're speaking to someone who was a big fan of the game. I owned it as a kid. There's definitely less at stake with Beetle Adventure Racing than most of the mainline games you cover, but gosh, there's something weirdly charming about it. I want to say it was just a Need for Speed game that they reskinned with Beetles, or something like that. It didn't come from the most creative of studios, but there's something very creative about the end result. Maybe that was just me looking at it, because I was used to the N64 and Japanese-developed Nintendo games, so I started applying that lens to a Western racing game.'''<br />
<br />
You're bang on. I actually have talked about it in two of my more recent videos. In my most recent video I have a segment about it, and then in the comfy winter places one -<br />
<br />
<br />
'''The ski lodge one.'''<br />
<br />
Yes. There's literally enough to do a SpeedLore episode on all six tracks of Beetle Adventure Racing, I would say, so that alone could make content. Then the exploration of the game, which is another kind of mini niche that I sometimes delve into: there's a lot of cool stuff in that game too. You're right, it was a Need for Speed 64 that got reskinned into the Volkswagen Beetle, but Paradigm Entertainment was involved, big Pilotwings guys. There are all these cool hidden spots in the game to appreciate.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh man. There's a handful of videos that could certainly be made about Beetle Adventure Racing that I hope to incorporate soon.'''<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of Paradigm, I'm actually going to be talking to... I don't know if you know the soundtrack for Pilotwings 64, the jazzy, smooth jazz soundtrack? That was Dan Hess. I'm speaking to him next week or in the next couple of weeks, and I've never spoken to anyone from the early... I think they called it the N64 Dream Team, all those third-party Western developers that they got to support the N64. That'll be fascinating.'''<br />
<br />
'''You know me, I'm a Sega baby, so I can tell you all about the early Genesis and all that stuff, but the N64 was super out of my wheelhouse. Also, like you, I got started doing something very specific, and now I'm just at a point where I'm starting to branch out of Sega interviews. Perhaps that's why I'm so interested in speaking with you: because I'm applying what you've done to my own career at this point.'''<br />
<br />
That's cool. Pilotwings was one I never played growing up, but my pal Grav was one of the top runners of the game. Sometime during COVID, when the Nintendo Switch Online came out, I played Pilotwings. The Hang Glider theme is just unbelievable. A lot of people love Birdman, but Hang Glider is just so good. I played the game and beat it. I've done a few videos about that, and I have a few more on my master list.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All I have to ask him about is the inspiration there. I think the early N64 library, especially the introduction to 3D for a lot of Nintendo kids who had never seen 3D before - just establishing that sense of place and that level of quality. That actually ties into my next question, because you had a tweet in August 2024 that says, "The world you grew up in no longer exists." That is so very relevant and touching to me. Could you expand on your thoughts there?'''<br />
<br />
It is a bit of a common meme format. You see it in various niches; it almost becomes a bit of a cliche. One of the first usages of it is a little girl with the Twin Towers in the background, and that's where it comes from: the world you grew up in no longer exists, just a sign of how things change.<br />
<br />
I think in particular, something a lot of people discuss these days online is that this nostalgia for the '90s and early 2000s is so strong and palpable, more so than for other eras. Not to get too much into the real world, but a lot of people feel like a lot in the real world is on the decline one way or another, and so the '90s and 2000s were the last great era of humankind. Are we, the people who grew up in that era, the last arbiters of what the old world used to be like before whatever happens? Maybe that's the case, and maybe that is what calls to this nostalgic era, what evokes these powerful thoughts.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I'm right there with you. I think as time goes on, it's easier and easier to forget the past, because those memories get farther and farther away. Part of why I reached out for this interview is that there aren't many people keeping those memories alive. There are people talking about the digital stuff and the programming and the code of the games, but so much of what made the '90s special is all of the oral history stuff, the cicadas and the sunsets and all that stuff, yet no one outside of you is doing it, or preserving any of that, on this level. I wish there were more of you. I wish there were 10 more of you.'''<br />
<br />
I appreciate that. Look, I do too, to get more done, and also if they have a unique perspective. I've never had any PlayStation console, for example. That's a huge blind spot for me, because the PlayStation and Sega Dreamcast and whatnot have these similar memories and vibes.<br />
<br />
This gets into something that I love talking about every now and then, which is the kind of playground rumors and urban legends about games. Mew under the truck is the classic one, but there are these more obscure niche ones where it's like, why do so many people remember this game this way? Rainbow Road in Mario Kart 64 without rails, for example. Can we combine the two, the oral history with the code, and figure out what was going on there, and why someone saw it that way or remembered it another way?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, more interviews always help. Has your relationship with games, particularly GoldenEye, changed after so many years of documenting them as opposed to playing them?'''<br />
<br />
This hearkens back to earlier in the conversation, where I talked about being 14 and 15 and playing the games, thinking this is pointless and stupid, what am I doing, trying to find some meaning in it. I was streaming and actively playing the games quite a bit in 2017 and into 2018, after starting SpeedLore, and then I kind of stopped streaming and actively playing them. Look, that was a lot of fun. I was grinding for times and I got some amazing records in that era. On Dam 00 Agent I almost got the world record, and that was the whole story. I got Streets Agent 1:11, a few things like that.<br />
<br />
Sometime around 2018, I realized my time is better spent telling the stories and documenting it. I'm not Ace or Clemens or Marc Rützou. They're the ones better off playing the game, so I'm better off telling the story about it. You do see this in the field of sports too. The guys who write books or do the content and the broadcasting and the podcasts are often guys who weren't the star players, but played with the stars on some level. They were the third-liners in hockey, or the goalies, or whatever. They had that perspective. They were there, but maybe their talent is better spent telling the stories instead.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, right. I definitely get that. Where do you see Gamer Folklore in five to ten years?'''<br />
<br />
Look, who knows how the YouTube landscape will be, for one. I hope to be posting even more consistently and have greater stories. I've been meaning to make websites to document this further and more iron-cladly archive a lot of stuff, as well as the folklorization of it all, because archiving the primary sources and whatnot is important in terms of being able to pull from that and tell the stories. It's hard to say.<br />
<br />
The thoughts get to me of trying to build some kind of community like the old internet, to at least have the kind of heyday where people can seek a refuge from the rest of the world online. Continue to tell these stories and document this stuff. Look, maybe by then getting into other slightly more modern consoles as well, like GameCube and Wii and whatnot, but who knows how it'll all play out?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. From all your years communicating game history, what's rubbed off on you the most, or what's the most surprising takeaway, as someone who's been communicating it for so long?'''<br />
<br />
On one hand, I want to say just that so many people are interested. I do feel blessed that I can tell these crazy stories of sometimes just one or two guys who played a level in a video game for fun, and tens of thousands of people are listening and enjoying it. That's pretty cool, to just know that there are people out there who also appreciate that sort of thing. I would say really that's the ultimate takeaway.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, sometimes someone says, "Oh, you inspired me to play GoldenEye," and they've sunk hours and years into the game. In a way, sometimes I feel a bit melancholy about that. They're thankful for it, and I'm like, "Man, I'm sorry. I wasted your life." That kind of thought muddles with me sometimes as well, but not enough to stop doing what I'm doing, for sure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You had talked about meaning, and the importance of finding and making your own meaning. I think, like you just said, you establishing this channel allows others to find meaning in what you're talking about or in these old games. I'm a personal believer that you can learn things about yourself and better yourself from interacting with old games and understanding what you get out of it. So I think just you having your channel allows so many people to find their own meaning in it.'''<br />
<br />
That is a good way to put it, because perhaps when I mentioned that sometimes I feel bad about encouraging people to play the game, you're right, I'm prescribing my own interpretation of meaning to them. For them, the meaning might be something completely different, and might be something much more valuable and significant. I've heard from a lot of people who say they picked up GoldenEye speedrunning during a hard time in their life, when they were transitioning from one thing to another, or they were out of work, or going through a breakup or whatever. I guess if the meaning was meaningful to them, then that's important.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. I think that's one of the benefits of having a show: it's art. You don't know what other people are going to get out of it. I think you just being personable and so forthcoming in your own personality and what you're talking about really invites a lot of people into establishing that meaning. Whatever you're doing with your show, I think you're doing it right. I think you're succeeding.'''<br />
<br />
I very much appreciate that. I have no plans to stop anytime soon. In fact, only to accelerate. So there you go.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Awesome. What are you working on right now, just in your life or with the show in general? What's Goose up to?'''<br />
<br />
Literally right now I'm working on editing a video about the real-world geography of GoldenEye's locations. It'll be up in the next couple of days. That's the video I'm working on right this second. It starts with, is the Byelomorye Dam real? Is Severnaya a real radio facility? I delve into that. I just have piles of other videos that I'm always working on. Like I said, I have these icebergs on the back burner. There's never an end of ideas and formats to make. Sometimes they're just on the back burner for years, but I certainly have a list.<br />
<br />
I'm just trying to wade through it all and make what I feel inspired and inclined to make. On YouTube these days, these compilation videos and longer videos do well, so I'm always thinking about assembling those. I like to put in a bit of new information alongside some old classics. I'll probably make a few more of those coming up. Revisiting SpeedLore in some way, which I'm still trying to figure out, is certainly on my plate for the next little while.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Out of everything you've accomplished with the channel specifically, what are you the most proud of so far?'''<br />
<br />
Man, it's hard to say. Some videos really stick out. My 1080° Snowboarding Deadly Fall video is what I consider my masterpiece. My Top 10 Speedruns of the Decade was also one I put so much work into. It took a solid month and it really was a great video. I love that one. It's kind of a reference point: when people look at the 2010s in speedrunning, they can see what I picked as the most important speedruns of that era. So that one's really good as well.<br />
<br />
The Chicago Ghost video is amazing too, because that's a reference point: this perpetual mystery that may never be solved, but has evidence that it was something people experienced. Those three stick out as my three best. Then of course the whole SpeedLore series as a whole is pretty cool. At least giving the oral history of GoldenEye fairly completely at some point in time is pretty cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. You do receive a lot of feedback as to how the fans are enriched and appreciate your work.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. Sometimes maybe too much. When they start playing themselves, people want to get involved and be in the next SpeedLore. That's a thing that happens too. They want to say, "Oh man, how can I be the character whose story is told?" That's what inspires a lot of people to pick up the controller and play.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. All right. That was actually all the questions that I had, and we're just going over our time here, so we hit that perfectly. Did you have any questions for me before we hop off?'''<br />
<br />
Not really. I look forward to the interview being posted in whatever format you're going to do that. I was looking forward to this and I'm glad we chatted. I'm sure we could chat infinitely. Maybe we'll do it again and revisit it with some more topics and questions sometime. That was cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That would be super cool. Just speaking to you has been... I'm not normally this casual. I appreciate the vibe that you're giving off, which is also interesting from my perspective interviewing you, because you are a person I've personally seen on the other side of the screen quite a lot, but you've never seen me. So I kind of have a little bit of a head start: I know how he talks, I got the vibe. Man, I really appreciate you speaking with me today. This was super cool.'''<br />
<br />
Look, I appreciate it too. I've come across your site a few times doing research and whatnot. It's something that I'll try to pull from a bit more going ahead. I look forward to seeing it all posted. It was a pleasure. I appreciate the questions and the thoughts. I didn't know I was going to get so much into the sports stuff, but when I really think about it, it truly is a part of the origin story. So I appreciate you being able to pull that out as well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. So much of GoldenEye, and by extension speedrunning as a whole, because of all the influence there, is sports-based in the vocabulary we use to talk about it. Maybe some of that is coincidental, but I think there's a very interesting lineage to be drawn between sports and speedrunning, and the Elite and GoldenEye are a very core part of that, I think. That'll be for another conversation, but there's a very interesting story there.'''<br />
<br />
For sure. We'll see. Who knows if I'll be able to lay some of that out in my future work.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. If you need any help with anything Sega, just give me a call, give me an email, whatever. If you ever need Sega episode topics, which isn't really in your wheelhouse because you're an N64 guy, but if you ever do stray there, let me know. I can throw so many crazy mysteries at you. I'm getting prototypes and stuff too, so if you ever need content, I'll give you some juicy exclusive stuff.'''<br />
<br />
That'd be cool. Sometimes I make these compilations or whatever, and a handful of Sega mysteries would be sick, because it takes me years to get to them. Still, just to know of them and ponder them when I come across them would be cool. I'll send you an email a little bit later, and I'd love to hear a handful of that kind of stuff.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I'll definitely do that.'''<br />
<br />
Awesome. That's great. It was great to chat today. I certainly hope to keep in touch and chat again in the future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. Thank you so much again. I super appreciate this. You're wonderful. Thank you again.'''<br />
<br />
You too. It was amazing. Thank you, and stay true.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=File:RyanWhite.png&diff=177346File:RyanWhite.png2026-10-11T18:23:40Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Category:Photos of people</p>
<hr />
<div>== Summary ==<br />
[[Category:Photos of people]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Hidden_Palace:Todo&diff=176393Hidden Palace:Todo2026-09-22T00:21:41Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Redirected page to To do</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [[To do]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=To_do&diff=176392To do2026-09-22T00:20:58Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div><center>'''''HELP HIDDEN PALACE GROW!'''''</center><br />
<br />
<center>Hidden Palace always needs improvement. This is a list of '''to-do''' things you can do to help grow and improve the site. Anyone is welcome to contribute. If you find an error that is spread across multiple pages, please add it below. You may also edit this page as you see fit.</center><br />
<br />
==Wiki to-do==<br />
*Make [[Special:WantedPages|wanted pages]]<br />
*Utilize or delete [[Special:UnusedFiles|unused files]]<br />
*Find, upload, fix, or remove [[Special:WantedFiles|broken links]]<br />
* Dat/hash all files (drx)<br />
*[[:Template:Disambig]]<br />
*<s>Import the rest of the old site</s><br />
*<s>Integrate with TCRF</s><br />
*<s>Add some nav boxes</s><br />
*<s>Some prototypes has 0 bytes in the total size bit. Need fixed</s><br />
<br />
==Wiki bugs==<br />
===High priority===<br />
<br />
===Mid priority===<br />
*Non-template wiki functions like References and TOC lack padding, resulting in them siting erroneously close to page elements like text. (Retro had this same issue. Black Squirrel can help.) [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
<br />
===Low priority===<br />
*Many users report the View New Changes link on Recent Changes appearing when there are none. Potentially Cloudflare caching. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
<br />
==Suggestions==<br />
*A <tt>wiki-talk</tt> channel on the Discord server for discussing wiki matters like templates, bugs, usage questions, and improvements. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
*Separate [[:Template:User stats]] into individual components to provide flexibility for contributors uninterested in all four statblocks combined into one template. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
*An on-wiki Chicago styleguide and basic set of how-tos (template usage, best practices, etc) for new contributors. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
<br />
==Pages with only external downloads==<br />
<br />
{{#ask:<br />
[[Category:External_links_without_a_download]] <br />
|limit=100<br />
|format=category<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Pages with missing downloads==<br />
<br />
{{#ask:<br />
[[Category:Pages with no download links]] <br />
|limit=100<br />
|format=category<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==Pages with missing title screenshots==<br />
<br />
{{#ask:<br />
[[Category:Missing title screenshots]] <br />
|limit=100<br />
|format=category<br />
}}<br />
<br />
<br />
==Pages with missing screenshots==<br />
<br />
{{#ask:<br />
[[Category:Missing screenshots]] <br />
|limit=100<br />
|format=category<br />
}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Hidden_Palace:Todo&diff=176391Hidden Palace:Todo2026-09-22T00:20:53Z<p>CartridgeCulture: delete</p>
<hr />
<div>{{delete|Merged with [[To do]]}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Hidden_Palace:Todo&diff=176390Hidden Palace:Todo2026-09-21T23:06:28Z<p>CartridgeCulture: wip</p>
<hr />
<div><center>'''''HELP HIDDEN PALACE GROW!'''''</center><br />
<br />
<center>Hidden Palace always needs improvement. This is a list of things you can do to help grow and improve the site. Anyone is welcome to contribute. You may also edit this page as you see fit.</center><br />
<br />
==Wiki bugs==<br />
===High priority===<br />
<br />
===Mid priority===<br />
*Non-template wiki functions like References and TOC lack padding, resulting in them siting erroneously close to page elements like text. (Retro had this same issue. Black Squirrel can help.) [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
<br />
===Low priority===<br />
*Many users report the View New Changes link on Recent Changes appearing when there are none. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
<br />
==Suggestions==<br />
*A <tt>wiki-talk</tt> channel on the Discord server for discussing wiki matters like templates, bugs, usage questions, and improvements. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
*Separate [[:Template:User stats]] into individual components to provide flexibility for contributors uninterested in all four statblocks combined into one template. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
*An on-wiki Chicago styleguide and basic set of how-tos (template usage, best practices, etc) for new contributors. [[User:CartridgeCulture|CartridgeCulture]] ([[User talk:CartridgeCulture|talk]]) 23:06, September 21, 2026 (UTC)<br />
<br />
==To add==<br />
*Disambigs<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=DJ_GEMS_Demo_(prototype)&diff=176389DJ GEMS Demo (prototype)2026-09-21T22:41:26Z<p>CartridgeCulture: I can't get title=working, I'm assuming that function's under another name...</p>
<hr />
<div>{{Prototype<br />
|titlescreen=DJ GEMS Demo (prototype).png<br />
|Page name=DJ GEMS Demo (prototype)<br />
|title=D.J. GEMS Demo<br />
|status=Released<br />
|dumper=CartridgeCulture<br />
|releasedby=CartridgeCulture<br />
|filedumpdate=May 31, 2026<br />
|filereleasedate=September 17, 2026<br />
|origin_type=Cartridge<br />
|origin_labels=D.J. GEMS DEMO<br />
|game=DJ GEMS Demo<br />
|system=Sega Mega Drive<br />
|unreleased=Yes<br />
}}<br />
{{Download<br />
|file=DJGEMSDemo.zip<br />
|external=https://segaretro.org/File:DJGEMSDemo.zip<br />
}}<br />
'''D.J. GEMS Demo''' is a Genesis cartridge created in 1994 by Developer Technical Support's Ken Chao for departing Sega of America composer [https://segaretro.org/David_Javelosa David Javelosa]. Chao loaded Sega's existing GEMS Module Test Program with a collection of Javelosa's original GEMS tracks, producing what amounts to a demo tape in cartridge form for the artist.<br />
<br />
The demo surfaced publicly in May 2019 when one of Javelosa's game design students recognized the ''Sonic 2'' material during a class demonstration and shared it online, with [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJLkkOxRP8Y a recording soon appearing] on the artist's YouTube channel. It was later dumped by [[User:CartridgeCulture|Ashley Rojas]] in May 2026 and released the following September.<ref>[https://forums.sonicretro.org/threads/devstash-x-sega-retro-present-microwave-megaweek.44909/ DevStash x Sega Retro Present MICROWAVE MEGAWEEK - Sonic and Sega Retro Forums]</ref><br />
==Notes==<br />
{{Tcrf link|DJ GEMS Demo}}<br />
==Videos==<br />
<center><br />
<youtube heights="320" widths="224">j-oVtYBPXsA</youtube><br />
</center><br />
==Origin==<br />
<center><gallery mode=packed><br />
DJGEMS.jpg<br />
DJGEMS2.jpg<br />
</gallery></center><br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
*''[https://forums.sonicretro.org/threads/devstash-x-sega-retro-present-microwave-megaweek.44909/#post-1119024 Release thread]''<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
{{Prototype Footer|{{Navbox prototype|DJ GEMS Demo}}}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=DJ_GEMS_Demo_(prototype)&diff=176388DJ GEMS Demo (prototype)2026-09-21T22:36:00Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Prototype<br />
|titlescreen=DJ GEMS Demo (prototype).png<br />
|Page name=DJ GEMS Demo (prototype)<br />
|status=Released<br />
|dumper=CartridgeCulture<br />
|releasedby=CartridgeCulture<br />
|filedumpdate=May 31, 2026<br />
|filereleasedate=September 17, 2026<br />
|origin_type=Cartridge<br />
|origin_labels=D.J. GEMS DEMO<br />
|game=DJ GEMS Demo<br />
|system=Sega Mega Drive<br />
|unreleased=Yes<br />
}}<br />
{{Download<br />
|file=DJGEMSDemo.zip<br />
|external=https://segaretro.org/File:DJGEMSDemo.zip<br />
}}<br />
'''''D.J. GEMS Demo''''' is a Genesis cartridge created in 1994 by Developer Technical Support's Ken Chao for departing Sega of America composer [https://segaretro.org/David_Javelosa David Javelosa]. Chao loaded Sega's existing GEMS Module Test Program with a collection of Javelosa's original GEMS tracks, producing what amounts to a demo tape in cartridge form for the artist.<br />
<br />
The demo surfaced publicly in May 2019 when one of Javelosa's game design students recognized the ''Sonic 2'' material during a class demonstration and shared it online, with [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJLkkOxRP8Y a recording soon appearing] on the artist's YouTube channel. It was later dumped by [[User:CartridgeCulture|Ashley Rojas]] in May 2026 and released the following September.<ref>[https://forums.sonicretro.org/threads/devstash-x-sega-retro-present-microwave-megaweek.44909/ DevStash x Sega Retro Present MICROWAVE MEGAWEEK - Sonic and Sega Retro Forums]</ref><br />
==Notes==<br />
{{Tcrf link|DJ GEMS Demo}}<br />
==Videos==<br />
<center><br />
<youtube heights="320" widths="224">j-oVtYBPXsA</youtube><br />
</center><br />
==Origin==<br />
<center><gallery mode=packed><br />
DJGEMS.jpg<br />
DJGEMS2.jpg<br />
</gallery></center><br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
*''[https://forums.sonicretro.org/threads/devstash-x-sega-retro-present-microwave-megaweek.44909/#post-1119024 Release thread]''<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
<br />
{{Prototype Footer|{{Navbox prototype|DJ GEMS Demo}}}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=176239User:CartridgeCulture2026-09-18T22:08:14Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>[[File:MicrowaveMegaweek.jpeg|right|320px]]'''Ashley Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer and researcher specializing in [https://segaretro.org/Sega_of_America Sega of America], as well as the founder of the preservation platform [https://discord.gg/EFYKEyJgX8 DevStash]. Closely associated with [https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture Sega Retro], she primarily conducts [https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture#Interviews original interviews] with former developers, executives, and community members to preserve their unique perspectives on the game development industry. She is also experienced in writing company biographies on notable staff like [https://segaretro.org/Brenda_Cook Brenda Ross] and [https://segaretro.org/Tom_Kalinske Tom Kalinske], building large-scale research projects such as ''[https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_X-treme/Development Sonic X-treme]'' and [https://segaretro.org/Rocket_Science_Games Rocket Science Games], and is responsible for the dumping, scanning, and preservation of over 50+ pieces of long-sought internal development material.<br />
<br />
She works to take readers back in time through the eyes of those who lived it, and believes in the active preservation of our shared gaming history.<br />
<br />
<center>[https://www.linkedin.com/in/cartcult/ Contact me] | [https://www.patreon.com/cartcult Support my work]</center><br />
{{clear}}<br />
==Statistics==<br />
As of {{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY2}}, {{User stats}}<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 3; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Jon_Snoddy_(2026-02-14)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Jon Snoddy (2026-02-14)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mike_Wallis_(2026-02-16)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Mike Wallis (2026-02-16)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Andrew_Probert_(2026-03-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Andrew Probert (2026-03-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ryan_White_(2026-03-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ryan White (2026-03-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-03-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-03-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Senn_(2026-04-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Senn (2026-04-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Howard_Drossin_(2026-05-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Howard Drossin (2026-05-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Penders_(2026-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Penders (2026-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Marc_Dawson_(2026-05-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Marc Dawson (2026-05-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-05-30)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-05-30)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Al_Nilsen_(2026-06-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Al Nilsen (2026-06-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Payne_(2026-07-18)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Payne (2026-07-18)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bobby_White_(2026-07-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bobby White (2026-07-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Erik_Wahlberg_(2026-08-08)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Erik Wahlberg (2026-08-08)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Doug_Lanford_(2026-08-15)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Doug Lanford (2026-08-15)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Shrigley_(2026-08-17)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Shrigley (2026-08-17)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Greg_Fleming_(2026-08-22)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Greg Fleming (2026-08-22)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Satoshi_Yokokawa_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Satoshi Yokokawa (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dean_Sitton_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dean Sitton (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Foley_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Foley (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Curtis_Soldano_(2026-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Curtis Soldano (2026-09-13)]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==External links==<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture {{PAGENAME}}] at [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro]<br />
<br />
__NOTOC__</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=File:MicrowaveMegaweek.jpeg&diff=176238File:MicrowaveMegaweek.jpeg2026-09-18T22:06:49Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Userpage file</p>
<hr />
<div>== Summary ==<br />
Userpage file</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=CartridgeCulture&diff=176237CartridgeCulture2026-09-18T21:27:13Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Redirected page to User:CartridgeCulture</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [[User:CartridgeCulture]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=176143User:CartridgeCulture2026-09-16T20:40:41Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Ashley Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer and researcher specializing in [https://segaretro.org/Sega_of_America Sega of America], as well as the founder of the preservation platform [https://discord.gg/EFYKEyJgX8 DevStash]. Closely associated with [https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture Sega Retro], she primarily conducts [https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture#Interviews original interviews] with former developers, executives, and community members to preserve their unique perspectives on the game development industry. She is also experienced in writing company biographies on notable staff like [https://segaretro.org/Brenda_Cook Brenda Ross] and [https://segaretro.org/Tom_Kalinske Tom Kalinske], building large-scale research projects such as ''[https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_X-treme/Development Sonic X-treme]'' and [https://segaretro.org/Rocket_Science_Games Rocket Science Games], and is responsible for the dumping, scanning, and preservation of over 50+ pieces of long-sought internal development material.<br />
<br />
She works to take readers back in time through the eyes of those who lived it, and believes in the active preservation of our shared gaming history.<br />
<br />
==Statistics==<br />
As of {{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY2}}, {{User stats}}<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 3; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Jon_Snoddy_(2026-02-14)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Jon Snoddy (2026-02-14)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mike_Wallis_(2026-02-16)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Mike Wallis (2026-02-16)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Andrew_Probert_(2026-03-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Andrew Probert (2026-03-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ryan_White_(2026-03-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ryan White (2026-03-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-03-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-03-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Senn_(2026-04-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Senn (2026-04-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Howard_Drossin_(2026-05-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Howard Drossin (2026-05-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Penders_(2026-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Penders (2026-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Marc_Dawson_(2026-05-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Marc Dawson (2026-05-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-05-30)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-05-30)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Al_Nilsen_(2026-06-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Al Nilsen (2026-06-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Payne_(2026-07-18)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Payne (2026-07-18)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bobby_White_(2026-07-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bobby White (2026-07-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Erik_Wahlberg_(2026-08-08)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Erik Wahlberg (2026-08-08)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Doug_Lanford_(2026-08-15)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Doug Lanford (2026-08-15)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Shrigley_(2026-08-17)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Shrigley (2026-08-17)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Greg_Fleming_(2026-08-22)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Greg Fleming (2026-08-22)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Satoshi_Yokokawa_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Satoshi Yokokawa (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dean_Sitton_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dean Sitton (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Foley_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Foley (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Curtis_Soldano_(2026-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Curtis Soldano (2026-09-13)]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==External links==<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture {{PAGENAME}}] at [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=176141User:CartridgeCulture2026-09-16T20:17:21Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Ashley Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer, researcher, and editor. Specializing in Sega of America and Sega Technical Institute, she primarily conducts original interviews with former developers, executives, and community members to preserve oral histories detailing Sega's rise to prominence in the United States. She is also experienced in writing company biographies on notable staff like Brenda Ross and Tom Kalinske, building large-scale research projects such as ''Sonic X-treme'' and Rocket Science Games, and is responsible for the preservation of notable in-development projects like ''Fat, Daddy'' and ''Dark Empires''.<br />
<br />
She works to take readers back in time through the eyes of those who lived it, and believes in the active preservation of our shared gaming history.<br />
<br />
==Statistics==<br />
As of {{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY2}}, {{User stats}}<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 3; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Jon_Snoddy_(2026-02-14)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Jon Snoddy (2026-02-14)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mike_Wallis_(2026-02-16)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Mike Wallis (2026-02-16)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Andrew_Probert_(2026-03-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Andrew Probert (2026-03-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ryan_White_(2026-03-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ryan White (2026-03-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-03-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-03-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Senn_(2026-04-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Senn (2026-04-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Howard_Drossin_(2026-05-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Howard Drossin (2026-05-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Penders_(2026-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Penders (2026-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Marc_Dawson_(2026-05-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Marc Dawson (2026-05-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-05-30)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-05-30)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Al_Nilsen_(2026-06-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Al Nilsen (2026-06-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Payne_(2026-07-18)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Payne (2026-07-18)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bobby_White_(2026-07-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bobby White (2026-07-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Erik_Wahlberg_(2026-08-08)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Erik Wahlberg (2026-08-08)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Doug_Lanford_(2026-08-15)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Doug Lanford (2026-08-15)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Shrigley_(2026-08-17)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Shrigley (2026-08-17)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Greg_Fleming_(2026-08-22)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Greg Fleming (2026-08-22)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Satoshi_Yokokawa_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Satoshi Yokokawa (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dean_Sitton_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dean Sitton (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Foley_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Foley (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Curtis_Soldano_(2026-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Curtis Soldano (2026-09-13)]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==External links==<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture {{PAGENAME}}] at [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=176011User:CartridgeCulture2026-09-16T02:55:24Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Ashley Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer, researcher, and editor. Specializing in Sega of America and Sega Technical Institute, she primarily conducts original interviews with former developers, executives, and community members to preserve oral histories detailing Sega's rise to prominence in the United States. She is also experienced in writing company biographies on notable staff like Brenda Ross and Tom Kalinske, building large-scale research projects such as ''Sonic X-treme'' and Rocket Science Games, and is responsible for the preservation of notable in-development projects like ''Fat, Daddy'' and ''Dark Empires''.<br />
<br />
She works to take readers back in time through the eyes of those who lived it, and believes in the active preservation of our shared gaming history.<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 3; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Jon_Snoddy_(2026-02-14)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Jon Snoddy (2026-02-14)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mike_Wallis_(2026-02-16)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Mike Wallis (2026-02-16)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Andrew_Probert_(2026-03-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Andrew Probert (2026-03-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ryan_White_(2026-03-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ryan White (2026-03-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-03-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-03-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Senn_(2026-04-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Senn (2026-04-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Howard_Drossin_(2026-05-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Howard Drossin (2026-05-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Penders_(2026-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Penders (2026-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Marc_Dawson_(2026-05-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Marc Dawson (2026-05-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-05-30)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-05-30)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Al_Nilsen_(2026-06-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Al Nilsen (2026-06-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Payne_(2026-07-18)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Payne (2026-07-18)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bobby_White_(2026-07-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bobby White (2026-07-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Erik_Wahlberg_(2026-08-08)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Erik Wahlberg (2026-08-08)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Doug_Lanford_(2026-08-15)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Doug Lanford (2026-08-15)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Shrigley_(2026-08-17)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Shrigley (2026-08-17)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Greg_Fleming_(2026-08-22)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Greg Fleming (2026-08-22)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Satoshi_Yokokawa_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Satoshi Yokokawa (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dean_Sitton_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dean Sitton (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Foley_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Foley (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Curtis_Soldano_(2026-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Curtis Soldano (2026-09-13)]<br />
</div></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=175181User:CartridgeCulture2026-09-06T00:05:25Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Ashley Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer, researcher, and editor. Specializing in Sega of America and Sega Technical Institute, she primarily conducts original interviews with former developers, executives, and community members to preserve oral histories detailing Sega's rise to prominence in the United States. She is also experienced in writing company biographies on notable staff like Brenda Ross and Tom Kalinske, building large-scale research projects such as ''Sonic X-treme'' and Rocket Science Games, and is responsible for the preservation of notable in-development projects like ''Fat, Daddy'' and ''Dark Empires''.<br />
<br />
She works to take readers back in time through the eyes of those who lived it, and believes in the active preservation of our shared gaming history.<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 3; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Jon_Snoddy_(2026-02-14)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Jon Snoddy (2026-02-14)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mike_Wallis_(2026-02-16)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Mike Wallis (2026-02-16)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Andrew_Probert_(2026-03-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Andrew Probert (2026-03-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ryan_White_(2026-03-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ryan White (2026-03-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-03-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-03-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Senn_(2026-04-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Senn (2026-04-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Howard_Drossin_(2026-05-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Howard Drossin (2026-05-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Penders_(2026-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Penders (2026-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Marc_Dawson_(2026-05-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Marc Dawson (2026-05-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-05-30)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-05-30)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Al_Nilsen_(2026-06-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Al Nilsen (2026-06-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Payne_(2026-07-18)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Payne (2026-07-18)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bobby_White_(2026-07-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bobby White (2026-07-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Erik_Wahlberg_(2026-08-08)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Erik Wahlberg (2026-08-08)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Doug_Lanford_(2026-08-15)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Doug Lanford (2026-08-15)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Shrigley_(2026-08-17)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Shrigley (2026-08-17)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Greg_Fleming_(2026-08-22)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Greg Fleming (2026-08-22)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Satoshi_Yokokawa_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Satoshi Yokokawa (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dean_Sitton_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dean Sitton (2026-09-05)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Foley_(2026-09-05)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Foley (2026-09-05)]<br />
</div></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview)&diff=175124Adrian Powell (2026-02-11 interview)2026-09-05T16:54:01Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=AdrianPowell.png<br />
|name=Adrian Powell<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Lemmings<br />
|date=2026-02-11<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?'''<br />
<br />
Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art - the best in the UK. In addition to his teaching, he seemed always to be creating artwork at home, with his materials scattered around the house. At that early stage in my life, I was unaware that my home surroundings would influence my future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned drawing and making your own comics as a kid. What comics or cartoons did you grow up with? And what cartoon and/or artist influenced you the most?'''<br />
<br />
My elder brother and I would create our own art and even produce comics. I suppose we were influenced by professional national publications such as the Dandy, the Beano, and Eagle (my favourite).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you go to school for art or were you self-taught?'''<br />
<br />
At school, my records show that I was generally at the top of the class in art, with favourable comments from the teachers. However, I have to admit to playing truant from school whenever it was a sports day (I did not like sports). But my time was not wasted. I would visit a local signwriter's studio and learned a lot about graphics and brushwork. I have to say though, there was little doubt that I was influenced by my father. I achieved my GCE in several subjects, including my most important qualification - art!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned you were a commercial artist, and that you have experience working in printing, publishing, and the like. Could you tell us more about your experience in the printing and typesetting industry?'''<br />
<br />
At the end of my schooling, I began work in the Publicity Department of the local authority, which was responsible for promoting the seaside resort where I lived. The job involved producing holiday guides, posters, leaflets, etc. A wonderful time, and very hands-on for learning the ins and outs of arts and graphics. I also attended night school for art and design. The teacher was... my father.<br />
<br />
There followed a number of jobs in and around London. For several years I was the production manager and print buyer for four monthly trade magazines - very hands-on and often stressful in making publication dates. During this time came marriage and a family, until I decided to go freelance in the North of England where my roots were. Quite a challenge, but I had a number of business contacts, one of which was a printing company. I had regularly produced various items of artwork for their customers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned being introduced to Psygnosis some time in 1990. How did that connection first happen?'''<br />
<br />
One of their customers was moving direction by investing in a new product in the exciting area of computer games. A small group of “techies” in Dundee had created a game but needed finance to go forward. Step in Psygnosis. My printer client phoned me one day to ask if I could draw cartoons and was I available the next day.<br />
<br />
The following day I was taken to Psygnosis HQ and introduced to the team. Psygnosis was a conversion of a Liverpool dockland warehouse on the river Mersey, with large open spaces where lots of young people were sat at monitors. In particular was a young guy with a screen in front of him. I sat with him and he began the game with ping pong balls performing many antics amongst the now familiar backgrounds of underground scenarios. He explained that the "balls" were in fact creatures called Lemmings, and they wanted me to produce a Lemming. And so it began. Big challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you given any guidelines on what the rest of the team wanted the Lemmings to look like? I'm curious how much freedom you had in your designs.'''<br />
<br />
The brief to me was to create something unique, and that whatever the character looked like, they would have to convert it into pixels! I had never heard of pixels! And there would be a number of different characters and antics on the screen at the same time. The problem would be to not have pixel overload on the screen. These were early days of games, and I knew nothing of the tech side.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How many iterations did your designs go through? I'm also curious what the internal "feedback, changing things, feedback" process went.'''<br />
<br />
I roughed several paper sketches in pencil initially, with a lot of Psygnosis visits. Pressure was on and the team were waiting anxiously as each day passed. At last, the Lemming was chosen after a few tweaks and colourization. Artwork commenced.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your previous experience in typesetting really shows when it comes to the game's iconic logotype. Can you tell us about the process of designing that logo?'''<br />
<br />
Because of my fascination with graphics, I decided to produce the logotype first. This was, after all, the major piece in the promotion. I had a particular admiration of a font called Cooper Black. Once again, I visited Psygnosis for agreement. I had made a shade of green for the Lemmings' hair, and for continuity, I used it in the title. I firmly believe the enthusiasm the team had for the logo set the way for me - more so than the Lemming itself. However, I realized at this point I was being given complete freedom in my first ever journey into computer games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mention being given about 4 months to meet a Christmas deadline, with Lemmings actually launching in February 1991. Does this mean your hiring date was around… August or September 1990? Is that right?'''<br />
<br />
This was August 1990, I think. Launch date was a few months away!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of challenges, what's the biggest challenge in working remotely as a contract artist?'''<br />
<br />
My small studio was away from home in order that I didn't have any family interruptions during urgent creativity. Lemmings, I envisaged, was about to become a major part of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Now you drew the game's box art, but I believe you created the box design as well. As in, determining the design layout and where things would go, if I have that correct. Could you tell us about the process of designing the game's box?'''<br />
<br />
The now iconic box cover artwork involved planning, airbrushing, and tracings. During the production of the cover, I was updated by Psygnosis of additional artwork requirements - more characters! Diggers, Floaters, Blockers, Builders, even a life-size Lemming.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You also mentioned working on a bunch of promotional artwork and the game’s manual. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
I had to create [all] this for point-of-sale distribution. Badges and lots of other point-of-sale items. And then some very involved artwork for the back of the box cover. The instruction manual was a very last-minute addition to my workload. The piece of artwork for the cover of the box showing two Lemmings carrying a placard was added later and changed over the course of reprints. I understand 20 million copies were printed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As an artist, what was the biggest difficulty in working under such a tight timeline?'''<br />
<br />
Probably the biggest challenge in being self-employed is discipline. But when the piper is calling the shots and the cheques at the end of the month, you just get on with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you do any further work on the Lemmings franchise?'''<br />
<br />
As for later games, I recall that Sony bought the Lemmings copyright. I was not involved in any more games. However, and I can't be sure of dates, several years later I was contacted by an American Lemmings fan who collected retro art. This communication started another voyage back to creating Lemmings images. He wanted to buy the original box cover artwork. I had no idea where it was or if it still existed. He asked me if I could recreate it, which I did. Then his brother wanted the same. Then it snowballed rather rapidly. I was back in the world of Lemmings artwork as commissions in the USA, France, Italy, the UK, the world, even Australia. And so it continues.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How does it feel to have impacted so many lives in such a positive way?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I was asked to appear in a film about the history of Lemmings. Eventually I was invited to the premiere in Dundee. My wife and I were shown to the VIP area in a cinema filled with Lemmings fans and watched the film. Very moving. At the end there was a questions and answers session. Someone asked about the original artist and I was asked to stand and take a bow. The audience stood and applauded. Later I answered lots of questions, signed autographs, and generally enjoyed the fame.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned your work for an Alzheimer's care organization and painting murals based on nostalgic themes for the patients? Could you tell us more about this work?'''<br />
<br />
With regard to the mural work I have done, this was over a long period for a major company involved in Alzheimer's care. For my part it was most enjoyable. I travelled to several parts of the UK. My brief was to sit with the residents and ask if they could recall childhood. Obviously, much of the recollections involved comics and games. Then I would paint the memories outside their bedroom. It worked and gave me great pleasure in seeing some recognition. Often they would sit and watch me paint, sometimes even joining in.<br />
<br />
A wonderful time in my life. In fact, most of it has been good. Maybe a book is next.<br />
<br />
<br />
::''[https://www.artpal.com/lemmings_art Support Adrian Powell at ArtPal]''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02_interview)&diff=175123Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)2026-09-05T16:53:33Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=CraigStitt-2.jpg<br />
|name=Craig Stitt<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Sega<br />
|date=2025-08-02<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Ashley Rojas: Hi! Good morning Mr. Stitt! First off, it's an absolute pleasure to speak with you. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little nervous in speaking with you.'''<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt: No worries. It's my pleasure. It really, really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Alright, and again, thank you so much for giving me your time like this. That's very kind of you.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no, I enjoy sharing knowledge and history and trying to get all this stuff out there for people to hear and see and know and keep it alive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Great, I've noticed that. Thank you just so much for having that mindset because it means that not only does a lot of your work get shared and more well known, but others' as well. [Sharing] information; that's a great mindset to have.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it makes me wish I had taken better notes back in the day. I've got a whole box of stuff at Sega that went missing. You know, a move, either when I left Sega or a move somewhere, so a lot of my sketches and all that stuff back at my time at Sega are gone, which is unfortunate.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, that is really unfortunate. I'd be so anxious knowing that.'''<br />
<br />
Well, it kicked me- when you're doing this stuff you have no clue that 20 or 30 years later you're going to be talking about it still. [laughs] But yeah, somewhere out there in a landfill in Redwood City is a box of little three and a half inch floppy disks with all my Sonic artwork on it. What kicked me and everything is: Sonic is the one where it never even crossed my mind to keep that because it was all proprietary software. Tom Payne, one of the other artists at Sega (at STI) did keep his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Now you've got people that have the ability to pull the information off there and then get to it. Like, "Ah, man, I wish I still had mine." Oh well.<br />
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<br />
'''Well, maybe this interview can act as a sort of verbal version of that.'''<br />
<br />
I hope so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Just to get started here, I did want to start on your background. Can I ask what your earliest creative influences growing up were?'''<br />
<br />
My whole family is very artistic and creative. Most of them also sing and dance, which I do not do. Yeah, the art was pretty much the whole family, especially my mom did a lot, my mom and my sisters. So I've always been influenced and supported in anything I want to do artistically. It's interesting, though, that I'm the only one to have gone, in the family, to have gone into art as a career. I think part of that is timing. I'm the younger of six- I'm number five of six kids. Strictly speaking, my older brother considered going into art, but he's like 12 years older than me. At that time, it was very limited on what your options were.<br />
<br />
Illustration, you know, magazines and book covers and magazine illustrations and stuff. It's very competitive and very limited, the market. On top of that, my brother's a little afraid to go and, you know, ruin his art, ruin his enjoyment of art because it was a job. He became an accountant, which I don't understand. [laughs] Anyway. So I'm in school and… actually my high school art teacher is one of the hugest impacts of my life because she wasn't family, and she said, "You can make a living at this." She pulled me aside one day early on and said, "Craig, you could make a living at this."<br />
<br />
That clicked. That clicked something in my brain. Even then I was still "OK, you can make a living as an artist?" I was a biology major and finally I ended up switching over to art and then finally switched over to art education, was going to teach art. Then that's where the timing of everything kicked in. Just as I'm in college, the computer graphics industry explodes. I come out of school, I get pulled into the early computer graphics industry and then from there into video games. I've never taught art, because I got sidetracked in making games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. What was the first computer you worked on when it came to designing graphics on the computer for the first time?'''<br />
<br />
It was called the GeniGraphics.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the GeniGraphics?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It was huge. The first generation ones I worked on used eight inch floppy disks, so actually truly floppy disks.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually floppy.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I can't remember the memory on those disks. It was… it wasn't called vector graphics… It was designed to do… like you did a lot of text graphics and like business meeting stuff. Like pie charts and boring stuff. You could do artwork on it. It was just a pretty complex problem. It was very interesting way of creating art on them. You can do some beautiful stuff. That's what I was doing, and I had gotten to the point, though, where I was really not happy doing it.<br />
<br />
I guess complaining too much. I was married at the time. Every time I come home from work, my wife at the time would have the wanted section of the newspaper spread out on the table with circled job opportunities. Looking for a job for me. She was tired of me complaining. She called one day while I was at work and she said, "I found your job." I know I kept this clipping, and I can't find it. But it's "Wanted: video game artist and game designer wanted, no experience necessary." That was Mark Cerny at STI, putting together his group at STI for Sega.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you hired directly by Cerny? Like, was he the one who was in your hiring interview?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I still do have the little scrap of paper where I wrote down his information and his phone number and his name really quick, the first time he called and said, "Yes, we'd like to talk to you and get more information from you." Yeah, so that was him. It was the very first time I met him. I assumed he was somebody's secretary or whatever, because he was so young. Very quickly I realize, "Oh, no, that's him, that's the boss." I was just thinking about him the other day because I lost touch with him. I'd love to get a hold of him again and just catch up because I was realizing what a huge impact he had on my life because he hired me at Sega.<br />
<br />
Then he left Sega and did a couple things, but he ended up in L.A. and I wanted to work with him again when I wanted to leave Sega. I called him, and then he's how I ended up at Insomniac Games. That was my career, Insomniac Games. That's all knowing Mark. Huge impact of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the date that you were hired? I know you said it was in 1990, I believe. No worries if you can't remember the specifics.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't remember it. Actually, you could look it up. I think if I remember correctly, my hiring letter, I think, got scanned in at the…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Video Game History Foundation.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Video Game History. I think they've got a copy, if not it's around here somewhere. Yeah, would have been 1990.<br />
<br />
I'm in South San Francisco now, moved up here a couple of years ago to get closer to my son and his family. I occasionally drive down the 101 [freeway], and every time I do I drive past… The building that STI had was just off- facing the freeway. Every time I drive past I'm like, "There's the old STI building." But it wasn't the very first one. The very first building with this tiny little office in some industrial complex down in San Jose just off of 880 [or] 17 [freeways]. I've been trying to remember… I have no idea where that is. I wonder if I've got the address somewhere for that building. [800 Charcot Avenue] That letter would probably have the address on it. I've gotta go find that letter. So 1990.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Let me see if I can find the… what was the name of this city… Was that in Foster City? Does that ring a bell?'''<br />
<br />
No, that would have been… Sega headquarters was in Redwood City. That interim office… because Mark was very consciously as far away from Sega as he could be, but be close enough that you could run back and forth, because he didn't want… That was the whole point of STI was to get it away from having too much oversight by people who didn't know what they're doing. That weren't game people. But we finally did end up at Sega actually, in their headquarters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned him getting away from SoA's oversight from non-game people. Did he see that as one of the big problems that STI was founded to fix?'''<br />
<br />
I know that's what he was trying to get away from initially, in the very beginning, and was hesitant as we kept moving closer and closer, but I don't remember there being a lot… Well actually. Trying to think. I know like even on Kid Chameleon, which was the first game I worked on at STI. We were getting crap from marketing trying to tell us how to name stuff and name the character and name the game and it was frustrating. But I think yes. I wasn't part of it because you know, Mark would have insulated and would have been taking the brunt of that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of Kid Chameleon. As an artist that was new to game development, was working on Kid Chameleon particularly challenging? What was challenging about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was. As I was just talking about that original building and that original office. The memory is like seared into my brain of like, the very first week I'm there, of me going outside and just trying to not freak out because I was like "I don't belong here." [laughs] I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know anything. I have to like relax and then go back inside. It was very different because it was this… It was a completely different picture. It was big Digitizers and you're drawing stuff pixel by pixel by pixel. I had done little to no animation prior to that. But it was very exciting.<br />
<br />
So you pixel by pixel and you do learn how to do it. I remember, I look back at this and I feel bad in that I remember it clicked, the animation and once again… the walk cycle was six frames and your characters were 32 pixels tall. Man, looking back at that, that's insane. I remember I had a, or looked like I was having, an easy time of it and that I knew what I was doing.<br />
<br />
I remember Brenda Ross was having a hard time and she was talking to Mark and Mark says, "Well go ask Craig." Because Brenda was hired before me but not by… I'm not sure how long she had been there. Not very long, but long enough, and Mark said, "Go ask Craig." I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just making it up on the fly and so when she asked me "Can you show me how to do this?" I went, "Yeah, but I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to teach you because I don't know. I'm just making it up," I think she took that wrong and this is where I feel bad. I think she thought I was blowing her off or something. I always look back at that and I think that just got… I don't know why that's something that's always stuck in my head is that initial conversation.<br />
<br />
Yeah, so once you got into it… I remember thinking the initial interview was for the Sega arcade systems, which I was very excited about. Then I find out that it was for the home system, and I'm like, [disappointedly] "Oh really?" For some reason I'm like, "Ah." I also went, "Oh crap." My neighbor had an Atari 2600, and that was the last time I had played any home video games. I had to run out and borrow a friend's NES to play- I had my first conversation with Mark saying, "Yeah, we want you talk to you again." I had better go play some home games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Just to familiarize yourself with them?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, because I'd never heard of the Genesis. I knew about the NES, but I'd never even touched one. I'm like, "Okay, I better scramble here so I have some idea what I'm talking about." But I very quickly realized I was glad and definitely looking back, I'm glad I was doing home games, console games versus arcade games. I had more fun doing that. Yeah, it was… Man, it's so different than games today.<br />
<br />
It's pixel by pixel and limited colors. I remember the transition from Genesis stuff onto the PS1. It was wonderful because all of a sudden you don't worry about palettes anymore. You just paint on Photoshop and you just build stuff and you still got memory issues and stuff. It went from… you look at a Kid Chameleon game or anything I did on Genesis and I could say "Everything on that screen I touched, every pixel there, I put every pixel on that screen." Then you get into the other games, the teams get bigger and the games get bigger. It's cool, but I miss that complete ownership or whatever of the world.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. It's your work as opposed to it being filtered through so many teams or like… the 'too many chefs' feeling.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. The funny thing is, I prefer to work as a team, but at the same time, it was nice to look at it and have it all be my work. It's this weird thing going on in my head that I really do prefer working as a team. I'm better if I'm with people that I can bounce ideas off of and pull ideas from and work with.<br />
<br />
Jumping ahead a little bit here. On Ratchet and Clank at Insomniac, there was a level, Metropolis, on Ratchet 1, that was really a nightmare level. It was huge. The map was way too big for what we'd agreed was possible to do. The artists I was working with… there were always two environment artists building a level because they were huge, even the good sized ones. The other artists- Tom… last name just slipped my brain, was having- well, something's going on in his life. He was having a hard time at work. He was always behind, he was late and I always had to redo about half his artwork. That game, other than one little area, everything in it is mine.<br />
<br />
I was like, "Oh, okay, so this is nice;" to look at this and go, "Hey, yeah, that entire city is mine." Which is satisfying. Very different than the pixel art.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You were mentioning limited color usage and that just being a challenge with the palette. That was like a theme that defined most Genesis-era games.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How difficult did you find that?'''<br />
<br />
At times, very. The palettes were difficult, but you learned how to dither since you're doing things literally pixel by pixel. If you didn't have a green, you could do every other square blue and yellow and get a green. It would blur out on the TV. The bigger problem was just the amount of art you were allowed to use for anything, particularly in the animations.<br />
<br />
I can remember once, and this was for Dark Empire, there was a boss character and… Dunn… William Dunn? Man, my brain…<br />
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<br />
'''Bill Dunn, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, there we go. Bill Dunn was the designer on that. I haven't talked to him in like forever. I remember he gave me the little sheet that had directions and the description of what the enemy was and what it was going to do and what animations they would need for it. I remember it saying, and this is like a little mini boss: "Writhing dramatic death. Six frames."<br />
<br />
I went, "Bill, you're not going to… writhing dramatic death and you've given me six frames." So that was always really… how do you get something to look good with six frames. People have gone back and have ripped all those files out of those games. I actually have a lot of the little walk animations for the different enemies I've done and that stuff. It's very interesting to go back and look at it and remember just moving pixels around to get just the right… cause you're using the blur of the television to get the things you need because you didn't have as many- y'know, there were 32 pixels by 32 pixels for the characters most of the time.<br />
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<br />
'''I was going to ask if you had any involvement in Dick Tracy, but it sounds like that happened just before you got there.'''<br />
<br />
Correct. I thought I was going to be working on Dick Tracy. I got there and they were already, I don't know, pretty close to shipping it. I didn't work on it. They were working on it when I got there, but yeah, I didn't have anything to do with it. I remember being bummed because at the time, the movie was a big thing. It was like, "Oh, that's really cool. That's exciting." I was bummed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Kid Chameleon was following Dick Tracy, which was Disney's, Touchstone's thing. It seems like Kid Chameleon was the first chance that STI's artists and staff got to really flex their creativity.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. At the time, Sega was looking for a mascot. Nintendo had Mario and Sega didn't have anything. Mark… one of the things on Kid Chameleon was… we wanted to be Sega's mascot. Cause there was no Sonic yet. We're doing it and it was loosely based… There was another… who was the "Kid"? There was another "Kid" game that was in Japan on the Genesis, and it was strange.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Alex Kidd.'''<br />
<br />
Alex Kidd, yeah. I can't remember what the relationship was there. There is one, I don't know what it was. We were hoping… There were a couple things. One, Mark wanted to make the biggest game ever made, the longest game ever made on the Genesis. It's like 1,800… You used to measure the side-scrollers by screens. It's 1,800 screens, if I remember the number right, so it was huge. Kid Chameleon was an enormous game with no saves and no battery backup. Part of that was money. It was cheaper to not have a battery cartridge, but also Mark didn't want to have a save. He wanted people to have to play through.<br />
<br />
It was interesting though, cause it was- this actually affected the way some stuff I did later on, is when we did finally see… We got this early beta game that was being done in Japan called Sonic. We went into the break room and put it on and played it, and it was beautiful. I remember sitting there with Mark and we were trying to figure out how they both did the art and the programming for like the loops and some other kinds of cool stuff that was new. We played for a few minutes and laughed. It was like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really pretty." But we were like, "No big deal." At that time there may not have been any Rings at all in the game. If there were Rings, there was definitely no splash.<br />
<br />
A month or so later, however long, we get the new version and there's definitely Rings and a Ring splash. Now we're fighting over who gets to play. "Give me the controller! I want to play!" because now it was fun. Now it was addictive. Now we went, "Ah, crap. This is Sega's character. Kid Chameleon's gonna be a fun game, but we're not going to be Sega's mascot. This is definitely the mascot." That was interesting looking back at that transition of Sonic being a pretty game, but who cares, to being addictive. I think it was just the Ring splash added something, at least to me, that just completely changed the feel and dynamics of the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I think that does quite a lot. Speaking of that early Sonic 1 build. Did you just die immediately when you got hit or was there some counter which decreased, like a health meter?'''<br />
<br />
I am trying to remember. I don't remember if there was… now I'm gonna guess, now this is just guessing. I'm going to guess you didn't die immediately. Actually, I don't know. It probably just didn't have the Ring splash visually.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''But it had Rings that you had to collect as "health?"'''<br />
<br />
The code would have been prepared for that incoming- they would have been preparing for that. Whatever the death was… I don't remember being frustrated because you get touched and die. But I don't remember what that was.<br />
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<br />
'''Yeah. No worries about remembering the specifics. I appreciate all you can give me so far, this is already quite a lot. So actually I wanted to go back to… You had mentioned something interesting, you had brought up Alex Kidd. I noticed some of your Kid Chameleon concept art. You always seem to mark a two letter acronym for the game under your art. All of the Kid Chameleon stuff is marked KK. At first I thought, "Oh, maybe Chameleon was spelled with a K." But then you had sent me a Dark Empires, and we had someone [MDTravis] open it up and look at the ROM header, and we found the name Kevin Kidd. Which is surprisingly similar to Alex Kidd.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does the name Kevin Kidd ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
That comes down to that whole marketing thing I was talking about of marketing telling us how to name stuff. Originally we had the character named Kevin. It was funny you said that, you were saying, "Why did I mark KK on everything?" Yeah, it's cause he was Kevin. Then marketing didn't like the name Kevin. They wanted to name him… let's see, Dylan? There was this whole kerfuffle about naming the character.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dylan Charles.'''<br />
<br />
Dylan Charles! Yes. Where did you get that name? That was- did Brenda remember that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, that was actually on our… I'm in front of my computer right here, that's on our Kid Chameleon page. It looks like it was sourced from… a 1992 players guide. I don't know how they got that.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Wow, man. Yeah, that was his name. I know what's somewhere on one of the levels, there's some carving in the stone or maybe it's on one of the title screens. There's these runes carved into the rock. If you look at it, it says Kevin. [laughs]<br />
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<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Just a little personal saying that no one's going to care about. I remember the name being a big deal. It was the same issue down at Insomniac. Naming stuff. The hardest part of any of these games is naming stuff. You've got to find something everybody likes. You've got to find something that marketing likes. You've got to find something that passes legal. That's hard. That's a really hard labyrinth to wander through.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on Kid Chameleon, how much artistic freedom were you given on the project?'''<br />
<br />
A lot. I don't remember anything other than trying to work out of whatever the art bible was for, "What is the look of it?" It was whatever we wanted to do and could do. Well, all of us, it was our first game. That was Mark's whole thing. That was that ad in the newspapers: "Wanted, artists and designers with no experience." Mark wanted to build a company with… he didn't want to bring people from other companies that had their way of doing things. He wanted to train people in his way of making games and his way of thinking. None of the artists… I don't know about the programmers, but none of the artists had ever made a video game and never done anything like this. It was all brand new.<br />
<br />
I remember Paul Mica. Another one of the artists, incredible artist. Some of his stuff was gorgeous. I remember him just really beating his head against the wall and just always having to go back and make things smaller or… "Paul, you've got way too many colors. You can't use that many frames." He really had a hard time working within the limitations. I remember him being really frustrated by that. I remember learning some little tricks about how to make eyes look alive when you've only got four pixels. Like, "How did he make his eyes look so cool? Oh, okay. He's got one little white pixel right there." Which is actually something I still think of every single time I draw something or I'm painting something and I've got an eyeball. Thank you, Paul. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned you had worked on the Digitizer. Was that working on the Digitizer exclusively, or did you ever dip into something like Amiga Deluxe Paint as well?'''<br />
<br />
Some of the people in the office were using the Amiga. I was just on the Digitizer. I think some of the work on Dick Tracy… I'm trying to think what it was. Cause I didn't work on it, but it was… right. It was such a tiny little office, we're all climbing over on top of each other. Cause I remember somebody showing me something on the Amiga, some auto features like, "Oh, that's really cool that it does that." Like putting a black outline around something. "Oh, that's cool, that saves time." I didn't do anything [on the Amiga], I was all Digitizer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the most challenging thing about working on the Digitizer? Other than everything.'''<br />
<br />
I was just gonna say, "Other than everything?" It was… Once again, your limitations, not so much on the Digitizer issue, it was just the Genesis, of just having the memory and frame rate issues of… you've got so few frames for each animation. One of the tools I really wish it had was, and this would have been for building the worlds, is you had a certain number of little eight by eight squares. What did we call them? Tiles? Stamps? Tiles.<br />
<br />
Everything went down to an eight by eight little pixel box that then you'd use four of those to make a 16 by 16. You could reuse that 16 by 16 into a 32 by 32. That's how you save memory was you reused these ever-increasing size chunks that then would fit and click back and forth. Then you could rotate and change colors and it was free as far as memory was concerned. I remember very specifically, on the Sonic games, of really wishing I had some tool that could sort through and find the doubles or ones that were close.<br />
<br />
Cause you always end up with a little- you just needed a little bit more of, and there would just be squares in there that were never used. Actually… they finally did come up with a tool that showed… Oh, they did! They finally came up with a tool [CMM] you could run that would show how often each eight by eight, in these different tiles, how often they were each used. You go, "Hey, this was only used once. I can get rid of it. Or this one's never used. Yeah, let's cut this, pull that out and save that memory." I'd forgotten about that. That was so nice. That was the dealing with memory and was, yeah, it was a nightmare. I remember it being fun to figure out the colors of those palettes, but frustrating also.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's a certain dance to that, a balance of what you can get and what you can't get out.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! A dance. I love the word dance there. When you make it work and you get it to come together… Which is funny, cause that's something you don't even think about. PS1 on, it didn't cross your mind. Like I remember the very first time I was in Photoshop. I'm in L.A. and painting in Photoshop and learning… Actually I just started to use Photoshop at Sega just before I left for something. I remember asking one of the programmers [in L.A.] "How do I pick my palette? How do I choose palettes?" He just kinda looked at me weird. "You don't have to, the programming does that thing. I was like, "Really? Awesome!" It was so much fun. So nice to not have to mess with that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you were mentioning that tile identification program. It might not be the same one but I wanted to run a "Do you recognize this name?" question by you. Yuji Naka had made a tool called the Super Character Maker or CMM. Does that one ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Vaguely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wasn't sure if that was the one that you were talking about, cause it is something that worked with the Digitizer, but I'm not sure if it was 'tile'-related or not.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. That rings a bell but I have no idea. I don't know if it was that tool or a different tool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was working with Yuji Naka like?'''<br />
<br />
[reticent] Hmm.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You can be honest.'''<br />
<br />
He didn't like Americans. He didn't like speaking English. He was a dick. I really have nothing nice to say about Naka. On the other hand, Yasuhara I love and would… There's very few things that would get me back into the game industry. If Mark called or Yasuhara called and said, "Hey, I've got something I'd want to do with you." I'd say, "Yes." Naka didn't like Americans, he didn't like Americans on his team. I'm particularly pissed at him because at the end of Sonic 2, Roger Hector, who was the head of STI at that time, told me that I was going to be a lead artist on Sonic 3 and was very excited about that. But Naka being Naka- cause the way Naka got what he wanted is he threatened everyone. If he didn't get what he wanted, he threatened to quit. So he was going to quit. He wasn't going to do Sonic 3 unless he got his own all-Japanese team in their own office with separate key cards. That was all Japanese. So Sonic 3 was done across the hall behind locked doors. Which pissed me off cause I was supposed to be one of the lead artists on it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're not the only one.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at it… Am I the only American that ended up with environment art in Sonic 2? I think I am. Cause all of Brenda's stuff got cut, and all of Tom's stuff. I'm the only American that had finished art in the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Naka. "I'm going to take my ball and go home" was his go-to plan on everything. You'd give him a big bag of money and give him what he wanted and he'd stay. But he was the exception. The other guys, Yasuhara and… Yamaguchi.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Yamaguchi.'''<br />
<br />
Yamaguchi, the other environment artist, was incredible. He's someone I'd enjoy working with again. He was a machine. He just lived at STI. He never went home and he would redo levels and redo- They'd be beautiful, and he wouldn't be happy with them, and he'd redo them again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You still keep in contact with Yasuhara and Yamaguchi?'''<br />
<br />
Yasuhara, we're friends on Facebook. Occasionally I have asked him questions here and then, occasionally. I do occasionally see him comment or click a like on something I post. The last time I contacted him was… I just digitized the resume videotape I made when I was leaving Sega. This was like maybe five, ten years ago. I was going to say a couple of years… No, it's probably more like 10 years. I had put it up on YouTube and a friend was watching it and says, "What is Treasure Tails?" I went, "What?" Cause I hadn't thought of this in like forever. He goes, "Yeah, it's one of the games you said you worked on" and all of a sudden these memories start coming back. I pulled out the tape quickly and looked at it and sure enough, here's this Sonic universe game with Tails. It's this… not ortho… the weird three quarter angle view…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric? No… something like that. I know what you're talking about.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It'll come to us later. It was a puzzle adventure game for Tails. I had forgotten completely, I completely forgot I'd ever worked on that. It was the one of the last things I did at Sega before leaving. I remember doing all the research and all that got done for it was like three mock-up screens. Just static. I actually contacted Yasuhara cause I was trying to find out who was designing this, who was working on this. I got a hold of Bill Dunn to see if he remembered anything. I wrote to Yasuhara and he got back to me and Yasuhara says, "I don't remember anything from that time." His brain is so burnt from that period in time, he just said, "I don't remember."<br />
<br />
Then I got digging into my journals and found a little bit of information, so I was able to put some times, some dates down and that stuff on it and found out the designer on it was Hoyt Ng and there was a programmer's name written down as far as I remember. We worked on it for… I think a few months. I don't remember how long now, but it got cancelled. Like so many things at STI. That's the reason I left STI: all these potential games, some of them almost finished, that would have been A plus, incredibly beautiful games that got cancelled just because of incompetent management.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Out of all those games that you just mentioned, what was the most complete that you were upset about being cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
That was one I didn't work on. I think the character's name was Jester.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Jester.'''<br />
<br />
I think the name of the game was called Kinetix? Kinex or Kinetix. I always used to think it was Jester, but I did find a little bit of information. I'm not sure, but I think the name of the game was actually Kinetix with an X. Anyway, Jester. So this little character made out of clay. The whole point of the game was watching him die. [laughs] There were all these horrible ways of, when you died, if he would get smashed and he didn't look like he was made of clay, but he was made of clay. He'd get smashed, he'd mush out like clay or he'd get set on fire or burned in acid or… it just all these wonderful deaths. They had been working on that… I don't know how much of that was done.<br />
<br />
The two people I know that we're working on it are both gone. Alan Ackerman was one of the artists on it and he passed away a number of years ago and Rick Macaraeg died shortly thereafter. He [Rick] was the designer on it. I don't know who out there would know anything about it, but that's the one that got cancelled that was just a beautiful game that could have been so awesome.<br />
<br />
Then there was Spinny & Spike by Steve Woita. I don't know how far along they got on that. Then there's my Segapede slash Astropede game that didn't get very far, although we worked on it a little long time, but we were just never given the resources. They were trying to do too many things with not enough people.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was not being given enough resources to work on a project a recurring theme at STI?'''<br />
<br />
Absolutely. The one game that did ship was The Ooze, which… I have no idea how it made it out the door. I think it's because it had a very, very, very small team. I think it was me and Tom… Did Brenda- I can't remember Brenda worked on that. Me and Tom were doing the environments, which were pretty simple. I actually did the Ooze. I remember, that game, is way back. The primordial stage of that game was Mark Cerny asking me to do a set of little tiles for animation that were just the Ooze, of every different little shape that you could have, so that the program group would then do the animations. There would be no animating the Ooze. You would just have every conceivable shape in a eight by eight little square that would make any curve.<br />
<br />
Cause he was doing a test with- was it Dave Sanner and Jason Plumb, were doing- cause I think they had this idea for a game and this little test ended up becoming The Ooze. It was funny, I bumped into Dave Sanner just a couple of weeks or a month or two ago, cause I was over at the Video Game History place scanning the last of something in with those guys. We got talking about The Ooze and they [the VGHF] went, "Oh wait, one of the guys that worked on it is like, right upstairs." It's a very small world.<br />
<br />
It was just very interesting to meet somebody that you haven't seen in 20 years. The last time you saw them, they're in a flannel shirt with long hair and just this easy-going stoner vibe. The guy walks in and I'm like, "Okay, that is Dave, but that is not the Dave I remember from 30 years ago."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Everyone's grown up… I was looking at the early concept art for some of your Ooze work cause it was also in your Video Game History Foundation archive there, and it looks pretty gruesome. There's one concept art of a guy's leg being pulled off into the Ooze. I was going to ask, were the early concepts for that game more gruesome or more adult than the final product?'''<br />
<br />
Well, the art there, I did. Just to clarify, I did the coloring of that because the actual art drawing were done by… Burt somebody, I can't remember his name [Kurt Peterson], but he did the line art, and then I just did some quick color work on them. Those drawings, I think, those are more an emotional… I don't know how serious the game is supposed to be. As a top down-looking game, there is [nothing] like a game being made today. These three-dimensional, running around first-person, third-person thing. I think that art was more for pitching the idea of Ooze versus what it would actually look like in the game. Cause you never see people in the game. It's like your satellite view of buildings and the Ooze. People are a few pixels tall. I haven't played that in a long time either. I don't think I even have a copy of that… Yeah, I never got a copy of The Ooze.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. I would have imagined that they would have given you at least one copy of the game that you had worked on.'''<br />
<br />
Well usually that's true. I think cause I left… I'm not sure. I'm trying to think. It came out just as I left Sega. I don't think I got a copy for that reason. That's also the same reason I don't have a copy and I never bought a copy of the last Ratchet and Clank game I worked on? Was it Deadlocked? Cause I left before it actually physically came out.<br />
<br />
The one thing that's gone missing is somewhere there's a box that has all of my signed copies of games. I'd get my games and I'd have the whole team sign it. I've got all the games I worked on signed by the entire team, along with my Genesis and all the other Genesis games, and it's in a box and it's gone. I can't find it. All my Sonic, all my Spyro stuff, all the games are… I can't find the box. I'm a little afraid it's walked out on me.<br />
<br />
I'm hoping it's just mislabeled in a box, inside of a box somewhere. Cause I moved out from L.A. two years ago, back up to the Bay Area. I was really hoping that during this move I would find it. Then in this move, I ended up just shoving boxes in the truck at the end anyway. Hopefully it's in one of those boxes. I'm just hoping my garage wasn't open one day and somebody walked by and saw a box marked video games and picked it up and walked off.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. Hopefully it's still kicking around there.'''<br />
<br />
Hopefully not. Send some good energy out into the universe. Yeah, that had all my copies.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wanted to ask a bunch of Sonic 2 questions and these are going to be a little more specific. If you have to say, "I don't remember that", no worries, I completely understand. A lot of us in the research community find the project especially fascinating. For editorial reasons, I'd like to thank one of our top Sonic researchers, Katsushimi, for providing some of these questions. To begin, could you describe your personal approach to drawing graphics when it came to the Sonic 2 project?'''<br />
<br />
I can remember thinking how it had a very computer generated look. It's all pixels, but it looked like it was made out of polygons. If you look at the palm trees and stuff, it has this very polygon-based look. That was my foundation, especially on the Hidden Palace artwork, was that this is made out of polygons. Trying to think of what else… that's the only thing that's coming to mind right now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you provided with much Japanese source material when you first started? Like what they wanted the game to look like or… kinda inspirations? Did they give you much material?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember. I don't remember anything other than the first game, other than playing Sonic [1]. I don't remember any other source material or reference material being given.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''We're curious about what feedback you got from other staff on your art as development progressed.'''<br />
<br />
I remember it being very positive. The one I do remember that was negative, and I had to agree, was actually both in Hidden Palace and Oil Ocean, the distant background, that independent layer in the background. I had a really hard time with those. I think that was also coming down to really limited memory. Those number of little squares, little tiles you had was very limited. I know on Oil Ocean, I wish I had a picture of what I did because I do not remember what it looked like at all. Yamaguchi was definitely not happy with it. The background that's in Oil Ocean in the game is actually Yamaguchi's. I remember at the time being frustrated a little bit. That it wasn't mine, that I couldn't do the background. The background wasn't mine. I also know that mine sucked. But I don't remember what it looked like.<br />
<br />
Hidden Palace Zone is the background that's there I'm not happy with. It was a tricky thing to do. That [background] was the hardest part. That's the only time I remember any negative comments was specifically the background on Oil Ocean. I know there's an original background I did for Hidden Palace that I think shows up in some of the magazine screenshots.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yes. The cave-y stalagmites and stalactites look.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, the more cave-shaped looks. That got replaced with whatever is there now. So yeah, that's mine. Even that, I'm still not happy with it. The favorite artwork I've ever done on any video game is Hidden Palace Zone. I'm the most proud of that work. But not the background.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. Honestly it's a beautiful looking stage.'''<br />
<br />
I know one of the things that was very important to me, and this is true all the way through the stuff I did on the PS1, was I always did everything I could to not have artwork in the environment look like wallpaper. Because you did have this limited number of tiles, and if you had a large area, all of a sudden it got very repetitive. A lot of artists in a lot of games, it's just wallpaper. It's just so obvious that it's the same pattern just stamped. To a certain extent you can't get away from that because it is wallpaper. It is the same pattern. But there's ways of doing it to offset it and make subtle changes to try and break that up. So even if you go back to Kid Chameleon, I remember spending a lot of time trying to come up with these interesting shapes that were in fact repeatable, but they weren't on a grid.<br />
<br />
One of the ones I'm the most proud of is Hidden Palace Zone. It's this geometric, polygonal, crystal-based stonework that everything's built off. That's this repeating pattern, but it's off at a weird angle, and so you only see that it repeats if you get a good half a screen full of the same image of the same wall. You go, "Okay, there is a repeating pattern there." But it bothered me even on Sonic. I look at some of the other Sonic levels, but even in Sonic 3. I look at Sonic 3, and I'm maybe more judgmental there because I was supposed to be on that. There's wallpaper. There's some levels like, "Really? That's… Naka doesn't like American art? That's crap. That made it into a Sonic game?" There's just a couple of levels that are just like… y'know, most of the stuff's gorgeous. Some is like, "Really? This is acceptable?"<br />
<br />
That was one of my big things on the side-scrollers was trying not to make that wallpaper. Even on PS2, you've still got textures that you're repeating on large areas. I really tried to hide the fact that you were reusing textures over and over and over again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So another thing I wanted to ask about Sonic 2, some of our researchers have characterized Sonic 2 as just scraps of things compiled into a game, maybe not as cohesive as it could be. Would you agree with that?'''<br />
<br />
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but I also can't disagree with that perspective of it. I think that may be because… I remember when Yasuhara gave his initial pitch for this massive multi-universe time traveling extravaganza, that would have been incredible. I remember at the time going, "You're nuts. There's no way. We don't have the time. We don't have the memory. We don't have anything to do that."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More lack of resources.'''<br />
<br />
So I think that's where maybe the hodgepodge aspect of it comes in is it's in bits and pieces. It could also just be just the nature of… I'm trying to compare Sonic 1. It's been so long since I played the other one. Y'know, how homogenous was Sonic 1 versus Sonic 2? I remember thinking levels like Casino [Night] Zone were beautiful! But it didn't fit. "Where's this in the world? Why is this in the world? What is this?" Then deciding it didn't matter because it's pretty and it's fun and who cares?<br />
<br />
So, yeah, I can definitely see how there's this hodgepodge… The worlds don't have a lot of throughput into each other in a continuous story way. There's some of them that were a little story driven, but a lot of them are just like "What's cool looking?" Maybe I should say… that would be a good question for Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You proposed a sidekick named Boomer for the sidekick competition that they had. Why a turtle? What inspired that idea?'''<br />
<br />
For me, it was the Tortoise and the Hare thing, fast versus slow. Sonic is known for being fast, and so his buddy is slow, he's a turtle… although he's not actually slow cause that wouldn't work. That's how I ended up with a turtle. That and I was trying to think of a second player character that would interact with Sonic, gameplay wise. In the pictures, if you've got them there, the turtle would drop down and… then also I was thinking of the Godzilla Kaiju monster…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gamera.'''<br />
<br />
Gamera! I was gonna say, it starts with a G. Gamera. He'd pull his legs in and become a little jet pack, so Sonic could use him as like a jet-powered skateboard or surfboard to get over obstacles or to do whatever. That would allow Boomer or Boomy (I'd said it a couple of different ways depending on where I wrote it down and when I wrote it down) to be able to keep up with Sonic. But also I was looking for something to compliment Sonic as opposed to just being the same [thing].<br />
<br />
I know people have sent me links where somebody has actually, in pixels, animated this little character. They were just like, "Okay, if they had done that, what would he look like?" I'd love to actually see that in the level. I'd love to see what he would look like in the Sonic world. I mean, Tails is a better character. But it would have been fun to have invented… it would have been fun to have my character be that guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You could add to the gameplay that way. Tails can seem like just another Sonic. He had flying, which expands the gameplay, but it sounds like with Boomer you were trying to build on the gameplay that was already there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. But I can also see from a realistic point of view, pragmatic point of view of… if they'd done that, that just complicates everything with programming. You've now got an entire new thing to program completely from scratch and it's going to radically change your gameplay and affect it with that… which is what you also want to do. But where Tails is… he's more of the same, but that's also good. There's not a right or a wrong there, depending on if it's done well and Tails was done well. I was looking for more change and interactivity.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oil Ocean seems to derive a lot of thematic inspirations from Chemical Plant. A lot of the graphics look pretty similar. Is there any direct connection there or is it that just a coincidence?'''<br />
<br />
I think that's just coincidence. I don't remember… I mean, it would be very likely we're doing those at the same time. Although Chemical Plant was one of those ones that Yamaguchi redid at least three times from scratch where he wasn't happy with the first one and you'd come in and then he'd completely changed it. That one went through like three almost complete revisions. No, there wasn't any conscious choices there being made as a similarity.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another two Zones that we think might have been related: Oil Ocean and Hidden Palace. Some people believe that they were meant to recycle graphics from one another at some point in development. Does that ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Hmm. Not that I know. I'd be curious to see which piece of the graphics they were thinking of. Cause I… there's nothing in common in either one of them. Trying to think if there's anything… Yeah, that'd be a no as far as I know. I did Hidden Palace first and then Oil Ocean.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was your idea to create Hidden Palace Zone? What was the inception of that?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember… I think the only input I remember getting from Yasuhara was the map. I don't even know if many sketches exist. In my sketchbook, there's a couple of sketches that show the beginnings of that crystalline polygon-shape stone structure that ended up being the foundation for Hidden Palace. The core of that was that rock formation and just being a cave, but wanting to make it something more than just rock. I don't know if there was any palette input from the Yasuhara or Yamaguchi. I don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So that golden-green vibe was yours.'''<br />
<br />
I think so… I think so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you feel when it was cut?'''<br />
<br />
It's changed over time. I remember going in to like the conference room to sit down and play Sonic 2 just for fun and went to pull up my- cause I said, that was the first level I did. I moved on and was working on Oil Ocean and really close to the end of the game [project]. I remember it being really close to the end of the game, but then checking dates, it's gotta be a little… based on other people's information, there had to be a little more time before the game actually shipped. I remember going to pull up what was the official (at that time) version and it was gone. You couldn't access it. So I went and talked to… I may have asked Yasuhara, but I know I remember talking to Roger Hector and he told me that it had been cut because of memory. Cause they didn't have enough memory, enough room on the cartridge. I remember being really pissed. Like once again, that's my favorite art period to this day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
So I was very pissed. Then the game ships and… then the cool part of that- tangent here, I got to carry the chipset from Sega of America over to Tokyo, cause it was faster and more reliable to physically carry the chipset back then versus to electronically transmit it. I got a free trip to Japan for- I have no idea why they chose me. Then again… While I'm on the plane on the way over, they discovered an A bug, so they did end up actually having to at least electronically transmit something.<br />
<br />
The game had shipped and within a few weeks or months of the game being out, people had used… was it GameShark, Game Genie? One of those to hack into the cart and found Hidden Palace Zone, or a ghost of Hidden Palace Zone. I was pissed. "Well there was room cause it's still there. It's on the cartridge." But it actually turns out that they just didn't have time to program it. They had to do a quick rewrite of both story and… That's where you were supposed to get all the Chaos Emeralds and get your Super Sonic powers or something was in Hidden Palace Zone, by completing Hidden Palace, or something like that.<br />
<br />
There were only ever two levels to Hidden Palace Zone, and there was no boss level. When the guy, I don't remember what his name was [Christian Whitehead], did the handheld phone version of it that brought it all back to life again, he added that weird organ [Egg Gauntlet]. No idea why it's an organ [laughs], but there was no boss on the original.<br />
<br />
I think it was maybe memory as well, but it was definitely they didn't have time to finish the programming and get it into the game proper. I'm actually lucky that parts of it were still on the cartridge and that there was this huge mystery and all these urban legends. Also the fact that it's named Hidden Palace and it's hidden, literally, in the game, kept it alive. I think that's why it is in the game officially now, finally, as of a few years ago. That whole thing kept going cause it did exist. I'm really glad it. It took a couple of decades, but the artwork's out there now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. We get to see your art.'''<br />
<br />
It finally made it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Another Hidden Palace Zone question. I believe it was you that had previously… it might've been someone else, but I think it was you that said "Hidden Palace Zone was a secret level that was originally accessed through Mystic Cave Zone." Do you remember anything about that?'''<br />
<br />
One of the 'fall to your infinite death' holes in Mystic Cave… you would fall and not die. You would fall and find yourself in Hidden Palace Zone, which is why I think it works now [in the 2013 port]. I think that's how they implement it now… is the way it was supposed to be. Although now I think it is just a hidden level, it doesn't do anything, where before it was the Chaos Emeralds and it was part of the story and part of the gameplay, as opposed to being just another level, which is why it didn't have a boss level or it was only two levels. It was a separate little thing on its own, which is probably the also reason why it got cut. It was a tangent thing to do something cool, and it was the easiest thing to cut when they ran out of time. Other than the fact that it was being done by an American.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of cut Zones, you'd mentioned working on a clown slash roller coaster themed Zone. What would that have been like?'''<br />
<br />
That was just an early thumbnail sketch of me just coming up with different ideas of playing off of that loop de loop idea for the Sonic levels, of having more of that. It didn't get anywhere beyond… did I do? I'm trying to think… I have a vague memory of, on the Digitizer, for some reason, I see red and white checkers and some early concept stuff on the Digitizer. But I really don't remember. The only thing that does exist is a couple of very quick, simple sketches in that sketchbook. I know I had one where the level was nothing but a rail, running around- So it'd be like a metal path, a metal tube doing a ring around the planet and having loops and spins and drops in it. The background would be this Jupiter-type, Saturn planet behind you and you're running around on the ring. But that was just a concept that was just early, early on that didn't get past a few sketches.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, I'm interested… You had mentioned, on that clown slash roller coaster Zone, remembering red and white checkers. When I read clown slash roller coaster, I immediately thought of Sonic 3, cause they have Carnival Night Zone, and Carnival Night Zone has a theme of red and white checkers. Do you think there's any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
I don't know. I don't think so. Once again, that content work I did would have been done in like early or mid '91, before Sonic 2 actually officially started or [had] any work done. Then Sonic 3 would have been two years later in a locked office across the hall. So probably not. I'm trying to… I've got these weird images now of that checker and trying to come up with a way to do that curved tent and make it efficient with those little eight by eight… Huh. I remember watching the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space to get ideas. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's awesome.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think there was some [clown/roller coaster] graphics done on the Digitizer, just to have stuff to pitch to Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did that Zone have a name at all, an early name, or was it just graphics at that point?'''<br />
<br />
No, this would have been just me mocking some quick stuff up to show Yasuhara for potential ideas. Cause all the actual design stuff would have been Yasuhara's. So it's just putting together ideas to… it's like Boomer. They may have done this for the levels as well, but Boomer, they definitely put a call out. They said, "Hey, everybody, we need a player two. Pitch us some ideas." They maybe did the same thing for the levels but I don't know. That was me just pitching ideas and trying to get something visual to show Yasuhara. That's somewhere in a landfill in Redwood City.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aw god, that pains me. So, another Sonic 2 experiment you did. You had mentioned your burning forest Zone, and that's actually something I asked about in our previous emails. You experimented with the idea of a burning forest Zone and the ways of designing graphics with the intent to make in the trees look like they were on fire. Can you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Is that… is that me? I don't… I don't remember. Was that Brenda? I don't think that's me. Did I… really? Wow. If I did, I've completely drawn a blank on that. Although… [thinking]. Oh man. Once again, I have this very weird memory of… You know, my first response is no, but then- this vague memory of struggling, trying to figure out how to do fire and… Wow. It's almost more of an emotional memory… Yeah, there is something in there, but yeah, it's gone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Speaking of early Zones, do you remember much… Brenda had made that mockup for the magazines… actually I think it was a little bit more than a mockup. Her Desert Zone that you could recycle into a Winter Zone. Do you remember that at all?'''<br />
<br />
I'll say superficially… When you're doing this stuff, you're so nose into your screen. Most of what I remember of Brenda's work is stuff that I have seen or talked about or heard long after. I have very few… the only level I remember… watching Brenda and walking past her computer and remember her working on was the forest Zone [Wood Zone]. All the desert stuff is like, "Okay, she did it, and there's other people talking about it, but I don't remember anything from the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. There was so much going on with Sonic 2.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How was working on Spinball?'''<br />
<br />
Spinball was fun. It was a little frustrating cause I got pulled off of… did I get pulled off Segapede to do Spinball? I think so. Sometime I did, in fact, go through my journal and get a timeline of events. It was fun to be back on a Sonic title, even though it wasn't Sonic 3. It's interesting. This is another one where Brenda got screwed because they were supposed to be a hidden watery cave level as level one [Underwater Caves]. The game would start with Sonic flying into this cave at sea level, and then you'd come into those caves, and this toxic level, which I was doing, and then into these other levels on up. Then for reasons they had to cut a level, and so they kept Brenda's and smushed, theme-wise, her's and mine together.<br />
<br />
Now the bottom half of my level, I had to go through and convert what was slime, on the bottom of mine, into water that turned into slime the higher you got on the level. If you look at screenshots, the patterns of this bulbous rocky formation that make up the cave is, in fact, Hidden Palace artwork dressed up. It's the same shape, it's the same repeating patterns, because that pattern worked so well, that I just rounded all the edges and turned it into these gooey bulbous shapes as opposed to squared-off polygons.<br />
<br />
I remember it was fun. It was a little frustrating working with Peter… starts with an M [Peter Morawiec], who was the lead designer and did a lot of artwork and did all that. He was a real perfectionist. He had a vision of how he wanted it to be. There was a lot of reworking stuff that was… sometimes he'd have a good point and other times it's like, "Why? No. That's just… that's fine." But once again, both he and Adrian, the programmer, were both really nice guys and just working their butts off. Yeah, so it was good. It was good to be back on a Sonic title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So I have a very specific question that you might know as an artist. Do you know who drew Spinball's sprites? We think it's either Macaraeg or Brenda.'''<br />
<br />
So the actual sprites for him spinning, when he was a little blue ball?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More Sonic's normal sprites.'''<br />
<br />
I would have assumed it was Yamaguchi. Did Yamaguchi do Spinball? I'm trying to think if he did Sonic…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I don't think Yamaguchi did Spinball. I can't find his name on the production credits…'''<br />
<br />
Oh! For Spinball! For some reason, my brain snapped back to Sonic 2. For Spinball, I don't know. It was probably… if I had to guess? Tom, but that's a guess. It could have been Brenda. It wasn't me! [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of, do you recall Brenda's project titled Fat, Daddy? The one with the cats and the jazz themes and the bebop, beatnik themes?'''<br />
<br />
Very vaguely. Once again, if you'd have asked me, "Did Brenda pitch anything or doing any of these?", I would have said "No." Somewhere else that has come up and then I get these "Oh I saw some images." There's nothing I remember of the fact that I know "Oh yeah, there was something." But then again, like Treasure Tails. I was working on that and I forgot about it! [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] So let's talk about Dark Empires. Could you give us a top-down summary of Dark Empires?'''<br />
<br />
So Bruce Dunn [Bill Dunn] was the designer on it. I was doing that… That must have been before Kid Chameleon. Cause it seems like they were at the same time, but that makes no sense, so it hadn't been before, because they got cancelled… We were at the little office in San Jose. By the time we got to the office in… is that Menlo Park? I'm not sure where you actually are on the freeway, where that building is, halfway up the 101 [freeway], halfway to Sega headquarters. I think by the time we got there, Dark Empires was dead.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was, cause we were doing Sonic 2 during… We were doing Kid Chameleon, cause I remember going in to Mark and saying, "Hey, I get some extra time to work now cause I'm going through a divorce. I'm going to be spending a lot of time at work." [laughs] No real reason to go home anymore. It almost had to be before [STI moved]. It wasn't a type of game I typically played much of, but the style and… William, he's a really nice guy. A pleasure to work with, really easy going… Bill. Bill Dunn. The style was right up my alley. This fantasy Dungeons & Dragons [style] - monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build. Did a lot of sketches that didn't…<br />
<br />
Ken Rose, who was the programmer, just sent me like a month ago that playable version. That's another thing that's in that box that is missing is my actual ROM card for Segapede, and I had one for Dark Empires. Luckily Ken still had the code for those. I wasn't able to get it to work, and then my son was supposed to come over and help me figure it out, and we never got that done. It'd be interesting to play it again, cause the only thing I have is to watch that videotape of my resume. But yeah, that was Bill's baby.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall what the impetus was for STI making what is essentially is a real time strategy game, or feels like a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, that's what I was just trying to think of. I was just trying to remember… cause I remember some conversations with Bill and Mark. I remember Bill being concerned that it was too much of a niche game for what Mark wanted to do, what Mark wanted STI to be, and him not being surprised that it got cancelled. Not happy about it, but not being surprised, because it wasn't the game that Mark wanted STI to be making that was going to be these A-title, top of the playlist games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Strategy was new back then. Console strategy.'''<br />
<br />
I remember the only real strategy game I ever played at that time was a Genesis game called Herzog Zwei. I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played. Tried to get into like Starcraft and those and just never got into them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did Herzog Zwei and other titles… was that what inspired Bill, or you guys as a team, to make a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't know. My memory is just of drawing pictures and doing the animations and "writhing dramatic death" for the boss… No, that was Kid Chameleon. The writhing dramatic death was Kid Chameleon. It wasn't really a boss. It was this snake creature that didn't end up being used. No, that was Kid Chameleon. I remember having a lot of fun doing the artwork [for Dark Empires]. I remember really enjoying working with Bill, and that art style was very natural for me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I feel like you naturally gravitate towards creatures and particularly I've noticed a theme of dragons that continued on later in your career.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It's interesting because Spyro… the idea for Spyro, was one of mine. I'm the one that pitched the idea for a dragon. It's interesting that once we got the go-ahead on that, it was an art style that was outside… the actual environment there, outside of what I would normally do. It's much prettier, it's much softer, much more painterly. It was one of the other artists, Kirsten, can't remember her last name. [Kirsten Van Schreven‑Butler] It's hyphenated, the last name. She's another environment artist and her texture work was this very loose, very painterly look in these pastel colors. That was it. I was, "Okay, that's Spyro. That's the look we want."<br />
<br />
I remember always looking at her work and then actually pulling out some of her textures to use as a canvas to start on, to learn how to do that painterly loose quality. It was a different, it was a look that is outside of my go-to, which is a little more monster-y and a little more hard-edged.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on Dark Empires, it looks like the game starts in more of a traditional medieval fantasy, and that proceeds into like a sci-fi setting. Do you remember whose idea was it to have the game focused around like growing, evolving time, like time would progress?'''<br />
<br />
So once again, I don't really remember. I don't know how much of this was a collaboration between Bill and Mark. I think it was mostly Bill. Those would be questions for him. All I remember is the visuals on it. I don't remember anything story-wise or gameplay-wise beyond a clicking, moving strategy type game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned that you were working on it, we have Bill working on it, and I think Scott Chandler was on programming. Do you recall anyone else working on Dark Empires?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. No, like I wouldn't have remembered Scott did the program until you mentioned it. I'm trying to think if Rick did anything on it… I don't think so. Did Alan [Ackerman] do anything on it? I don't think so. If I ever get that up and running where I can run through it and see… I don't know if there's any other pieces that are not my artwork that I'd recognize as, "Hey, I didn't do that." I don't remember any other artists, but it all blurs together. Somewhere in my mind, I want to say I'm doing that at the same time I'm doing Kid Chameleon, but that doesn't make any sense. Too long ago.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall why exactly it was cancelled? You had mentioned Mark saying that it was against the ideology of STI (to make these big franchise-creating series). Do you recall the exact reasons you were given why Dark Empire was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
No. I think it was just too much of a niche game or… I don't know if there was conversations about it just wasn't working. It wasn't fun.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I wanted to ask was: in your VHS resume for both Dark Empires and Treasure Tails. You're looking at the art through the same debug display. There was a crimson line and text at the bottom that says WINDOW 0,223. Was that your art tool or… was that a specific tool?'''<br />
<br />
That's the Digitizer. I think if I remember it, I'm literally videotaping the screen of the Digitizer. This is like real low-tech. I literally had my video camera on a tripod recording the screen, if I remember right. Hm…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It does look like it's direct feed. I can't speak to a hundred percent for sure, but the VHS resume looks like a direct feed.'''<br />
<br />
I just remember having my little camcorder. Maybe I did have it feeding in directly. It's all very primitive. No editing tools or anything. To edit it, I would like literally hit pause and start the next one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To hop to Jester really quick. Do you remember whose idea was it to make a game starring a protagonist made of clay? Cause you can do a whole lot with that concept, it's a creative idea.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. I don't know… that would either be, to the best of my guessing memory, would be either Mark or Rick, or a collaboration between those two. I'm trying to think how much game design Rick was doing. I know Rick was doing a lot of game design and artwork, cause I think Rick did the animations for Jester. I'm trying to remember if Mark was doing game design on that. I think Mark and Rick were doing game design. Once again, I didn't work on it.<br />
<br />
I know he [Rick Macaraeg] did the animations for Jester. I don't know if he was doing level art. I know Alan Ackerman did level art. I don't know who… I want to say Mark was probably doing some game design for that as well, but I don't know, don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''And just to confirm, this is Mark Cerny?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Mark Cerny. So the primary designer and my memory was Rick Macaraeg. That was his baby. But I don't know if he was working with Mark initially to come up with the concept or if that was Rick's idea. I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A question you may have already answered, I apologize if you did. Do you remember exactly why Jester was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
I mean, not a good reason. I think it was… it had to have been almost finished cause it had been in production for like two years. Part of it is Mark Cerny had moved on. He had left Sega. I want to say it suffered the death of any project that dies after its lead promoter leaves, after its producer leaves. Sega was really bad for: a producer would come in and would start a bunch of projects and then they would leave, and then a new producer would come in. Well, the new producer doesn't want to be working on somebody else's projects. They want to be doing their projects.<br />
<br />
My best guess is that that was a major contributor to [the cancellation of] Jester was that Mark Cerny had left. So there was no huge person- the person that was really behind it was no longer there, and we had new producers that didn't have any interest in doing somebody else's game. I wish I knew, I wish I could remember how much of the game was done. Cause I remember it just didn't make any sense to cancel it. Of all the games that got cancelled. That's the one that just should have gotten done. It was new, it was fun, it was creative. It was very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another cancelled STI project, this one we actually know less about than Jester: What was SpellCaster?'''<br />
<br />
SpellCaster! Okay, so it never got beyond a pitch. So after Sonic, they said, "Okay, you can pitch ideas." The head people from SoA would come down… Toyoda… I can't remember the name. It was a Japanese guy, was really nice guy. Tom Kalinske, another really nice guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda.'''<br />
<br />
Wait, what was his name again?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda, I believe.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Shinobu, a really nice guy. I think he's the one that chose me to go to Japan for some reason. They would come down with whoever from marketing and they would sit around the conference room table and you can come in and pitch an idea. SpellCasters was me and Dave Sanner, the programmer I just re-met, and we came up with this idea of this combat game, but to set it apart from every other Street Fighter-type game out there, two things is: my big thing was you were going to be able to actually affect the environment, not just throw spells and weapons, hit, hurt the other players. If he was standing on a platform, you could shatter the platform or you could hit something to have it fall on him and you could also interact with the environment.<br />
<br />
Then Dave's big thing is he wanted the spells to be a sound-based, music-based. As you push the buttons, it would play a sound. You would hear notes as the players were mashing their buttons. That would do two things. One, you could hear the other player. Once you got playing enough, you could recognize songs, recognize a short tune, and you'd get a little heads up as to what the other guy was going to do. We did up a document, I did up some artwork, and we pitched it to Sega and that's as far as I got. They said, "Oh, thank you, but no."<br />
<br />
That's as far as that got, just the documents you see there and a single pitch meeting. I also came back after that and just myself put together Segapede and pitched that. That's the one where Sega went, "Hey, we like that. But we want to see a proof of concept." So that's when Segapede ended up coming about.<br />
<br />
The foundational idea for Segapede was it was initially it was supposed to take place in the Sonic universe. The core concept was that… the memory I talked about, that very first time I ever played Sonic and there was no Ring splash and then playing it again and there was a Ring splash and how much the Ring splash made it fun was, that was the core. The base idea that started Segapede was the character was going to be the centipede that each of the body segments was this little ball bearing, a little unicycle thing, with your power-ups sitting on top of that. It could be an extra engine to go fast. It could be rocket launchers. It could be spikes. It could be whatever gameplay characteristics, things you needed, would be these different body segments.<br />
<br />
Zip the character is basically a unicycle. He's just this one little ball bearing with this little character on top, and as he runs around the level, he collects these body pieces, and you collect your power ups like any other game. The difference here is that when you get hit, those go flying just like Rings. You'd have a body part splash and these body segments, your power-ups, would all go rolling off screen and you had to run around and grab them all before they went off screen and disappeared like the Rings. I also liked the idea of that centipede shape. Once again, playing off of a Sonic world of these loops and the roller coaster feelings of this… like a roller coaster train, this whole string of pods rolling and sliding around in a Sonic world, basically, was the foundation for Segapede.<br />
<br />
Sega liked it, but two things: they wanted a playable prototype, a proof of concept, and they didn't want it to be in the Sonic universe, which I'm still bummed about. Because the original idea had it where Robotnik was experimenting with Chaos Emeralds in his lab and they exploded and they vaporized and he breathed in all this Chaos Dust and it was going to kill him, putting him into a coma, and it was going to kill him. Sonic decided he wanted to save him. This goes back to the movie Incredible Voyage [Fantastic Voyage], where they shrink everyone into this important person. They shrink everyone down… Raquel Welch, and put them in this little submarine and inject them with his blood and they gotta go do brain surgery. That was the gameplay. Zip is in fact microscopic, he's a nanite, but Zip was a friend of Sonic's. So Sonic gets Zip to go into Robotnik.<br />
<br />
The levels are in fact inside Robotnik, and you're collecting this Chaos Dust and trying to save Robotnik. That was the original idea, which I still really like and still think would have been a good game, but Sega didn't want it in the Sonic universe. I had to come up with this other idea that I was never happy with, story-wise of the concept or the reason for anything being. But at least they wanted the game because they gave us like a couple months to do the prototype. That's where I realized I had all this finished artwork for Hidden Palace Zone just sitting on my desk. That enabled us to do a really quick and dirty first playable, proof of concept, but have it look finished.<br />
<br />
The playable version that you [Ashley Rojas] just got sent was what Ken Rose and I managed to do in a couple of months or less. I don't know how much time we spent on that. That's another one that we got… just the lack of support from Sega and our management. Cause they had me managing and I don't manage. I don't know anything about the background of making the games. You know, "Let me do the art." Then they had Ken who… no actually, we didn't have Ken. Ken did the prototype. Then when the game went into production… No, we still did have him, but there was something going on between Ken and management cause Ken wanted some assurances, "What was going on?" I can't remember what the politics were going on there, but there were some politics going on between Ken and management.<br />
<br />
We had at least one Japanese programmer but Ken said he just was a terrible programmer and the other two artists they hired… One was a very talented fine artist [Marte Thompson] and she had been working on the computer, but had been doing technical schematics, literally line work and text, so she had no clue about making video games. I don't think she was even a big game player. Then the other guy was this incredible artist. His name was Alex [Niño]. He was extremely famous in the comic world cause he did like the original Tarzan comics. He's an older guy. The art director hired him just because he could. [laughs] Cause this guy was a legend in the art world. But he'd never worked on the computer at all. I don't know if he even owned a computer at the time.<br />
<br />
He's sketching in his drawings and his concepts and that's something else that got lost is… I have a stack of enemy concepts that he drew for Segapede that I wish I had. That just dragged on and I think that's when they finally needed people and pull me off, I think to do Spinball. [sarcastically] Awesome.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on Segapede, it looks like the name Segapede came first and then I believe you changed it to Astropede near the end as you were preparing to leave Sega. Is that true?'''<br />
<br />
Well, Segapede was literally just a working title. In fact, I should have put just "working title" because I had no intention of ever calling Segapede. That was just a working title. But then once we get the final approval… So that prototype was called Segapede, but then once we got final approval, the new working title, hopefully final real title had it shipped, would have been Astropede. Once again, that never went down the path of, "Does everybody like it? Does marketing like it? Does legal like it?" It never even got to that point. Segapede was just the prototype working title.<br />
<br />
I got teased a lot. Brenda used to tease me a lot about the name [laughs]. But yeah, it was just a working title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall the name of that fine artist and the Japanese artist? Can you recall either of those names?'''<br />
<br />
I can see her [Marte]. Then Alex Niño. Alex Niño was the older guy that had drawn the Tarzan comics, like back in the fifties or sixties. Really nice guy. His sketches were just gorgeous. But just kinda useless when it comes to making video games. Mark may have wanted to hire people outside the industry in the beginning. That's not what we needed then. We needed the people that could hit the ground running, and a producer that would actually produce.<br />
<br />
What was her name… It was frustrating because she was often calling in sick. She'd say, "I had an anxiety attack and I had to turn around and go home." I didn't understand at the time. I'll say, maybe you know this, but I left the game industry in 2005 and am on disability still because of anxiety and depression. I totally get the anxiety thing now, how it just shuts your brain off. "Oh, I get it now." I wish I was more understanding back in the day. What's her name? I can see her.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. No worries at all. If you remember it all, shoot me an email. I'll get that added to our production credits. You said there was a producer on that. Do you remember the producer's name?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, he was English, and he seemed very supportive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dean Lester?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! He seemed very supportive but I remember Brenda and I think Rick Macaraeg both not liking him and telling me to not trust him. And… yeah he stabbed me in the back.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. You're not the first one to say that they had issues working with Dean Lester. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. We got along wonderfully and he was very supportive, it felt like, on putting together Segapede. When he came in it would have been called Astropede. So once it was actually a game in production… He seemed very supportive but he didn't ever actually do anything. Looking back at it… Once again, we needed a project manager. We needed somebody that would actually knew how to schedule and knew all the things that have to be known to make a game and keep things on schedule and keep things moving and all that business end of it.<br />
<br />
I guess he was expecting me to do that and I was trying to do it. I wanted to do that, but that's not what I did, it's not anything I actually knew anything about. This was in, what, my third game, fourth game ever? When time came and Sega realized that they needed to… Cause I think they had like five games running simultaneously. He didn't support keeping Segapede going. Didn't give it the resources it needed at all, ever. As I said, he got me a couple artists, but that weren't fit for the job. According to Ken, a programmer that was not fit for the job. At that point I realized like, "Oh, this is why Brenda and Rick didn't care for Dean." They knew this was going to happen.<br />
<br />
There was another programmer, a woman. I do not remember her name at all… Once again, she had her own thing going, had projects that she wanted to do. When she came in, you could feel things shift. Her and Dean were there at the same time. I was also butting heads with Roger Hector, because morale at this point was low. They had Spinny & Spike, Steve Woita's game. Segapede, my game. Spinball, which was Peter's game. The Ooze was going on also. They were trying to do Sonic on for the Mars, 32X, or whatever that chaotic transitional crazy thing that Sega screwed everything up on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah [laughs].'''<br />
<br />
You had least five games going simultaneously in a company that really, at best, could do two or three, as far as manpower. The morale was in the crapper. I remember going into [the office of] Roger Hector, who had taken over after Mark left, and saying, "Hey, morale is just really crap right now. Everybody is just miserable." I spent probably an hour in his office. I remember I got about three steps out his door and realized I spent the last half hour or 45 minutes apologizing to him because the morale was 'my problem'. It wasn't the company's. I got about three steps out and I went, "What the fuck?" Because that was Roger's superpower. He's a nice guy, very charismatic. His nickname was Teflon Don. Nothing stuck to him. If anything bad happened, it was never his fault.<br />
<br />
I guess that followed him from his time at Disney. He was really good at avoiding blame. He had to add this power of when you're with him, of… he just had incredible charisma or something. At that point, I literally walked to my desk and called Mark Cerny. "Sayyy, Mark, I understand you're looking for someone, you're putting a new team together." I mean, that was the transition. Like, "Oh, crap, it is time to get out of here," and called Mark.<br />
<br />
Although when Sega didn't get a Sonic for the 32X Mars slash Saturn… that bullet, even Roger couldn't avoid that one. He ended up leaving Sega shortly thereafter because I think he finally couldn't dodge that bullet. That's how I ended up in L.A. with Mark was "OK, it's finally time for me to get out of here."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. That was actually going to be one of my questions, how you moved to Insomniac. I did want to ask one final STI question before we get off. I do appreciate the patience. I know this is a long interview. I'm actually on my last page. We're getting to the end.'''<br />
<br />
Oh that's fine. Don't worry about me, I can talk all day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.'''<br />
<br />
I enjoy sharing and talking.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So my question was, and this is something that you very likely might not know… The whole reason this interview started was because I was asking Brenda about some Michael Jackson Sonic 3 stuff. Do you remember seeing Michael Jackson or ever sitting in a meeting that he was a part of?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Very much so. That's my golden answer to: "Who's the most famous person you ever met?" "See if you can beat this one." I guess he was there signing or doing some contracts or talking about doing the music for Sonic 3 and was a huge Sonic fan and wanted to meet the team. We knew about it. We knew he was coming. We were all in the conference room and it's kinda surreal because I'm siting there and I'm like five feet away from… at that point, that's like the high point of Michael Jackson. He's like the most famous person on the planet, practically. I remember sitting there and thinking, "There are people who would literally kill me to be sitting here."<br />
<br />
I think I asked him one question, mostly it was just him asking questions and talking to people. Most of the time was focused on Naka and Yasuhara and maybe Yamaguchi. Because I know he invited… at least Yasuhara went and spent a day or had lunch at the Neverland Ranch, so went and had lunch with Michael at his place. I'm not sure if not Naka and who else went, but I know I know at least Yasuhara went. I know we gave Michael Jackson one of our Sega jackets. It was the Sega letterman jacket.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Which makes the one I have worth a lot more money because there's pictures of Michael Jackson wearing his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was fun, it was exciting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''In that meeting that you were in with Michael Jackson, was Brenda there with you?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. I'm going to say yes? She could've been, should've been, but I don't remember who else was the meeting. I know it was shoulder to shoulder around the table, but I don't remember who all was there. It was after hours, so it was it was later in the evening. Not late, but after normal hours. I remember I was like one of the last people in the room, so I was just busy working on my desk waiting for somebody to say something, and I looked around and "Where is everybody?" I'm like, "Oh, crap." I got up and poked my head in the door and everyone's… he's already there and I snuck in and sat down. He was on crutches. He never on crutches and never took the sunglasses off.<br />
<br />
He was on crutches because he'd hurt himself doing some commercial. He was filming something and hurt himself, so he's on crutches. Very, very nice, very soft spoken, very complimentary. He had nothing but nice things to say about the game and [he was] thankful to the team. But very quiet, very.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would you be able to tie a specific date to that? The reason I'm glad you said crutches was because we actually know the date that he did have that accident. That was in early March. So it would have to be sometime in March or later in 1993. Would you be able to tie that to a specific date?'''<br />
<br />
I'm going to be fairly certain that that's written somewhere down in my journal. But off the top of my head, I can't. I know… it was after he would have been injured. Then unfortunately, very shortly thereafter, his life imploded, and Sega cut all ties at distance themselves from him. It'd be in my journals. I've just gotta know where my journals are.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was it just that one meeting or two? That you attended?'''<br />
<br />
With the team, yeah, it was just the one that we know of. I don't want if he came other times to talk about doing the music. That was the only time we met him, the only time the only time I knew he was in the building. I remember they put little footprints after he left, they put little footprints where we walked. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Oh that's really funny.'''<br />
<br />
One of the things, when I when I moved back up here, is I drove over and didn't know Sega had moved. I drove over because I hadn't been there in 20 plus years and hardly recognized it because there's so many new buildings and everything. I looked at the building, I wondered who's in there. Same thing when I drive past the STI offices that are off the 101 here, if there's any gamers in that building that know what was created in those rooms… If you had a Sonic fan and they're actually sitting in the room where Sonic 2 was made or where this is made or that was made, I always just wondered, "Do they know or would they care?"<br />
<br />
My favorite celebrity story was for the big release for Sonic 2. So it's a huge party at… a Toys "R" Us or FAO Schwarz? It was a big toy store in New York City. They flew the team out. The morning of the event, I go downstairs from the hotel and there's a limo waiting. I get in the limo and I've got a denim Sonic 2 jacket [on that] they'd given the team. I get in the car and there's Dylan Taylor Thomas [Jonathan Taylor Thomas], the middle son on the TV show Home Improvement, in the car. Home Improvement at the time was a big show and Sega had brought in a bunch of the big kids TV celebrities to play Sonic 2 for the cameras. So he was there. He was already in the car waiting and I go in and I get in the car with him and his mom's there, and he looks at me and he goes, "Oh, are you security?" I went, "No, no, I'm one of the artists." And he's like, "Really? Can I have your autograph?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ah, that's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
So I would see him on a TV show and be like, "He asked for my autograph. He asked for MY autograph." Then later that night… there was the TV show Saved by the Bell, they had the character name was Screech. Kid's name was Dustin [Diamond]. He was there as well. A bunch of us ended up having dinner with him and his dad, and then his room with the hotel was just down from mine. So we come back from dinner, we're sitting there walking and talking, I said, "Good night" and they walked down the hall. I go into my room, I just flip the TV on and there he is. It just happened to turn on to Saved by the Bell with him, and I'm like, "That's weird." That was just really bizarre. Like, "Wait, I just had dinner with you. That's weird." Yeah, every time I see Taylor Thomas I'm like, "Yeah, he asked for MY autograph."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an awesome story, holy crap. [laughs] So to move onto Insomniac, what was early Insomniac like? Because you were there from the very early days.'''<br />
<br />
From the very beginning, from the almost very early beginning, yeah. I left Hector's office, called Mark, and Mark said, "Yes, I need an artist," But I thought he's still here in the Bay Area He's like, "Oh, but I'm in L.A. I do have a team, they've never made a game." But they need an artist, and we're talking and I said, "Well, I can't come to L.A." My son was six years old. I'm divorced, but I'm right here with my son, he's six, I can't move to L.A. Mark said, "Well, tell you what? If you can come down for just three months, and help them finish the game, we'll put you up while you're down here and we'll fly you back to San Jose every weekend." "Hey, OK, I can do that for three months, that'd be kinda fun."<br />
<br />
I flew down, I met Ted and the Hastings brothers and really liked them. [I] wasn't overly impressed with Disruptor, the game they were working on, it was just a Doom clone. There's no way I would have gone down to work with these guys, who've never made a game, on a Doom clone, except I really wanted to work with Mark again. Mark's one of those people who I think either you really enjoy working with or you really don't like him. I really enjoyed working with him, luckily.<br />
<br />
I went down for three months, and we're doing Disruptor. I was learning 3D, learning Maya, Alias on the fly. I'm kinda learning Photoshop on the fly, because I really didn't know Photoshop very well yet, and then flying back and forth. Disruptor was originally for the 3DO platform. Mark's superpower is seeing the future and knowing what the future needs. You can start work on it now so that it's ready when the future needs it. That really is his superpower. He says, "Okay, at 3DO… this is not going to work. Let's go start talking to Sony and the PlayStation." We didn't have to do much art change, but we had to rework some stuff.<br />
<br />
At some point, shortly thereafter, Ted asked me if I wanted to go permanent with them, as opposed to just my three month contract. Flying back and forth was fine. I talked to my son about it. Like, "Okay, we'll just keep doing this. I'll just keep flying back and forth." So that three months flying back and forth… ended up [as] 25 years in L.A. Ten of that with Insomniac. I never planned on moving to L.A.<br />
<br />
We did Disruptor, which got wonderful reviews… and didn't sell, because Universal didn't advertise it. No one had ever heard of it. Also, Tomb Raider came out at the same time. And Dark Empires [Star Wars: Dark Forces] and Doom. Star Wars, which was actually a good game on the PS1. Doom, which was almost unplayable on the PS1, but it was Doom. Then Tomb Raider, which is Tomb Raider. Disruptor didn't sell. No one ever heard of it.<br />
<br />
It was after Disruptor that… at that point, it was just the two Hastings brothers (Alex and Brian Hastings) and Ted Price who'd started the company. I was their first employee. They had one contract artist in before me that I left shortly after I started. I think it was just me and the contract artist and the Hastings and Ted, and there was Michael Johns and Mark, with Mark's little company Cerny Games. That was it.<br />
<br />
That game shipped. At that point, there's just the four of us. There's just the Hastings, Ted and myself. Ted said, "Okay, everyone go take two weeks and come up with a game and come back, we'll all pitch them to each other, and we'll decide what we do next." So I think Al Hastings came back with like this Martian… no, this off-road racing game, which came from the fact that, on Disruptor, when you're running around Mars, there's these rolling sand dunes you're running across, and it was really fun just to run around out in the desert and catch air on top of the dunes. He was thinking, "Okay, we can make a game out of that." I'm pretty sure Ted pitched an alien invasion game, that I'm guessing eventually became Resistance on the PS3. I don't remember what Brian pitched.<br />
<br />
Then I pitched this game where you get to be a dragon, as opposed to riding or slaying a dragon. You are the dragon. In the original pitch, you started out as a hatchling, you started out as an egg and it hatches, and the premise is that as the game progresses, you get bigger and bigger and bigger and become more powerful. The gameplay is you need to leave your little den and go out and gather gold and gather treasure and bring it back, but then you also have to protect it, it's your lair, and you've got to protect it against various people coming in to try and steal your treasure. Then that changes throughout time as you live to be… you can live for thousands and thousands of years. The world, so to speak, would change through eras in time.<br />
<br />
I pitched that idea to Ted and the Hastings and everyone said they liked the dragon idea. We polished it up and then pitched it to Mark Cerny and Universal Studios. This is where Mark's superpower comes into play is… Universal liked it. Mark liked it. But he said, "Two suggestions. Keep the dragon the same age. Because sequels will be easier." Wow, yeah, never occurred to me that we'd be making two of these. Then the other one was him looking ahead knowing it's going to take two years to make this game. In two years, who's going to be buying and playing the PS1. He said, "Keep him the same age and keep the game cute and a little more family friendly," because your average player age is going to drop a couple of years by the time you guys get this game out.<br />
<br />
That's when we did another rework and we ended up with this little dragon named… once again, never his real name. People always think it's his real name. His working title name was Pete because it was a play off Pete's Dragon. It just drives me nuts, where people say, "If you named him that Disney would sue you." It's like, "No, the dragon in Pete's Dragon is named Elliot. That's the little boy named Pete. That's the joke here, people. We're not going to name him Pete." But by the end of it, I really did want to name him Pete, cause after 18 months… once again, that naming thing, it took forever to find a real name. By the time we got around to it, I liked Pete.<br />
<br />
We reworked it and brought in Charles Zembillas as a contract artist, just to do some character design, cause he also did all the character design for Naughty Dog. Crash Bandicoot and the other stuff for Naughty Dog. We brought him in and I think he was there just for an afternoon or morning, early afternoon. Then we couldn't decide… he did a whole bunch of drawings. He's incredible. He did a whole bunch of drawings, but no one liked any one drawing as our little dragon. We had pieces we liked. I took the ones we liked, photocopied them, then I cut the head off of one and I either shrunk it down a little bit, or I blew it up bigger, and I used some Wite-Out and I taped these things all together. I took a photocopy of that and I brought that into the conference room and everyone went, "That's our dragon. That's our character." That's one of the scans I still have, that cut and paste Spyro.<br />
<br />
He was originally green. I did the color comp and he's green. But we very quickly realized that he's green, and for a lot of the game, he's going to be running around on grass. So that's not going to work. Plus there was Gex and Croc and at least one other… Yoshi. There's all these other green reptile mascot characters. "Y'know, maybe not green." That's the one of the other things I still have is this 25 year old videotape of Spyro in all these different colors, trying to find what would look good. We ended up on purple, and that's how we ended up with a little purple dragon.<br />
<br />
I remember the very first time Al Hastings had it up and running. Literally just a flat green plane. I think maybe it had like one little square in the middle for a reference point, and it was just this flat green plane with a grass texture on it. But you could run around with Spyro and it was fun. You could sit there and just run around and chase your tail for ten minutes and have fun. I remember telling somebody, "Okay, this is our game to screw up. Cause this is fun with no gameplay and no world. If this is not fun when we're done, WE'VE screwed up." That was the beginning of Spyro.<br />
<br />
Of all the games I've worked on, Spyro is the one that's near and dear to my heart. If I hadn't been at Sega, somebody else would have done the artwork on Hidden Palace on Sonic, or if I hadn't been around later on at Insomniac, somebody else would have done Ratchet and Clank's artwork, and maybe it wouldn't be as good, maybe it'd be better. Had I not been at Insomniac when I was, there would be no little green dragon or a little purple dragon. You would have an off-road racing game or an alien invasion game that may or may not have been a hit.<br />
<br />
He's near and dear. Ted was always really good at- anytime somebody would ask him, "Why did you guys make a game about a dragon?" he'd always say, "Well, Craig Stitt said he always wanted to make a game about dragons. Craig said he's always liked dragons." That was awesome at the time. I really appreciated the fact that Ted always made sure to mention my name. I think as time went on… you say something enough and that becomes fact. I think as time went on, all Ted thinks I did was say, "Dragons are cool. Let's make a game about a dragon."<br />
<br />
No, there was this whole concept and there was so much more there. It's gotten to be a little frustrating that there wasn't more acknowledgement. As years went by at Sega and Insomniac… there was some crap going on there, and it literally broke me. That's why I left in 2005 was I basically had a nervous breakdown and pretty much lost the ability to paint or draw. Which I'm just now starting back after 2015 years. It was very hard when Insomniac wanted, or I should say needed, to leave Universal Studios, because it meant leaving Spyro behind, because Universal owned the IP.<br />
<br />
Ted didn't have the emotional connection I had to Spyro. But he did have to deal with the BS of Universal on a regular basis, which I guess was just nonstop. They finally had to break ties. Then after Spyro, Sony is like, "Hey, you guys come over here!" Before, when we sent out for resumes during Disruptor, trying to staff up for Spyro, it was really hard to even get resumes. We're sort of this no-name company and "Who's going to send their resume in?" Then after Spyro, we're stealing people from Disney, we're stealing animators from Disney, we're getting stacks of resumes. It really helps to have a little name recognition and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Sony really wanted… for their new game, they wanted a character that had hands. I think the game designers did as well, because it was it was problematic trying to figure out ways to get Spyro to do things since he was a quadruped. Then Spyro ended and then we did… there was another game that would have been really awesome. At this point, Insomniac is now off the lot from Universal, we've got our own building, floor of the building.<br />
<br />
Paul… what's last name… he was one of the game designers and pitched an idea called Monster Knights, like Knights with a K. Monster Knights. The play dynamic was the character, all of his power-ups and weapons and tools, so his shields and his armor and his guns or his bows or whatever, were actually monsters of different kinds that he would use as a shield or as armor or as a weapon. Beautiful art, great concept, and some reason, you know, Ted and the Hastings didn't like it.<br />
<br />
Then somebody… I think Al pitch this game that ended up just being called a Girl with a Stick. Our working title was I5, Insomniac's 5th game. These beautiful worlds where this girl with this magical stick would run around, fight monsters, and she'd plant her stick in… you get to certain locations and you could activate these huge spells for these big boss fights. The worlds were gorgeous. We're working really closely with Naughty Dog, sharing the same tools and kinda the same 3D engines between each other. The game was gorgeous. I really wish I had videotape of particularly this one level I did. It was just… it was a painting. It was gorgeous. But the game wasn't very much fun.<br />
<br />
We worked on it for like, eight months, or even more maybe, and Ted finally comes in and says, "Okay, everyone, I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is we're canceling I5. The good news is we're canceling I5." Everyone, Sony, everybody was just like, "This is beautiful. But it's just not fun."<br />
<br />
Then pretty quickly thereafter, Ratchet and Clank popped up. I'm not sure who pitched that idea. Was it Brian? It may have been Brian. That one fell into place very quickly as far as names and characters, all the front end on that, at least from my perspective, which I had (from a frustrating point of view) almost no input on. It was very frustrating to go from being at the ground level, inputting ideas and being in all the meetings as you're building up a new concept, to literally not being invited to the meeting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oof.'''<br />
<br />
That just got worse as time went by. If I had to do it all over again, I would have quit after Ratchet and Clank 1. I should have quit after Ratchet and Clank 1. Right in the middle of Ratchet… like, during Spyro, I remember, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night, I'm at my desk banging away on something on behind schedule, and Ted would call me into his office. "Hey, Craig, can I talk to you?" and I'm like, "Oh man, I am so busted." I'd into to his office and I'm getting ready to get chewed out, and Ted would go, "Hey, Craig, just want to thank you for being here. We couldn't do this without you. Here's the raise."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's nice!'''<br />
<br />
"Okay! Oh, okay." Then I'd go back to work. Then like a year later, another late night, I'm at my desk, I'm behind schedule, like everybody always is. Ted says, Hey, "Can I see you at my desk?" I'm like "Crap, I'm busted. I'm in so much trouble." He goes, "Hey, Craig, couldn't do this without you. Thank you. Here's a raise." "Oh, okay."<br />
<br />
Then jump ahead to… halfway through Ratchet and Clank, this time during the day. Ted says, "Hey, can I see you in my office?" "Yeah, sure." This time I'm not freaking out. Like, "Hey, I'm getting a raise." I go in and Ted says, "If you're behind schedule again, we're gonna have to fire you."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[shock] No.'''<br />
<br />
That was so asinine, it was such a bizarre statement, my brain didn't register it. I just went, "Oh, well, I'll work harder. I'll put some more hours in," and I went to lunch. I'm sitting at lunch and all of a sudden I'm like, "What the fuck? Did he just threaten to fire me?" It didn't register until halfway through lunch. I go back into his office, and I go "Ted, did you…?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't react." I'm like, "Yes, because it's asinine. Everybody's behind schedule!" At the time, I think I was writing the schedule. So I said, "Okay."<br />
<br />
Then the next level is that Metropolis [Metropolis, Kerwan] from Ratchet 1, which is that level that I working with Tom on, which he was having a hard time [on]. I ended up pretty much doing the whole level that was impossible to do. It was three times the size it should have been, that we'd all agreed on. I remember pointing it out to Ted. At the meeting, they rolled the thing out on the floor because it's so big. I immediately go, "They've gotta cut at least like sixty percent." Because these are literally just still just paper… Was this still just paper taped together, or were they finally printing out stuff using Illustrator? It used to just be hand-drawn graph paper taped together.<br />
<br />
Ted just came in like, "Tough, do it, figure it out, make it work." I did. This is also the level that… When we pitched Ratchet to Sony, we use the Spyro engine. With all this forced perspective, and all these tricks, made it look like a PS2 game. There's all this trickery going on. It looks incredible, would love to have that videotape. "Okay, this has to look good. This is the level we sold the game to Sony on."<br />
<br />
It's still the flagship level of the series to this day, to the best of my knowledge. So that's done, and I remember Ted looks at me, he just gives me this nod and this wink like, "Yeah, you're good. Don't worry about it." But I wasn't. I was continually not invited to meetings and left out of stuff and given crap and I just got the feeling that they would love to fire me because they could hire three college kids out of college for what they're paying me. I should have spoken up. They'd hire somebody and have to give them some responsibility, so they'd take one of my responsibilities away. They just kept putting me down into smaller and smaller responsibility. I still had a half dozen artists under me and whatnot. It was just… it was getting bad.<br />
<br />
The end of the story is during Ratchet Deadlocked is they've already broken off a handful of people to start working on Resistance for the PS3, cause that's a whole new system, you gotta learn everything over again. So we finished Deadlocked. I remember I sat down, I learned how to use the new tools and do everything new. Then I go and I sit down and I teach my team, the environment team, how to use these new tools and how things are going to work. Then I go back and I go and I sit at my desk and… I can't do it. My brain just doesn't. The simplest decision. I can't decide do I want 10 polygons or 20 polygons on this curve. I just can't make the simplest decision. A little time goes by and I get called in by Ted. "Craig, can I see you in my office?" And it's, "We are firing you." You can either resign and we'll give you half of the upcoming bonus or we're firing you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sounds like you had to deal with more than you deserved there.'''<br />
<br />
I don't know where their mindset was. I look at what they've done for other employees who were having problems, that they bent over backwards for. Maybe if I had approached them and said, "Hey, there's something going on here. It's not that I'm not working hard enough or that I'm lazy. Something is wrong." Yeah, I should have left after Ratchet. I should have left when they threatened to fire me that very first time. I should have said, "Fuck you." [laughs] I really should have. I would probably have my sanity.<br />
<br />
They really messed me up. Although I was telling part of that story to a coworker… Currently, I'm working at a children's museum and I'm just on the floor. I just play with kids. I'm a camp counselor. I just sit and draw and play with the kids and do games and silly stuff. So not management. I'm on the floor. Most of my coworkers are like 20 years old or in high school still. This started in L.A. after I hadn't worked for a number of years, and a friend kept saying that I really need to come work at a children's museum in L.A. It was a long drive and I was like, "I don't know…"<br />
<br />
I just went down and went to one of her special events at the museum and just sat there for a while and talked to everybody and played around the museum. "Yeah, I need to be here." So this is my new calling. I was talking to this employee and I said, "You know, I wonder where I'd be if I had quit when I should have?" I love their response, because I said, "Well, if I had, I'd probably still be making games." He goes, "Yeah, maybe, but you wouldn't be here." I went, "Oh, yeah." I prefer this. I don't make near the money I make making video games, you make stupid money making video games. Here, I'm basically making minimum wage. But this is good. This is keeping me healthy, healthy and happy.<br />
<br />
My times at Insomniac were a real mixed bag. They went from incredible to literally breaking me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah…'''<br />
<br />
I remember they took me out on a cruise once. At that big party on the cruise, Ted's going through the history of Insomniac, and he briefly mentions and moves on. Which is okay, it's fine, it's a big company and it's got a lot of history. But it kinda bugged me. Once again, it's like I'm very curious… I'm trying to not let too much ego get in the way here… I'm curious where Insomniac would be if there was no Spyro. Who knows what they would have done without it. Spyro was in the top five for the PS1 of overall sales. Cross-generational, cross-gender, beyond what we ever expected to have it be.<br />
<br />
So Ted's talking, and Al comes over… Al, very quietly (Al is very quiet) says "Thank you." He says that and it really touched me. "We could not have done this without you." It was just so nice to hear that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine… What changes do you feel could have been made which would have helped you avoid that burnout? That's kind of a big question.'''<br />
<br />
If I stood up for myself. So when they started taking responsibilities away… Like in one game, I would be in charge of something or I would have come up with the idea for something. Then the next game, I wouldn't need being invited to that meeting. It's like, "Okay, it's not like I did a really crappy job. I don't get to do it again." It's like, "No, I did a very good job. So why am I not even invited the second time around?" When we hired new people, if I had stood my ground a little more and said, "No, those are my responsibilities, find something else for them to do."<br />
<br />
This goes all the way back to the very beginning. When we first hired John Fiorito, who was the other art director at Insomniac in the early years… so they didn't really have an art director because there were just two artists and a couple programmers and Ted. As Spyro got going, Ted was telling me, "OK, you're going to be art director on the next project." But he never officially made it official. But when they hired John, all of a sudden, it's like, they've got to keep John happy. John's a great person and an incredible artist, and he's also a really good manager. I'm a sucky, horrible manager. He was a good manager.<br />
<br />
Instead of willingly saying, "Oh yeah, we'll just split up my responsibilities and John will take this and I'll take this." I wish I had said, "No, no, no, Find something else for John to do." John and I worked really well together and there was a nice division of responsibilities there, but that was the beginning of "Oh, we've got something new. Let's take some of Craig's responsibilities." I don't know what their motives were. I try not to be too hard on myself. "Well, John's a better artist than I am." John's definitely a better manager than I am.<br />
<br />
If someone's work sucks or isn't working right, and you need to say, "You're not going home until this is fixed." or "You're working extra because this needs to be fixed," I would point out what needed to be done or that it wasn't right. When they didn't fix it before they left, I would stay late and fix it. Which would put me behind on my schedule. That's why I'm a shitty manager. I would have done that as we hired more people, and I would have said, "Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being asked about these things? Why are these no longer my responsibilities? Were you not happy with them? You never said anything."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like they had an inclusion problem.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I don't really know why. At first, I was definitely treated like the golden boy the first couple of years because I was the only person that made a game. I already had a couple of million-selling titles under my belt. I really tried to not act that way. I really tried not to be cocky or arrogant or to feel like I could get away with things. But I think it must have come across that way to some people. The only thing I remember getting called out on prior to "You're behind schedule" is… I actually was verbally told by Ted, "You are in charge here. You are the art director on this." This would have been on Ratchet or Spyro 2. "You're in charge of the art." At least for some small piece of it, because there was John still.<br />
<br />
Chad Dresden was there and I remember he was a great artist, really fast, and I did (as a crappy manager) make the mistake of asking him to fix bugs and fix things and do things that I didn't have time to do. He always had time because he was always ahead of schedule because he worked his ass off and he was fast. He started to resent the fact that because he was ahead, I was always asking him things to do. He talked to Ted and Ted called me into his office and chewed me out for always dumping stuff on Chad.<br />
<br />
It was bad on me. I take that one. It wasn't fair to Chad. That's the only time that anything had been said that I think… I don't know. I don't know. If I stood up for myself earlier, and if they gave in, then great, I would have had what I wanted. And if they didn't, I would have left earlier.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you handled it as best you could within what you were given.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I was still flying back and forth every weekend. I'd be curious to see what Ted's memories or perspective is on this, but… not that it matters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So while you were telling me that I wrote down a couple more Spyro questions, if you don't mind me hopping back a little bit.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, please. I can get off my sob story and actually get back to talking about games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no, you're good. That's an important part of it. That's an important part of your career.'''<br />
<br />
One more thing really quick here. Something I tell people, regardless of where they're working, is the mistake I made at Insomniac is: I thought of them as family. I had been there since the beginning. I was their first employee. I thought Insomniac is family. Work is never family. You are an asset. You are a tool. You're a cog in their machine. You are loved and taken care of as long as they want to take care of you, but you are not family. The second something changes, you're just replaceable. Don't make that mistake of thinking of someplace as family or home when it's not.<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to questions about Spyro.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I did want to say on the topic of burnout. When I asked you what changes could have been made, I was more referring to the company, because even though you took it on yourself and you were very noble in saying, "What could I have done differently," I was thinking more of… because if you're undergoing burnout, that can be personal issues, but I feel like the company also has a responsibility to address, on their end, what's causing that issue to be saddled on you in the first place.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at the few other people that I know had some diagnosed physical issues that made it very hard to work. Insomniac bent over backwards to keep them and make sure that they were happy and healthy and content. Chad's very talented. He was a good art director. When he needed to leave the company and go back to family in North Carolina, they opened up another branch of Insomniac in North Carolina that he could work from there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez.'''<br />
<br />
I'm like, "Okay?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"So you can't understand my position on this, but you can open up an entirely new branch in a different state?"'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. For the longest time, for the first number of years… Insomniac fired a couple of people, but nobody left Insomniac because where would you go that was better? We were making incredible gains. The coworkers were awesome, the perks and the food and everything in the office was awesome. There was literally nowhere else you could go. Then as the company got bigger, and they got more corporate, it turned into just another company. Ted kept saying, "We're never going to go corporate, we're always gonna stay the same." Then it got as corporate as it could be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So to hop to a couple questions I wanted to ask about Spyro. You said that originally, there was the concept for him aging and… because dragons are really old, the world would evolve around him. To jump back to our Dark Empires discussion, that's a theme in Dark Empires. You have both dragons and the world evolving around the player. Is there any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
Not consciously. But now that you say that? Yeah, there's definitely that transition there. I don't know if that was subconsciously still in my brain, that part of my brain liked, or… Yeah, that wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you eventually settle on the name Spyro?'''<br />
<br />
We went around with that. Names are so hard. It took forever to find a name for the company because Insomniac was named Extreme Games when I first went down. We went on forever… It was like last minute. We needed to do press releases for Disruptor, and like, "We need a company name." Finally got Insomniac. Another company… We had Insomniac games, and there was another Insomniac Studios that had filed. You have to… the first one to get a product on the shelf can actually lock the name down. So we were in a race with Insomniac Studios to be the first one to ship and we beat them. I feel sorry for them because now they got to start over.<br />
<br />
Spyro is the same way. Pete was… I think it's one of the Hastings came up with Pete. It's like, "Yeah, perfect." But you're always thinking. We get closer and closer and then Sony starts pushing like, "OK, we need a real name." We're throwing all these different names out. I know Pyro got put out early, but it was too on the nose. Also we don't want parents getting pissed off because their kids are lighting fires. Finally, pretty close to the shipping of [the game], we're "We've got to have a name." Somebody at Sony pitched Spyro.<br />
<br />
Everybody liked it, except for Brian Hastings, who went, "Hey, wait a minute. I pitched that name like three months ago, and nobody liked it." We're like, "Oh, really?" So he was always a little pissed that he'd pitched it and we hadn't liked it. Somebody at Sony came up with Spyro. Luckily it passed all the tests.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One final Dark Empires question, and I appreciate you letting me hop around here.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no worries.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So we noticed that the Dark Empire's ROM, the existing ROM, doesn't have any sound. Do you recall if anyone was planned to be assigned to do music and sound for it?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
It's weird. I'm trying to remember if there was sound on… Well then again, it's been 35 years? 1990, when? 30, 35 years. [laughs] Since I would have last played that. Yeah, not that I know of. Sound effects, I guess, would have done in house. Then music… I know for Kid Chameleon, they brought in somebody outside to do the music. Actually, he did some of the sound effects, too. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Going back to Spyro here. Of all the original Spyro games, or I will say, of all three of the original Spyro games, which did you enjoy working on the most?'''<br />
<br />
It's down to 1 or 2. It's a trade off because, short answer, the first one, just because it's new and it's this wonderful, beautiful world. But then, the second one, because… all the hard starts, all the hard, unfun stuff about the being the creative process, is done. Now you're just having fun. You know the tools, you know the world, and you can just build. So it's hard [to answer]. My favorite level of all the levels is Badlands, Skelos Badlands. Is that in 1? Just something about that one, I really like the artwork. I like skulls, if you can't tell from some of the other games I worked on. That was the first time I got to do skulls and bones in a Spyro game.<br />
<br />
The other interesting thing, that was my big surprise on Spyro, is the skies. Al Hastings came up with this way of doing skies with polygons where you're lighting the vertex and then the computer will gradate between whatever is on this vertex to the next vertex, so you can get these gradations. By shaping your polygons, you can create clouds or whatever you want in the sky. Ted did the first one or two. He then asked me to take over doing the skies. I really didn't want to. It was very tedious. They weren't particularly pretty. I didn't think there was much creatively you could do with it. The tools were really just very basic. The first couple were just a lot of work and a lot of manual, intensive, just not fun computer work. But as the tools improved, in the end, of all the different things I did in Spyro, doing the skies is my favorite.<br />
<br />
I really learned how to push what could be done with the tools and with polygons and vertex lighting. Jump ahead 30 years, and get talking to people… the people who find me or find out find out that I worked on Spyro they always bring up the skies. The skies were one of their favorite things.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
That means so much to me. I've talked to a couple of different people who talk about how they didn't have the best childhood. Spyro was their escape. Particularly, there was at least at least a couple different times that people have told me that they had spots, their favorite spot, where they would just go sit and listen to the music of Spyro. The music of Spyro, you can't beat. They would just go sit and listen to the music and look at the sky. I'm like, "Wow."<br />
<br />
The worlds were fun to build, and I've got some favorite places and favorite things and had a lot of fun building the world. But the skies. I look back at those… I just recently here just came across this picture of a tattoo that's one of my skies. It's very clearly made to look like it's polygons and a vertex-lit tattoo of the sky, with a crystal dragon from Spyro 1 on top of it. This beautiful tattoo, it kinda freaked me out in a good way, because I've seen lots of tattoos of Spyro and different games I've worked on. I built the crystal dragon and I built the sky. I'm looking at this person's tattoo. "That's my artwork on your body." That is cool. That is wild.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It must be rewarding hearing feedback like that.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, it is. It really, really is. I'm trying not to cry right now. I gotta learn the word in Japanese, but there's a Japanese word that means your reason for being [Ikigai]. It's four different things. It's a Venn diagram with four circles. The first one is doing something that you enjoy doing. The second one is doing something that you're actually good at doing. The third one is doing something that they actually will pay you to do. And the fourth one is doing something that enhances or gives back to the world.<br />
<br />
I look at my time at museums, when working with kids, I'm like, "Okay, I enjoy doing it. I'm good at doing it. They pay me to do it. And it's definitely helping the world." That's a good reason for being. Back when I was making games, and was making really good money, and I had a lot of friends who were working like two or three jobs to barely keep paying the rent… I felt really guilty that I'm sitting around listening to music, drawing monsters all day, and I'm getting paid money. My one friend pointed out like, "No, what you're doing is important. It is affecting people. These are more than games to some people." I really understand that now. From talking to these people and seeing the way people's eyes light up, when I'm talking to someone and they find out that I worked on Spyro, and they just light up.<br />
<br />
Actually, at the museum down in L.A., every Thursday, they have 15 minutes in the morning for like, you could have a show and tell. You could sign up and bring in something to talk about a trip or a knee surgery or your favorite whatever. People kept asking me to bring in some artwork and video game stuff. So I did. My boss knew I'd made games, but that he didn't know anything beyond that. As I'm going through my artwork, and I pulled out the Spyro stuff, his eyes literally opened up and his jaw literally dropped and he's staring at me. Afterwards he comes to me and goes "Spyro! That was my game, that was the game." It's so weird to watch him try to be my boss and not go all fanboy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] That's really sweet.'''<br />
<br />
I really had a very fortunate life. Not only did I get to make games, I got to work on some of the best base games out there. Sonic. I mean, come on, my second game ever was Sonic the Hedgehog. Then Spyro and Ratchet and Clank. They're still making Ratchet and Clank games. Sonic's got movies, Spyro's got a TV show. Although he's kinda butt ugly in it because Skylanders, but it's still Spyro. Ratchet and Clank's got a movie. Comix Zone, the rights got sold to make a movie.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh!'''<br />
<br />
I don't know if anything ever happened to that, but somebody bought the rights. So yeah, very fortunate life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What advice would you give to young artists entering the industry?'''<br />
<br />
What would I tell people? Because I do get asked that a lot. I do encourage people. It's as much luck and being in the right place. People ask me how I got into the industry. If I answered "An ad in the newspaper that said wanted artists, no experience necessary." I mean, come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's not going to happen nowadays.'''<br />
<br />
What kinda bullshit lazy writing is that? I had a sign on my desk for years. Well, I had two signs on my desk. I had KISS, K-I-S-S, which is 'keep it simple, stupid.' [laughs] To remind myself to keep everything simple. I need to make a sign here for my projects here. The other one was, 'if you love your job, you'll never have to work a day in your life.' I've felt very fortunate that that's almost my entire life, other than shoveling fries in high school, I've had jobs where I was really enjoying the work.<br />
<br />
When I talk to people, I tell them to pursue something that you really enjoy, because if you can get that, if you can make a living at that, it's not work. It's very hard, and there's not many people that can manage to do it, but if you can… Then I follow that up with my cautionary tale. "Don't be blinded by that." Because that will mess you up. But just have faith. It does happen. It happened to me, it can happen that you can you can follow this and do it.<br />
<br />
People ask specific suggestions on the game industry now and I just tell them, "It's changed so much. I can give you some generic stuff that worked 30 years ago, but it's so different now." It's changing again here with AI stuff coming in. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the art. Actually, it'll be interesting to see what happens to games across the board.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting new time.'''<br />
<br />
My nephew was just showing me this game that is entirely AI generated. It's huge, because it's just this computer continually creating worlds that you can fly to. It'll be interesting. It's not a bad thing. It's just a new tool, but it will be interesting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you could return to game development, what kinda game do you think you'd most want to make today?'''<br />
<br />
I would love to make that original dragon game I pitched. Let's say we had made that. Let's say Mark had went "Awesome. Perfect." I think it would have been an incredible title, would have been a really fun game. It would have been kinda niche though. Moms and grandmas and girlfriends and four-year olds all want to play Spyro, but you also didn't lose the 15 year old boys. Where if you had this more realistic looking dragon, it would have been a good game, but it wouldn't have been with this worldwide hit. I would still love to play that, would love to make my original dragon game. What'd I call it? DragonSpan.<br />
<br />
Or I would love to finish up Astropede. That one could have maybe happened. I was talking to Ken, and we're bouncing back and forth like "How do we… what do we do here?" because we both wanted to see it finished. I would love to see that, because I still think… there were some technical problems and gameplay issues that we had never got to the point to where we had resolve, they were going to be a real problem, that I think now wouldn't be a problem. Just because resolution's higher on games now.<br />
<br />
I would love to make the original dragon game, where you're protecting your hoard and fighting off D&D adventurers coming in, but you also gotta go out and kidnap the princess so you have something to eat. Have you ever see the movie Dragonslayer, 1982?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's vaguely familiar. I don't think I've seen it.'''<br />
<br />
One of the most wonderful- it's not the most realistic dragon still to date, but the dragon in it is incredible in most scenes. That movie was definitely at the forefront of my brain as I was thinking of the original pitch for Spyro. That and Lord of the Rings; Smaug. By the end of the game, you're Smaug. Even more so, you're this D&D magic-using, talking, powerful dragon that's casting spells and all sorts of stuff. I would love to do that. And the artwork for that would be fun. That's right up my alley again. [laughs] Monsters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course. Looking back at all of your work in the game industry, what are you the most proud of?'''<br />
<br />
[thinks] Spyro. My favorite artwork that I'm the most proud of… I'm really glad it got cut from Sonic 2 because it made it more than just another level, is the Hidden Palace artwork and the Hidden Palace level. I'm really proud of that. It's kinda taken on a life of its own. Then Spyro. Specifically in Spyro, the skies. The rest of the artwork in the game is beautiful and fun, but after having talked to so many people about the skies… and then myself going back and looking at them. Cause people have gone through with various editors and pulled the skies out. I'd love to see the meshes without the vertex lighting. I'd love to see the meshes of these skies.<br />
<br />
I'm trying to explain to people and they're like, "What?" "Oh, I can just show you." Somewhere, there's a magazine article that has a single screenshot with and without the light colors. I've been going through and looking at these panoramic views of the skies and just… Once in a while, I'll do a piece of art, and I step back and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that?" I've got one painting, the Calvin and Hobbes painting, which is up on that DeviantArt link. The Calvin and Hobbes painting, that's one where I finished and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that? It wasn't you. Who did that?"<br />
<br />
I look at the Spyro skies, and I'm like, "Yeah, wow, those are gorgeous. Who did those?" It's nice. I like that feeling of, "Oh, I can actually look at that and I don't see all the flaws." You know, most other artists and people in general on anything, they look at something they did and all they can see is "Oh, I didn't get this right, I didn't get that right." I look at the skies and it's like, "Wow, yeah…"<br />
<br />
Talking to these people, it's surreal. That tattoo… Wow. "You did something that touched people."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your work had a huge influence.'''<br />
<br />
There was a special about these guys who went to Spain because they were huge fans of the spaghetti Westerns, in particular, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. They were going to hike around and they were going to find all the filming locations. Are you familiar with the movie?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it all the way through, but I'm familiar with spaghetti Westerns.'''<br />
<br />
You gotta watch it. It's a must-watch movie. It can be a little long, but yeah, it's classic, and it's Clint Eastwood. At the end of the movie, there's the three bad guys. There's the good, the bad, the ugly. There's this three-way Mexican standoff gunfight in the middle of this big circular cemetery with gravestones all around it. Incredible music playing, classic spaghetti Western gunfight. These guys are looking for that location, because it wasn't a real cemetery. It's a place they built out in the middle of Spain. During this special, they're talking about these different things and meeting people who were extras and whatnot, they get talking to Hatfield, lead singer from Metallica, James Hatfield, who loves the movie. In fact, Metallica starts every one of the concerts with the song that plays right before that gunfight.<br />
<br />
They're talking to him and he said something that really hit home with me. He says, people come up to him either at concerts or just on the street, and tell him how much his music means to them or how it changed their lives. He said he used to just say "Thank you very much," but then he realized that he doesn't see his music the way they see his music. To him, part of it's just a job, it's just what he does. To them, it's so much more. It can be the spiritual thing. It literally changed their lives. When he's talking to these people, he says he tries really hard to remember that, that this is more than just his music to them.<br />
<br />
As I'm listening to him talk, and I'm just starting to talk to all these people about Spyro, I'm like, "Oh, yeah." I mean, I'm not a huge gamer. I've got other things I spend way too much time and money on. This realization is like, for some of these people… like the look on my boss' face and these other people. It's huge. Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Thanks again for the patience with this long interview, we're almost about done here.'''<br />
<br />
No worries, I enjoy it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can tell.'''<br />
<br />
It's cathartic for me. Sonic, Spyro, Insomniac… see where I am on that. Like, "Oh, no, I've still got to work on that." Well, my brain's dealing with that. It's all good. Like I said, I know how much some of this stuff means to different people. One of the things I really want to do is… I've been putting my artwork out there for quite a while. It's in like game forums and places where like the gamers are going to find it, but I know there's the casual fans that don't go online looking for these stories, that would love to hear these stories and see these pictures and know some of this stuff. That's not where they spend their time digging into the Internet.<br />
<br />
I want those people to find some of this stuff and hear some of these stories. I want to get out there. I'm getting older. [laughs] I want to make sure it's out there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah… How do you feel about the influence Hidden Palace Zone had on the larger gaming community? Obviously, they named the game preservation group after it, but Hidden Palace has become kinda the symbol for like mystery in games. That must be a good feeling.'''<br />
<br />
It's another one of those surreal feelings. Once again, it makes me feel glad that it got cut from the game. Had it not been cut, it could be on somebody's ranking list of… "What's your favorite level in Sonic 2?" would be really the only place it'd ever be discussed. It's part of the whole industry now, especially within the Sonic world. It's surreal, very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it means quite a lot. That's all the questions I had to ask you. I appreciate so much again that you've given me all your time. We've been talking for almost three and a half hours here. That's incredibly gracious of you.'''<br />
<br />
I'd be putting off what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. [laugh] I'm accomplishing something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, actually, one last question. Speaking of Hidden Palace, you had previously donated Segapede to Hidden Palace for preservation, and they did a big history post about it and they were able to study it. If you don't mind, could we do the same with Dark Empires? Get it uploaded, write a little history post about it?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Once again, for the people that are going to be interested that stuff… I wish I remembered more about it. I remember doing the sketches and the only reason I remember doing those sketches because I still have those sketches. Maybe it'll trigger somebody else's memory now from something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I was so happy that you were sharing names, and part of the reason I was asking about names, was because I was actually going to reach out to get more information on just all the projects that we talked about, with all your former coworkers.'''<br />
<br />
I can't remember what I was asking Bill about… I know I talked to him or texted him probably a decade ago now. If you can track Bill down, he would definitely be able to give you more. I'm trying to think, who else… I think was Bill I contacted about Treasure Tails, and he said he didn't have anything to do with it, but I think he said Hoyt did. I don't think I… did I ever get a hold of Hoyt? I can't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I'd love to track him down.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I'd like to remember more about Treasure Tails. I do remember I do have my notes in my journal that talk about being excited about this kinda stuff. Then all of a sudden, "Eh, it's being cancelled."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you're ever able to find that journal again, please shoot me an email. As you said, there's probably tons of juicy information in there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think in the relative STI days, I actually scanned in those pages. I've been meaning to go through and pull out… because the other thing is in the landfill and Redwood City. I was busy doing this, because I was really pretty good about writing in a journal every morning or whenever, and decided that I was going to have two journals. I was going to have my personal journal, about just likes and thoughts and dating, whatever. Then my other journal about work, I was going to do at work, and I was going to do it on the computer. I'd sit down every morning and type for a few minutes.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, that journal, the typed journal on the floppy disk, is probably in a landfill somewhere because it got left behind. It didn't get brought with me. As opposed to my books, I still have my books. Unfortunately, they're mostly full of who I'm dating at the moment. The key moments and dates are still in that, so that at least allows you to get some anchor points to lock in… I'm almost sure it'll have the date of Michael Jackson's visit.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] I mean, that's low priority, but I appreciate whatever you're able to dig up and send my way.'''<br />
<br />
But you think… okay, so the accident [Michael Jackson had]. Knowing it's in March of 93, did you say was his accident…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, so March of… Just to give you an overview of what we know from other developer statements. Brenda said some of this, David Javelosa said some of this. There was at least one meeting before he sprained his ankle because Brenda said that she remembered him not on crutches. That would have put in January or February 1993 or earlier, but probably January, February '93. Then there was a second meeting where he was on crutches that you saw him, so we think that might have been mid '93.<br />
<br />
That first meeting was him discussing Sonic 3 off crutches. The second meeting was him discussing Sonic 3 more, just discussing doing it. He was on crutches, so that was March or later. Then there was a third meeting where he was also on crutches, that was later in '93 because he was dropping off materials to STI for Sonic 3, probably demos or tracks like that.<br />
<br />
If you can find a date… no worries. We're just always like to piece together timelines on Sonic Retro.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, every little piece of information leads to the next little piece of information.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, it's like archaeology.'''<br />
<br />
It literally is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like assembling… It's like you have a bit of pottery and you just assemble pieces and then you put some pieces in place and say, "Oh, the outline for this piece looks like this other piece." It's almost like a puzzle that way.'''<br />
<br />
There was something recently here… that somebody pointed out something online. I had made a comment on Reddit or somewhere. Somebody came back and they had they said something else like, "Oh, I thought this," or "I've seen this written." Actually, they posted a link to another article. I'm reading that and went, "Yes!" All of a sudden it flipped something that I remembered. These little pieces, like "Okay, that can't work because this is here now." So you have to change what was happening. Then all of a sudden, these other memories come back, because now you remember things in the correct order and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it's archaeology. It's piecing together. Occasionally, you look at the paleontology and look at some of the early drawings of dinosaurs like, "Wow, that is so wrong."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, they were trying but it was wrong.'''<br />
<br />
"You were trying. I can see why you got that. But that's not how it was." Then wait another 100 years and I'm sure they'll be looking at our drawings doing the same thing. They'll watch Jurassic Park and go, "What were you guys thinking?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. History is an interesting thing.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, if you've got any more questions, go ahead and shoot them to me again. I'm always more than happy to do what I can and try to remember what I can.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, we really appreciate the openness.'''<br />
<br />
You've done this a couple times today. Where you're just asking a question, and I'd go, "No, I don't remember anything." But there'll be a certain word, you'll say a certain thing, and "Oh, wait!" Like the fiery forest thing. I'm like, "Oh, wow." I don't initially remember anything, but I now know that was a thing. Because I can remember trying to remember how to do flames on branches… weird.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, whatever you remember you can always find my way as well. I'll probably be following up this interview with maybe a couple more questions that I either forgot or I look at the interview and I'm like, "Oh, shoot, I should ask that. Something like that."'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, my pleasure. It really has been my pleasure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, this was wonderful speaking with you. Again, you gave me over three and a half hours of your time. I cannot thank you enough for everything that you gave us today.'''<br />
<br />
[laughs] But now you've got to edit this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, my gosh, yeah. So with transcriptions… Because I do my own transcriptions, it's about two to three hours for every one hour of recording. This might be a nine hour project. So I was going to say, I'm going to take about a week to two weeks to transcribe this, clean it up, get it all together, and then I'll publish it, and then I'll send you a link. If you see any minor issues or if I got a name wrong or something, you can just let me know.'''<br />
<br />
Okay, yeah. Well, good luck, and thank you. I enjoy this, and I'm happy to do it. I'm more than happy to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Craig. This is absolutely wonderful again.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Well, talk to you later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Talk to you later. Bye bye.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
::''[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas This interview was originally published on Sega Retro on August 7, 2025].''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=News/Happy_Halloween_2025!_Dark_Empires_Prototype_%26_Craig_Stitt_Interview&diff=175122News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview2026-09-05T16:52:50Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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'''[https://hiddenpalace.org Hidden Palace] and [https://segaretro.org/ Sega Retro] '''PROUDLY''' present...''' <br><br><br />
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[[Craig Stitt (2025 interview)|Craig Stitt interview]]<br><br />
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[https://segaretro.org/Sega_Technical_Institute Sega Technical Institute] was Sega of America's first attempt at an internal game development division. Headed by [https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny Mark Cerny], an American developer who had spent the previous three years at Sega's Tokyo headquarters developing Master System software, the small autonomous studio first began operations in an unassuming San Jose business park in January 1990. It was deliberately positioned near Sega Enterprises USA (Sega of Japan's US arcade division) rather than Sega of America's headquarters in San Francisco to insulate the fledgling studio from what Cerny saw as unproductive and excessive oversight from company management. Most importantly, STI reported directly to Sega's Japanese management and was granted the unique privilege of bypassing Sega of America's concept approval processes.<br />
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Cerny's original vision for STI had been to establish a hybrid training and development center where inexperienced American talent could learn directly from visiting Japanese developers, eventually creating an American-led studio capable of addressing what Sega of America viewed as an over-reliance on Japanese software. Sega had originally planned to send eleven Japanese arcade developers to California, but after the US embassy in Tokyo denied their O-1 visa applications and temporarily barred further submissions, Cerny was forced to build an American team without assistance from Japan. Despite these constraints, his concept of an open development environment encouraged staff to freely conceive and pitch their own ideas - principles that would give rise to the studio's history of experimental projects.<br />
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STI began development of its first original game in 1990, the action-platformer ''[https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon Kid Chameleon]'', a result of Cerny's initiative to create a character-driven global blockbuster franchise. However, it wasn't the only original project undertaken by the fledgling studio. That same year, [https://segaretro.org/William_G._Dunn Bill Dunn], a designer at STI and tabletop gaming enthusiast, conceptualized a fantasy-based tactical strategy game for the Sega Genesis. The new title would reference the design of Technosoft's recently released ''[https://segaretro.org/Herzog_Zwei Herzog Zwei]'', a novel title which brought real-time strategy gameplay to home console owners. Cerny approved the concept later that year, assigning programmers [https://segaretro.org/Scott_Chandler Scott Chandler] and [https://segaretro.org/Ken_Rose Ken Rose], alongside artists [https://segaretro.org/Yasushi_Yamaguchi Yasushi Yamaguchi] and [https://segaretro.org/Craig_Stitt Craig Stitt], to development. No audio staff were assigned to the game, but Stitt speculates that music and sound would have been handled by an outside composer.<br />
<br />
Stitt in particular was enthused to join the project. A traditional artist and illustrator who shared Dunn's love of tabletop games, Stitt specialized in fantasy artwork, regularly creating monster designs for his own tabletop campaigns, with his work characterized by an emphasis on dragons. He recalls, "The style was right up my alley. This fantasy ''Dungeons & Dragons'' [style], monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build." Alongside Dunn, the two collaborated with Cerny on designing a top-down fantasy tactical strategy game set in a world of dragons and monsters, with different factions vying for control of the land. The game which would become known as ''[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires Dark Empires]'' officially began early production at STI's original San Jose offices sometime in 1990.<br />
<br />
Stitt was largely unfamiliar with strategy games before being assigned to ''Dark Empires'', but was also a fan of the aforementioned ''Herzog Zwei''. "I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played." He went on to create over a dozen pieces of concept art for the project, including early artwork of the game's unimplemented science fiction setting and a range of distinct units and tiles. Genesis graphics were created on Sega of Japan's [https://segaretro.org/Digitizer_System Digitizer System], a light-pen-based graphics workstation shipped to California by Japanese management, with Stitt's artwork adopting a detailed medieval fantasy style inspired by his ''Dungeons & Dragons'' illustration experience.<br />
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| [[File:DE_gameplay1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DE_gameplay2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DE_gameplay3.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DE_gameplay4.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
''Dark Empires'' would be structured around two opposing factions (consisting of gold and purple dragons and their respective leaders in the dumped prototype) engaging in battle across a selection of six different planets. Each faction would have a leader unit that functions similarly to a king in chess, with victory achieved by defeating the opposing faction's leader. The game was planned to progress through evolving time periods over the course of gameplay, with concept art depicting settings such as Natural, Fantasy, Prehistory, Horrific, and Cybernetic. Gameplay itself would alternate between two perspectives: a zoomed-out view reminiscent of ''Herzog Zwei'', where players move individual groups of four units across the battlefield, and a hexagonal unit-based view in which individual units can be commanded to both move and attack the enemy faction.<br />
<br />
The team had planned a number of then-novel mechanics for ''Dark Empires'', including neutral temples which players could enter to initiate a battle against a ram-headed enemy controlled by the opposing player. Defeating this enemy would reward the player with an additional single-dragon squad to command, requiring players to balance time and unit management against the possibility of expanding their forces. In addition to the two main player factions, wild dragons would roam the map as hostile forces that would attack either side, controlled by the enemy player once engaged. Units also possess nonfunctioning experience bars that gradually increase during play, seemingly intended as a leveling system for individual unit growth.<br><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles3.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
Development progressed into late 1991, when the game reached a first-playable state, featuring basic and mostly functional combat gameplay and the framework for a promising American-designed console tactical strategy game. However, as strategy games for home consoles were then an unproven and largely unheard of concept, Cerny's desire to focus on large blockbuster titles was bound to eventually clash with a game of relatively niche market appeal. Further, the studio was already beginning to suffer from recurring mismanagement problems, particularly in the allocation of project resources like assigned staff. To compound matters, Sega of America's marketing department had just tasked STI with starting production of ''[https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(16-bit) Sonic the Hedgehog 2]'' that November, with Yamaguchi leaving the project to help lead that game's development. Shortly after the completion of its first-playable prototype, ''Dark Empires'' was cancelled in December 1991.<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt later recycled certain ''Dark Empires'' concepts for use in future projects; among these was the design for a bald, disembodied human head with striking green eyes, a concept which would evolve into ''Kid Chameleon''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s final boss, Heady Metal. Also repurposed was one of ''Dark Empires''<nowiki>'</nowiki> more developed planned leader units, the Elf King, appearing as a playable character in his pitch for the ultimately undeveloped 1993 Genesis fighting game ''SpellCaster''. Stitt later noted potential connections between the cancelled project and his later pitch for ''Spyro the Dragon'', including the emphasis on dragons and the concept of evolving time periods. "That wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere."<br><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume5.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume6.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume7.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
Following its cancellation, ''Dark Empires'' went virtually undocumented until Stitt uploaded a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOlHbBTF8eI 1995 video résumé] of his STI work to YouTube in August 2020, including five Digitizer stills of gameplay and a set of sprite art from the game, publicly revealing the project for the first time. Commenting on the video, he also revealed that he had a working ROM image. Five years later in August 2025, Sega Retro editor Ashley Rojas [https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas interviewed Stitt] on his career and Sega Technical Institute work, including coverage of ''Dark Empires''. During the interview process, Stitt shared his copy of the ROM - which had thankfully been retained by Ken Rose after all these years. The game was subsequently documented by both Rojas and technical researcher MDTravis, allowing ''Dark Empires'' to finally see the light of day nearly 34 years after its cancellation.<br />
<br />
The dumped prototype, dated September 1991, identifies itself with the ROM header <tt>KEVIN KIDD</tt> - an early working title for ''Kid Chameleon'' conceived as a Western-oriented continuation of the ''Alex Kidd'' lineage - suggesting ''Dark Empires'' was built upon that game's source assets. At this point in development, however, the prototype is markedly incomplete. The password system and menu options are nonfunctional, with every stage selection loading into an identical battlefield. Units are also limited to a single attack per turn, leaving combat skeletal in design, and sound is absent altogether. Regardless, the build marks an early effort by Sega of America's flagship R&D studio to explore concepts outside the norm and exists as a fascinating example of Sega Technical Institute's pre-''Sonic 2'' development output.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:CraigStitt-2.jpg|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<center><br />
Special thanks go to [[Craig Stitt (gospyro)|Craig Stitt]], for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, [[User:MDTravis|MDTravis]] for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and [[User:Armadylo|Armadylo]] for editing and proofreading this article.<br />
<br />
[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture Ashley Rojas (CartridgeCulture)]<br />
<br />
<br />
Have a happy Halloween!<br><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_skeleton.gif|centre|frameless]] <br />
|}<br />
</center><br></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=175121User:CartridgeCulture2026-09-05T16:24:01Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Ashley Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer, researcher, and editor. Specializing in Sega of America and Sega Technical Institute, she primarily conducts original interviews with former developers, executives, and community members to preserve oral histories detailing Sega's rise to prominence in the United States. She is also experienced in writing company biographies on notable staff like Brenda Ross and Tom Kalinske, building large-scale research projects such as ''Sonic X-treme'' and Rocket Science Games, and is responsible for the preservation of notable in-development projects like ''Fat, Daddy'' and ''Dark Empires''.<br />
<br />
She works to take readers back in time through the eyes of those who lived it, and believes in the active preservation of our shared gaming history.<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 3; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Jon_Snoddy_(2026-02-14)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Jon Snoddy (2026-02-14)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Mike_Wallis_(2026-02-16)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Mike Wallis (2026-02-16)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Andrew_Probert_(2026-03-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Andrew Probert (2026-03-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ryan_White_(2026-03-21)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ryan White (2026-03-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-03-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-03-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Senn_(2026-04-02)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Senn (2026-04-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Howard_Drossin_(2026-05-03)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Howard Drossin (2026-05-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Penders_(2026-05-07)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Ken Penders (2026-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Marc_Dawson_(2026-05-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Marc Dawson (2026-05-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Dan_Hess,_Wes_Hoffman_(2026-05-28)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Dan Hess, Wes Hoffman (2026-05-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2026-05-30)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2026-05-30)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Al_Nilsen_(2026-06-23)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Al Nilsen (2026-06-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Payne_(2026-07-18)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Tom Payne (2026-07-18)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bobby_White_(2026-07-25)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Bobby White (2026-07-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Erik_Wahlberg_(2026-08-08)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Erik Wahlberg (2026-08-08)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Doug_Lanford_(2026-08-15)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Doug Lanford (2026-08-15)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Chris_Shrigley_(2026-08-17)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Chris Shrigley (2026-08-17)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Greg_Fleming_(2026-08-22)_by_Ashley_Rojas Interview: Greg Fleming (2026-08-22)]<br />
</div></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=160525User:CartridgeCulture2026-04-01T00:57:27Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Alexander Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer and researcher most active on [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro].<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 2; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==User stats==<br />
{{User stats}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview)&diff=159083Adrian Powell (2026-02-11 interview)2026-02-28T05:46:27Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=AdrianPowell.png<br />
|name=Adrian Powell<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Lemmings<br />
|date=2026-02-11<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Alexander Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?'''<br />
<br />
Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art - the best in the UK. In addition to his teaching, he seemed always to be creating artwork at home, with his materials scattered around the house. At that early stage in my life, I was unaware that my home surroundings would influence my future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned drawing and making your own comics as a kid. What comics or cartoons did you grow up with? And what cartoon and/or artist influenced you the most?'''<br />
<br />
My elder brother and I would create our own art and even produce comics. I suppose we were influenced by professional national publications such as the Dandy, the Beano, and Eagle (my favourite).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you go to school for art or were you self-taught?'''<br />
<br />
At school, my records show that I was generally at the top of the class in art, with favourable comments from the teachers. However, I have to admit to playing truant from school whenever it was a sports day (I did not like sports). But my time was not wasted. I would visit a local signwriter's studio and learned a lot about graphics and brushwork. I have to say though, there was little doubt that I was influenced by my father. I achieved my GCE in several subjects, including my most important qualification - art!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned you were a commercial artist, and that you have experience working in printing, publishing, and the like. Could you tell us more about your experience in the printing and typesetting industry?'''<br />
<br />
At the end of my schooling, I began work in the Publicity Department of the local authority, which was responsible for promoting the seaside resort where I lived. The job involved producing holiday guides, posters, leaflets, etc. A wonderful time, and very hands-on for learning the ins and outs of arts and graphics. I also attended night school for art and design. The teacher was... my father.<br />
<br />
There followed a number of jobs in and around London. For several years I was the production manager and print buyer for four monthly trade magazines - very hands-on and often stressful in making publication dates. During this time came marriage and a family, until I decided to go freelance in the North of England where my roots were. Quite a challenge, but I had a number of business contacts, one of which was a printing company. I had regularly produced various items of artwork for their customers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned being introduced to Psygnosis some time in 1990. How did that connection first happen?'''<br />
<br />
One of their customers was moving direction by investing in a new product in the exciting area of computer games. A small group of “techies” in Dundee had created a game but needed finance to go forward. Step in Psygnosis. My printer client phoned me one day to ask if I could draw cartoons and was I available the next day.<br />
<br />
The following day I was taken to Psygnosis HQ and introduced to the team. Psygnosis was a conversion of a Liverpool dockland warehouse on the river Mersey, with large open spaces where lots of young people were sat at monitors. In particular was a young guy with a screen in front of him. I sat with him and he began the game with ping pong balls performing many antics amongst the now familiar backgrounds of underground scenarios. He explained that the "balls" were in fact creatures called Lemmings, and they wanted me to produce a Lemming. And so it began. Big challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you given any guidelines on what the rest of the team wanted the Lemmings to look like? I'm curious how much freedom you had in your designs.'''<br />
<br />
The brief to me was to create something unique, and that whatever the character looked like, they would have to convert it into pixels! I had never heard of pixels! And there would be a number of different characters and antics on the screen at the same time. The problem would be to not have pixel overload on the screen. These were early days of games, and I knew nothing of the tech side.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How many iterations did your designs go through? I'm also curious what the internal "feedback, changing things, feedback" process went.'''<br />
<br />
I roughed several paper sketches in pencil initially, with a lot of Psygnosis visits. Pressure was on and the team were waiting anxiously as each day passed. At last, the Lemming was chosen after a few tweaks and colourization. Artwork commenced.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your previous experience in typesetting really shows when it comes to the game's iconic logotype. Can you tell us about the process of designing that logo?'''<br />
<br />
Because of my fascination with graphics, I decided to produce the logotype first. This was, after all, the major piece in the promotion. I had a particular admiration of a font called Cooper Black. Once again, I visited Psygnosis for agreement. I had made a shade of green for the Lemmings' hair, and for continuity, I used it in the title. I firmly believe the enthusiasm the team had for the logo set the way for me - more so than the Lemming itself. However, I realized at this point I was being given complete freedom in my first ever journey into computer games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mention being given about 4 months to meet a Christmas deadline, with Lemmings actually launching in February 1991. Does this mean your hiring date was around… August or September 1990? Is that right?'''<br />
<br />
This was August 1990, I think. Launch date was a few months away!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of challenges, what's the biggest challenge in working remotely as a contract artist?'''<br />
<br />
My small studio was away from home in order that I didn't have any family interruptions during urgent creativity. Lemmings, I envisaged, was about to become a major part of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Now you drew the game's box art, but I believe you created the box design as well. As in, determining the design layout and where things would go, if I have that correct. Could you tell us about the process of designing the game's box?'''<br />
<br />
The now iconic box cover artwork involved planning, airbrushing, and tracings. During the production of the cover, I was updated by Psygnosis of additional artwork requirements - more characters! Diggers, Floaters, Blockers, Builders, even a life-size Lemming.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You also mentioned working on a bunch of promotional artwork and the game’s manual. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
I had to create [all] this for point-of-sale distribution. Badges and lots of other point-of-sale items. And then some very involved artwork for the back of the box cover. The instruction manual was a very last-minute addition to my workload. The piece of artwork for the cover of the box showing two Lemmings carrying a placard was added later and changed over the course of reprints. I understand 20 million copies were printed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As an artist, what was the biggest difficulty in working under such a tight timeline?'''<br />
<br />
Probably the biggest challenge in being self-employed is discipline. But when the piper is calling the shots and the cheques at the end of the month, you just get on with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you do any further work on the Lemmings franchise?'''<br />
<br />
As for later games, I recall that Sony bought the Lemmings copyright. I was not involved in any more games. However, and I can't be sure of dates, several years later I was contacted by an American Lemmings fan who collected retro art. This communication started another voyage back to creating Lemmings images. He wanted to buy the original box cover artwork. I had no idea where it was or if it still existed. He asked me if I could recreate it, which I did. Then his brother wanted the same. Then it snowballed rather rapidly. I was back in the world of Lemmings artwork as commissions in the USA, France, Italy, the UK, the world, even Australia. And so it continues.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How does it feel to have impacted so many lives in such a positive way?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I was asked to appear in a film about the history of Lemmings. Eventually I was invited to the premiere in Dundee. My wife and I were shown to the VIP area in a cinema filled with Lemmings fans and watched the film. Very moving. At the end there was a questions and answers session. Someone asked about the original artist and I was asked to stand and take a bow. The audience stood and applauded. Later I answered lots of questions, signed autographs, and generally enjoyed the fame.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned your work for an Alzheimer's care organization and painting murals based on nostalgic themes for the patients? Could you tell us more about this work?'''<br />
<br />
With regard to the mural work I have done, this was over a long period for a major company involved in Alzheimer's care. For my part it was most enjoyable. I travelled to several parts of the UK. My brief was to sit with the residents and ask if they could recall childhood. Obviously, much of the recollections involved comics and games. Then I would paint the memories outside their bedroom. It worked and gave me great pleasure in seeing some recognition. Often they would sit and watch me paint, sometimes even joining in.<br />
<br />
A wonderful time in my life. In fact, most of it has been good. Maybe a book is next.<br />
<br />
<br />
::''[https://www.artpal.com/lemmings_art Support Adrian Powell at ArtPal]''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview)&diff=158593Adrian Powell (2026-02-11 interview)2026-02-18T04:42:53Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=AdrianPowell.png<br />
|name=Adrian Powell<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Lemmings<br />
|date=2026-02-11<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Alexander Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?'''<br />
<br />
Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art - the best in the UK. In addition to his teaching, he seemed always to be creating artwork at home, with his materials scattered around the house. At that early stage in my life, I was unaware that my home surroundings would influence my future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned drawing and making your own comics as a kid. What comics or cartoons did you grow up with? And what cartoon and/or artist influenced you the most?'''<br />
<br />
My elder brother and I would create our own art and even produce comics. I suppose we were influenced by professional national publications such as the Dandy, the Beano, and Eagle (my favourite).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you go to school for art or were you self-taught?'''<br />
<br />
At school, my records show that I was generally at the top of the class in art, with favourable comments from the teachers. However, I have to admit to playing truant from school whenever it was a sports day (I did not like sports). But my time was not wasted. I would visit a local signwriter's studio and learned a lot about graphics and brushwork. I have to say though, there was little doubt that I was influenced by my father. I achieved my GCE in several subjects, including my most important qualification - art!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned you were a commercial artist, and that you have experience working in printing, publishing, and the like. Could you tell us more about your experience in the printing and typesetting industry?'''<br />
<br />
At the end of my schooling, I began work in the Publicity Department of the local authority, which was responsible for promoting the seaside resort where I lived. The job involved producing holiday guides, posters, leaflets, etc. A wonderful time, and very hands-on for learning the ins and outs of arts and graphics. I also attended night school for art and design. The teacher was... my father.<br />
<br />
There followed a number of jobs in and around London. For several years I was the production manager and print buyer for four monthly trade magazines - very hands-on and often stressful in making publication dates. During this time came marriage and a family, until I decided to go freelance in the North of England where my roots were. Quite a challenge, but I had a number of business contacts, one of which was a printing company. I had regularly produced various items of artwork for their customers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned being introduced to Psygnosis some time in 1990. How did that connection first happen?'''<br />
<br />
One of their customers was moving direction by investing in a new product in the exciting area of computer games. A small group of “techies” in Dundee had created a game but needed finance to go forward. Step in Psygnosis. My printer client phoned me one day to ask if I could draw cartoons and was I available the next day.<br />
<br />
The following day I was taken to Psygnosis HQ and introduced to the team. Psygnosis was a conversion of a Liverpool dockland warehouse on the river Mersey, with large open spaces where lots of young people were sat at monitors. In particular was a young guy with a screen in front of him. I sat with him and he began the game with ping pong balls performing many antics amongst the now familiar backgrounds of underground scenarios. He explained that the "balls" were in fact creatures called Lemmings, and they wanted me to produce a Lemming. And so it began. Big challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you given any guidelines on what the rest of the team wanted the Lemmings to look like? I'm curious how much freedom you had in your designs.'''<br />
<br />
The brief to me was to create something unique, and that whatever the character looked like, they would have to convert it into pixels! I had never heard of pixels! And there would be a number of different characters and antics on the screen at the same time. The problem would be to not have pixel overload on the screen. These were early days of games, and I knew nothing of the tech side.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How many iterations did your designs go through? I'm also curious what the internal "feedback, changing things, feedback" process went.'''<br />
<br />
I roughed several paper sketches in pencil initially, with a lot of Psygnosis visits. Pressure was on and the team were waiting anxiously as each day passed. At last, the Lemming was chosen after a few tweaks and colourization. Artwork commenced.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your previous experience in typesetting really shows when it comes to the game's iconic logotype. Can you tell us about the process of designing that logo?'''<br />
<br />
Because of my fascination with graphics, I decided to produce the logotype first. This was, after all, the major piece in the promotion. I had a particular admiration of a font called Cooper Black. Once again, I visited Psygnosis for agreement. I had made a shade of green for the Lemmings' hair, and for continuity, I used it in the title. I firmly believe the enthusiasm the team had for the logo set the way for me - more so than the Lemming itself. However, I realized at this point I was being given complete freedom in my first ever journey into computer games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mention being given about 4 months to meet a Christmas deadline, with Lemmings actually launching in February 1991. Does this mean your hiring date was around… August or September 1990? Is that right?'''<br />
<br />
This was August 1990, I think. Launch date was a few months away!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of challenges, what's the biggest challenge in working remotely as a contract artist?'''<br />
<br />
My small studio was away from home in order that I didn't have any family interruptions during urgent creativity. Lemmings, I envisaged, was about to become a major part of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Now you drew the game's box art, but I believe you created the box design as well. As in, determining the design layout and where things would go, if I have that correct. Could you tell us about the process of designing the game's box?'''<br />
<br />
The now iconic box cover artwork involved planning, airbrushing, and tracings. During the production of the cover, I was updated by Psygnosis of additional artwork requirements - more characters! Diggers, Floaters, Blockers, Builders, even a life-size Lemming.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You also mentioned working on a bunch of promotional artwork and the game’s manual. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
I had to create [all] this for point-of-sale distribution. Badges and lots of other point-of-sale items. And then some very involved artwork for the back of the box cover. The instruction manual was a very last-minute addition to my workload. The piece of artwork for the cover of the box showing two Lemmings carrying a placard was added later and changed over the course of reprints. I understand 20 million copies were printed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As an artist, what was the biggest difficulty in working under such a tight timeline?'''<br />
<br />
Probably the biggest challenge in being self-employed is discipline. But when the piper is calling the shots and the cheques at the end of the month, you just get on with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you do any further work on the Lemmings franchise?'''<br />
<br />
As for later games, I recall that Sony bought the Lemmings copyright. I was not involved in any more games. However, and I can't be sure of dates, several years later I was contacted by an American Lemmings fan who collected retro art. This communication started another voyage back to creating Lemmings images. He wanted to buy the original box cover artwork. I had no idea where it was or if it still existed. He asked me if I could recreate it, which I did. Then his brother wanted the same. Then it snowballed rather rapidly. I was back in the world of Lemmings artwork as commissions in the USA, France, Italy, the UK, the world, even Australia. And so it continues.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How does it feel to have impacted so many lives in such a positive way?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I was asked to appear in a film about the history of Lemmings. Eventually I was invited to the premiere in Dundee. My wife and I were shown to the VIP area in a cinema filled with Lemmings fans and watched the film. Very moving. At the end there was a questions and answers session. Someone asked about the original artist and I was asked to stand and take a bow. The audience stood and applauded. Later I answered lots of questions, signed autographs, and generally enjoyed the fame.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned your work for an Alzheimer's care organization and painting murals based on nostalgic themes for the patients? Could you tell us more about this work?'''<br />
<br />
AP: With regard to the mural work I have done, this was over a long period for a major company involved in Alzheimer's care. For my part it was most enjoyable. I travelled to several parts of the UK. My brief was to sit with the residents and ask if they could recall childhood. Obviously, much of the recollections involved comics and games. Then I would paint the memories outside their bedroom. It worked and gave me great pleasure in seeing some recognition. Often they would sit and watch me paint, sometimes even joining in.<br />
<br />
A wonderful time in my life. In fact, most of it has been good. Maybe a book is next.<br />
<br />
<br />
::''[https://www.artpal.com/lemmings_art Support Adrian Powell at ArtPal]''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=158592User:CartridgeCulture2026-02-18T04:02:21Z<p>CartridgeCulture: /* Interviews */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''Alexander Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer and researcher most active on [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro].<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 2; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
*[https://hiddenpalace.org/Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview) Interview: Adrian Powell (2026-02-11)]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==User stats==<br />
{{User stats}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Category:%27%27Lemmings%27%27_interviews&diff=158591Category:''Lemmings'' interviews2026-02-18T03:56:39Z<p>CartridgeCulture: delete request</p>
<hr />
<div>{{delete|We should probably disable automatic category creation.}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview)&diff=158589Adrian Powell (2026-02-11 interview)2026-02-18T03:55:41Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=AdrianPowell.png<br />
|name=Adrian Powell<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Lemmings<br />
|date=2026-02-11<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Alexander Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?'''<br />
<br />
Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art - the best in the UK. In addition to his teaching, he seemed always to be creating artwork at home, with his materials scattered around the house. At that early stage in my life, I was unaware that my home surroundings would influence my future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned drawing and making your own comics as a kid. What comics or cartoons did you grow up with? And what cartoon and/or artist influenced you the most?'''<br />
<br />
My elder brother and I would create our own art and even produce comics. I suppose we were influenced by professional national publications such as the Dandy, the Beano, and Eagle (my favourite).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you go to school for art or were you self-taught?'''<br />
<br />
At school, my records show that I was generally at the top of the class in art, with favourable comments from the teachers. However, I have to admit to playing truant from school whenever it was a sports day (I did not like sports). But my time was not wasted. I would visit a local signwriter's studio and learned a lot about graphics and brushwork. I have to say though, there was little doubt that I was influenced by my father. I achieved my GCE in several subjects, including my most important qualification - art!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned you were a commercial artist, and that you have experience working in printing, publishing, and the like. Could you tell us more about your experience in the printing and typesetting industry?'''<br />
<br />
At the end of my schooling, I began work in the Publicity Department of the local authority, which was responsible for promoting the seaside resort where I lived. The job involved producing holiday guides, posters, leaflets, etc. A wonderful time, and very hands-on for learning the ins and outs of arts and graphics. I also attended night school for art and design. The teacher was... my father.<br />
<br />
There followed a number of jobs in and around London. For several years I was the production manager and print buyer for four monthly trade magazines - very hands-on and often stressful in making publication dates. During this time came marriage and a family, until I decided to go freelance in the North of England where my roots were. Quite a challenge, but I had a number of business contacts, one of which was a printing company. I had regularly produced various items of artwork for their customers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned being introduced to Psygnosis some time in 1990. How did that connection first happen?'''<br />
<br />
One of their customers was moving direction by investing in a new product in the exciting area of computer games. A small group of “techies” in Dundee had created a game but needed finance to go forward. Step in Psygnosis. My printer client phoned me one day to ask if I could draw cartoons and was I available the next day.<br />
<br />
The following day I was taken to Psygnosis HQ and introduced to the team. Psygnosis was a conversion of a Liverpool dockland warehouse on the river Mersey, with large open spaces where lots of young people were sat at monitors. In particular was a young guy with a screen in front of him. I sat with him and he began the game with ping pong balls performing many antics amongst the now familiar backgrounds of underground scenarios. He explained that the "balls" were in fact creatures called Lemmings, and they wanted me to produce a Lemming. And so it began. Big challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you given any guidelines on what the rest of the team wanted the Lemmings to look like? I'm curious how much freedom you had in your designs.'''<br />
<br />
The brief to me was to create something unique, and that whatever the character looked like, they would have to convert it into pixels! I had never heard of pixels! And there would be a number of different characters and antics on the screen at the same time. The problem would be to not have pixel overload on the screen. These were early days of games, and I knew nothing of the tech side.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How many iterations did your designs go through? I'm also curious what the internal "feedback, changing things, feedback" process went.'''<br />
<br />
I roughed several paper sketches in pencil initially, with a lot of Psygnosis visits. Pressure was on and the team were waiting anxiously as each day passed. At last, the Lemming was chosen after a few tweaks and colourization. Artwork commenced.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your previous experience in typesetting really shows when it comes to the game's iconic logotype. Can you tell us about the process of designing that logo?'''<br />
<br />
Because of my fascination with graphics, I decided to produce the logotype first. This was, after all, the major piece in the promotion. I had a particular admiration of a font called Cooper Black. Once again, I visited Psygnosis for agreement. I had made a shade of green for the Lemmings' hair, and for continuity, I used it in the title. I firmly believe the enthusiasm the team had for the logo set the way for me - more so than the Lemming itself. However, I realized at this point I was being given complete freedom in my first ever journey into computer games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mention being given about 4 months to meet a Christmas deadline, with Lemmings actually launching in February 1991. Does this mean your hiring date was around… August or September 1990? Is that right?'''<br />
<br />
This was August 1990, I think. Launch date was a few months away!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of challenges, what's the biggest challenge in working remotely as a contract artist?'''<br />
<br />
My small studio was away from home in order that I didn't have any family interruptions during urgent creativity. Lemmings, I envisaged, was about to become a major part of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Now you drew the game's box art, but I believe you created the box design as well. As in, determining the design layout and where things would go, if I have that correct. Could you tell us about the process of designing the game's box?'''<br />
<br />
The now iconic box cover artwork involved planning, airbrushing, and tracings. During the production of the cover, I was updated by Psygnosis of additional artwork requirements - more characters! Diggers, Floaters, Blockers, Builders, even a life-size Lemming.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You also mentioned working on a bunch of promotional artwork and the game’s manual. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
I had to create [all] this for point-of-sale distribution. Badges and lots of other point-of-sale items. And then some very involved artwork for the back of the box cover. The instruction manual was a very last-minute addition to my workload. The piece of artwork for the cover of the box showing two Lemmings carrying a placard was added later and changed over the course of reprints. I understand 20 million copies were printed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As an artist, what was the biggest difficulty in working under such a tight timeline?'''<br />
<br />
Probably the biggest challenge in being self-employed is discipline. But when the piper is calling the shots and the cheques at the end of the month, you just get on with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you do any further work on the Lemmings franchise?'''<br />
<br />
As for later games, I recall that Sony bought the Lemmings copyright. I was not involved in any more games. However, and I can't be sure of dates, several years later I was contacted by an American Lemmings fan who collected retro art. This communication started another voyage back to creating Lemmings images. He wanted to buy the original box cover artwork. I had no idea where it was or if it still existed. He asked me if I could recreate it, which I did. Then his brother wanted the same. Then it snowballed rather rapidly. I was back in the world of Lemmings artwork as commissions in the USA, France, Italy, the UK, the world, even Australia. And so it continues.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How does it feel to have impacted so many lives in such a positive way?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I was asked to appear in a film about the history of Lemmings. Eventually I was invited to the premiere in Dundee. My wife and I were shown to the VIP area in a cinema filled with Lemmings fans and watched the film. Very moving. At the end there was a questions and answers session. Someone asked about the original artist and I was asked to stand and take a bow. The audience stood and applauded. Later I answered lots of questions, signed autographs, and generally enjoyed the fame.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned your work for an Alzheimer's care organization and painting murals based on nostalgic themes for the patients? Could you tell us more about this work?'''<br />
<br />
AP: With regard to the mural work I have done, this was over a long period for a major company involved in Alzheimer's care. For my part it was most enjoyable. I travelled to several parts of the UK. My brief was to sit with the residents and ask if they could recall childhood. Obviously, much of the recollections involved comics and games. Then I would paint the memories outside their bedroom. It worked and gave me great pleasure in seeing some recognition. Often they would sit and watch me paint, sometimes even joining in.<br />
<br />
A wonderful time in my life. In fact, most of it has been good. Maybe a book is next.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Adrian_Powell_(2026-02-11_interview)&diff=158587Adrian Powell (2026-02-11 interview)2026-02-18T03:55:30Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Created page with "{{Interview |image=AdrianPowell.png |name=Adrian Powell |status=Released |interviewer=CartridgeCulture |subject=''Lemmings'' |date=2026-02-11 }} '''Alexander Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?''' Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art -..."</p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=AdrianPowell.png<br />
|name=Adrian Powell<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=''Lemmings''<br />
|date=2026-02-11<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Alexander Rojas: Would you be able to tell us a bit about your background, particularly when it comes to your early experience in art?'''<br />
<br />
Adrian Powell: Recalling my family home as a child, there was always a presence of art. This was influenced by my art teacher father, who was trained at the London Royal College of Art - the best in the UK. In addition to his teaching, he seemed always to be creating artwork at home, with his materials scattered around the house. At that early stage in my life, I was unaware that my home surroundings would influence my future.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned drawing and making your own comics as a kid. What comics or cartoons did you grow up with? And what cartoon and/or artist influenced you the most?'''<br />
<br />
My elder brother and I would create our own art and even produce comics. I suppose we were influenced by professional national publications such as the Dandy, the Beano, and Eagle (my favourite).<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you go to school for art or were you self-taught?'''<br />
<br />
At school, my records show that I was generally at the top of the class in art, with favourable comments from the teachers. However, I have to admit to playing truant from school whenever it was a sports day (I did not like sports). But my time was not wasted. I would visit a local signwriter's studio and learned a lot about graphics and brushwork. I have to say though, there was little doubt that I was influenced by my father. I achieved my GCE in several subjects, including my most important qualification - art!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned you were a commercial artist, and that you have experience working in printing, publishing, and the like. Could you tell us more about your experience in the printing and typesetting industry?'''<br />
<br />
At the end of my schooling, I began work in the Publicity Department of the local authority, which was responsible for promoting the seaside resort where I lived. The job involved producing holiday guides, posters, leaflets, etc. A wonderful time, and very hands-on for learning the ins and outs of arts and graphics. I also attended night school for art and design. The teacher was... my father.<br />
<br />
There followed a number of jobs in and around London. For several years I was the production manager and print buyer for four monthly trade magazines - very hands-on and often stressful in making publication dates. During this time came marriage and a family, until I decided to go freelance in the North of England where my roots were. Quite a challenge, but I had a number of business contacts, one of which was a printing company. I had regularly produced various items of artwork for their customers.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned being introduced to Psygnosis some time in 1990. How did that connection first happen?'''<br />
<br />
One of their customers was moving direction by investing in a new product in the exciting area of computer games. A small group of “techies” in Dundee had created a game but needed finance to go forward. Step in Psygnosis. My printer client phoned me one day to ask if I could draw cartoons and was I available the next day.<br />
<br />
The following day I was taken to Psygnosis HQ and introduced to the team. Psygnosis was a conversion of a Liverpool dockland warehouse on the river Mersey, with large open spaces where lots of young people were sat at monitors. In particular was a young guy with a screen in front of him. I sat with him and he began the game with ping pong balls performing many antics amongst the now familiar backgrounds of underground scenarios. He explained that the "balls" were in fact creatures called Lemmings, and they wanted me to produce a Lemming. And so it began. Big challenge.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you given any guidelines on what the rest of the team wanted the Lemmings to look like? I'm curious how much freedom you had in your designs.'''<br />
<br />
The brief to me was to create something unique, and that whatever the character looked like, they would have to convert it into pixels! I had never heard of pixels! And there would be a number of different characters and antics on the screen at the same time. The problem would be to not have pixel overload on the screen. These were early days of games, and I knew nothing of the tech side.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How many iterations did your designs go through? I'm also curious what the internal "feedback, changing things, feedback" process went.'''<br />
<br />
I roughed several paper sketches in pencil initially, with a lot of Psygnosis visits. Pressure was on and the team were waiting anxiously as each day passed. At last, the Lemming was chosen after a few tweaks and colourization. Artwork commenced.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your previous experience in typesetting really shows when it comes to the game's iconic logotype. Can you tell us about the process of designing that logo?'''<br />
<br />
Because of my fascination with graphics, I decided to produce the logotype first. This was, after all, the major piece in the promotion. I had a particular admiration of a font called Cooper Black. Once again, I visited Psygnosis for agreement. I had made a shade of green for the Lemmings' hair, and for continuity, I used it in the title. I firmly believe the enthusiasm the team had for the logo set the way for me - more so than the Lemming itself. However, I realized at this point I was being given complete freedom in my first ever journey into computer games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mention being given about 4 months to meet a Christmas deadline, with Lemmings actually launching in February 1991. Does this mean your hiring date was around… August or September 1990? Is that right?'''<br />
<br />
This was August 1990, I think. Launch date was a few months away!<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of challenges, what's the biggest challenge in working remotely as a contract artist?'''<br />
<br />
My small studio was away from home in order that I didn't have any family interruptions during urgent creativity. Lemmings, I envisaged, was about to become a major part of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Now you drew the game's box art, but I believe you created the box design as well. As in, determining the design layout and where things would go, if I have that correct. Could you tell us about the process of designing the game's box?'''<br />
<br />
The now iconic box cover artwork involved planning, airbrushing, and tracings. During the production of the cover, I was updated by Psygnosis of additional artwork requirements - more characters! Diggers, Floaters, Blockers, Builders, even a life-size Lemming.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You also mentioned working on a bunch of promotional artwork and the game’s manual. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
I had to create [all] this for point-of-sale distribution. Badges and lots of other point-of-sale items. And then some very involved artwork for the back of the box cover. The instruction manual was a very last-minute addition to my workload. The piece of artwork for the cover of the box showing two Lemmings carrying a placard was added later and changed over the course of reprints. I understand 20 million copies were printed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''As an artist, what was the biggest difficulty in working under such a tight timeline?'''<br />
<br />
Probably the biggest challenge in being self-employed is discipline. But when the piper is calling the shots and the cheques at the end of the month, you just get on with it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did you do any further work on the Lemmings franchise?'''<br />
<br />
As for later games, I recall that Sony bought the Lemmings copyright. I was not involved in any more games. However, and I can't be sure of dates, several years later I was contacted by an American Lemmings fan who collected retro art. This communication started another voyage back to creating Lemmings images. He wanted to buy the original box cover artwork. I had no idea where it was or if it still existed. He asked me if I could recreate it, which I did. Then his brother wanted the same. Then it snowballed rather rapidly. I was back in the world of Lemmings artwork as commissions in the USA, France, Italy, the UK, the world, even Australia. And so it continues.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How does it feel to have impacted so many lives in such a positive way?'''<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago I was asked to appear in a film about the history of Lemmings. Eventually I was invited to the premiere in Dundee. My wife and I were shown to the VIP area in a cinema filled with Lemmings fans and watched the film. Very moving. At the end there was a questions and answers session. Someone asked about the original artist and I was asked to stand and take a bow. The audience stood and applauded. Later I answered lots of questions, signed autographs, and generally enjoyed the fame.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned your work for an Alzheimer's care organization and painting murals based on nostalgic themes for the patients? Could you tell us more about this work?'''<br />
<br />
AP: With regard to the mural work I have done, this was over a long period for a major company involved in Alzheimer's care. For my part it was most enjoyable. I travelled to several parts of the UK. My brief was to sit with the residents and ask if they could recall childhood. Obviously, much of the recollections involved comics and games. Then I would paint the memories outside their bedroom. It worked and gave me great pleasure in seeing some recognition. Often they would sit and watch me paint, sometimes even joining in.<br />
<br />
A wonderful time in my life. In fact, most of it has been good. Maybe a book is next.</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=File:AdrianPowell.png&diff=158586File:AdrianPowell.png2026-02-18T03:51:24Z<p>CartridgeCulture: Category:Photos of people</p>
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<div>== Summary ==<br />
[[Category:Photos of people]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=File:CraigStitt-2.jpg&diff=158584File:CraigStitt-2.jpg2026-02-18T03:45:27Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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<div>[[Category:Photos of people]]</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02_interview)&diff=158218Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview)2026-02-11T20:10:15Z<p>CartridgeCulture: transcription ideology is hard</p>
<hr />
<div>{{Interview<br />
|image=CraigStitt-2.jpg<br />
|name=Craig Stitt<br />
|status=Released<br />
|interviewer=CartridgeCulture<br />
|subject=Sega<br />
|date=2025-08-02<br />
}}<br />
<br />
'''Alexander Rojas: Hi! Good morning Mr. Stitt! First off, it's an absolute pleasure to speak with you. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little nervous in speaking with you.'''<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt: No worries. It's my pleasure. It really, really is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Alright, and again, thank you so much for giving me your time like this. That's very kind of you.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no, I enjoy sharing knowledge and history and trying to get all this stuff out there for people to hear and see and know and keep it alive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Great, I've noticed that. Thank you just so much for having that mindset because it means that not only does a lot of your work get shared and more well known, but others' as well. [Sharing] information; that's a great mindset to have.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it makes me wish I had taken better notes back in the day. I've got a whole box of stuff at Sega that went missing. You know, a move, either when I left Sega or a move somewhere, so a lot of my sketches and all that stuff back at my time at Sega are gone, which is unfortunate.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no, that is really unfortunate. I'd be so anxious knowing that.'''<br />
<br />
Well, it kicked me- when you're doing this stuff you have no clue that 20 or 30 years later you're going to be talking about it still. [laughs] But yeah, somewhere out there in a landfill in Redwood City is a box of little three and a half inch floppy disks with all my Sonic artwork on it. What kicked me and everything is: Sonic is the one where it never even crossed my mind to keep that because it was all proprietary software. Tom Payne, one of the other artists at Sega (at STI) did keep his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right.'''<br />
<br />
Now you've got people that have the ability to pull the information off there and then get to it. Like, "Ah, man, I wish I still had mine." Oh well.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, maybe this interview can act as a sort of verbal version of that.'''<br />
<br />
I hope so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Just to get started here, I did want to start on your background. Can I ask what your earliest creative influences growing up were?'''<br />
<br />
My whole family is very artistic and creative. Most of them also sing and dance, which I do not do. Yeah, the art was pretty much the whole family, especially my mom did a lot, my mom and my sisters. So I've always been influenced and supported in anything I want to do artistically. It's interesting, though, that I'm the only one to have gone, in the family, to have gone into art as a career. I think part of that is timing. I'm the younger of six- I'm number five of six kids. Strictly speaking, my older brother considered going into art, but he's like 12 years older than me. At that time, it was very limited on what your options were.<br />
<br />
Illustration, you know, magazines and book covers and magazine illustrations and stuff. It's very competitive and very limited, the market. On top of that, my brother's a little afraid to go and, you know, ruin his art, ruin his enjoyment of art because it was a job. He became an accountant, which I don't understand. [laughs] Anyway. So I'm in school and… actually my high school art teacher is one of the hugest impacts of my life because she wasn't family, and she said, "You can make a living at this." She pulled me aside one day early on and said, "Craig, you could make a living at this."<br />
<br />
That clicked. That clicked something in my brain. Even then I was still "OK, you can make a living as an artist?" I was a biology major and finally I ended up switching over to art and then finally switched over to art education, was going to teach art. Then that's where the timing of everything kicked in. Just as I'm in college, the computer graphics industry explodes. I come out of school, I get pulled into the early computer graphics industry and then from there into video games. I've never taught art, because I got sidetracked in making games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. What was the first computer you worked on when it came to designing graphics on the computer for the first time?'''<br />
<br />
It was called the GeniGraphics.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That was the GeniGraphics?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It was huge. The first generation ones I worked on used eight inch floppy disks, so actually truly floppy disks.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Actually floppy.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I can't remember the memory on those disks. It was… it wasn't called vector graphics… It was designed to do… like you did a lot of text graphics and like business meeting stuff. Like pie charts and boring stuff. You could do artwork on it. It was just a pretty complex problem. It was very interesting way of creating art on them. You can do some beautiful stuff. That's what I was doing, and I had gotten to the point, though, where I was really not happy doing it.<br />
<br />
I guess complaining too much. I was married at the time. Every time I come home from work, my wife at the time would have the wanted section of the newspaper spread out on the table with circled job opportunities. Looking for a job for me. She was tired of me complaining. She called one day while I was at work and she said, "I found your job." I know I kept this clipping, and I can't find it. But it's "Wanted: video game artist and game designer wanted, no experience necessary." That was Mark Cerny at STI, putting together his group at STI for Sega.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you hired directly by Cerny? Like, was he the one who was in your hiring interview?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I still do have the little scrap of paper where I wrote down his information and his phone number and his name really quick, the first time he called and said, "Yes, we'd like to talk to you and get more information from you." Yeah, so that was him. It was the very first time I met him. I assumed he was somebody's secretary or whatever, because he was so young. Very quickly I realize, "Oh, no, that's him, that's the boss." I was just thinking about him the other day because I lost touch with him. I'd love to get a hold of him again and just catch up because I was realizing what a huge impact he had on my life because he hired me at Sega.<br />
<br />
Then he left Sega and did a couple things, but he ended up in L.A. and I wanted to work with him again when I wanted to leave Sega. I called him, and then he's how I ended up at Insomniac Games. That was my career, Insomniac Games. That's all knowing Mark. Huge impact of my life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you remember the date that you were hired? I know you said it was in 1990, I believe. No worries if you can't remember the specifics.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't remember it. Actually, you could look it up. I think if I remember correctly, my hiring letter, I think, got scanned in at the…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Video Game History Foundation.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Video Game History. I think they've got a copy, if not it's around here somewhere. Yeah, would have been 1990.<br />
<br />
I'm in South San Francisco now, moved up here a couple of years ago to get closer to my son and his family. I occasionally drive down the 101 [freeway], and every time I do I drive past… The building that STI had was just off- facing the freeway. Every time I drive past I'm like, "There's the old STI building." But it wasn't the very first one. The very first building with this tiny little office in some industrial complex down in San Jose just off of 880 [or] 17 [freeways]. I've been trying to remember… I have no idea where that is. I wonder if I've got the address somewhere for that building. [800 Charcot Avenue] That letter would probably have the address on it. I've gotta go find that letter. So 1990.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Let me see if I can find the… what was the name of this city… Was that in Foster City? Does that ring a bell?'''<br />
<br />
No, that would have been… Sega headquarters was in Redwood City. That interim office… because Mark was very consciously as far away from Sega as he could be, but be close enough that you could run back and forth, because he didn't want… That was the whole point of STI was to get it away from having too much oversight by people who didn't know what they're doing. That weren't game people. But we finally did end up at Sega actually, in their headquarters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You mentioned him getting away from SoA's oversight from non-game people. Did he see that as one of the big problems that STI was founded to fix?'''<br />
<br />
I know that's what he was trying to get away from initially, in the very beginning, and was hesitant as we kept moving closer and closer, but I don't remember there being a lot… Well actually. Trying to think. I know like even on Kid Chameleon, which was the first game I worked on at STI. We were getting crap from marketing trying to tell us how to name stuff and name the character and name the game and it was frustrating. But I think yes. I wasn't part of it because you know, Mark would have insulated and would have been taking the brunt of that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of Kid Chameleon. As an artist that was new to game development, was working on Kid Chameleon particularly challenging? What was challenging about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was. As I was just talking about that original building and that original office. The memory is like seared into my brain of like, the very first week I'm there, of me going outside and just trying to not freak out because I was like "I don't belong here." [laughs] I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know anything. I have to like relax and then go back inside. It was very different because it was this… It was a completely different picture. It was big Digitizers and you're drawing stuff pixel by pixel by pixel. I had done little to no animation prior to that. But it was very exciting.<br />
<br />
So you pixel by pixel and you do learn how to do it. I remember, I look back at this and I feel bad in that I remember it clicked, the animation and once again… the walk cycle was six frames and your characters were 32 pixels tall. Man, looking back at that, that's insane. I remember I had a, or looked like I was having, an easy time of it and that I knew what I was doing.<br />
<br />
I remember Brenda Ross was having a hard time and she was talking to Mark and Mark says, "Well go ask Craig." Because Brenda was hired before me but not by… I'm not sure how long she had been there. Not very long, but long enough, and Mark said, "Go ask Craig." I really didn't know what I was doing. I was just making it up on the fly and so when she asked me "Can you show me how to do this?" I went, "Yeah, but I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how to teach you because I don't know. I'm just making it up," I think she took that wrong and this is where I feel bad. I think she thought I was blowing her off or something. I always look back at that and I think that just got… I don't know why that's something that's always stuck in my head is that initial conversation.<br />
<br />
Yeah, so once you got into it… I remember thinking the initial interview was for the Sega arcade systems, which I was very excited about. Then I find out that it was for the home system, and I'm like, [disappointedly] "Oh really?" For some reason I'm like, "Ah." I also went, "Oh crap." My neighbor had an Atari 2600, and that was the last time I had played any home video games. I had to run out and borrow a friend's NES to play- I had my first conversation with Mark saying, "Yeah, we want you talk to you again." I had better go play some home games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Just to familiarize yourself with them?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, because I'd never heard of the Genesis. I knew about the NES, but I'd never even touched one. I'm like, "Okay, I better scramble here so I have some idea what I'm talking about." But I very quickly realized I was glad and definitely looking back, I'm glad I was doing home games, console games versus arcade games. I had more fun doing that. Yeah, it was… Man, it's so different than games today.<br />
<br />
It's pixel by pixel and limited colors. I remember the transition from Genesis stuff onto the PS1. It was wonderful because all of a sudden you don't worry about palettes anymore. You just paint on Photoshop and you just build stuff and you still got memory issues and stuff. It went from… you look at a Kid Chameleon game or anything I did on Genesis and I could say "Everything on that screen I touched, every pixel there, I put every pixel on that screen." Then you get into the other games, the teams get bigger and the games get bigger. It's cool, but I miss that complete ownership or whatever of the world.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. It's your work as opposed to it being filtered through so many teams or like… the 'too many chefs' feeling.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. The funny thing is, I prefer to work as a team, but at the same time, it was nice to look at it and have it all be my work. It's this weird thing going on in my head that I really do prefer working as a team. I'm better if I'm with people that I can bounce ideas off of and pull ideas from and work with.<br />
<br />
Jumping ahead a little bit here. On Ratchet and Clank at Insomniac, there was a level, Metropolis, on Ratchet 1, that was really a nightmare level. It was huge. The map was way too big for what we'd agreed was possible to do. The artists I was working with… there were always two environment artists building a level because they were huge, even the good sized ones. The other artists- Tom… last name just slipped my brain, was having- well, something's going on in his life. He was having a hard time at work. He was always behind, he was late and I always had to redo about half his artwork. That game, other than one little area, everything in it is mine.<br />
<br />
I was like, "Oh, okay, so this is nice;" to look at this and go, "Hey, yeah, that entire city is mine." Which is satisfying. Very different than the pixel art.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You were mentioning limited color usage and that just being a challenge with the palette. That was like a theme that defined most Genesis-era games.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How difficult did you find that?'''<br />
<br />
At times, very. The palettes were difficult, but you learned how to dither since you're doing things literally pixel by pixel. If you didn't have a green, you could do every other square blue and yellow and get a green. It would blur out on the TV. The bigger problem was just the amount of art you were allowed to use for anything, particularly in the animations.<br />
<br />
I can remember once, and this was for Dark Empire, there was a boss character and… Dunn… William Dunn? Man, my brain…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Bill Dunn, yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, there we go. Bill Dunn was the designer on that. I haven't talked to him in like forever. I remember he gave me the little sheet that had directions and the description of what the enemy was and what it was going to do and what animations they would need for it. I remember it saying, and this is like a little mini boss: "Writhing dramatic death. Six frames."<br />
<br />
I went, "Bill, you're not going to… writhing dramatic death and you've given me six frames." So that was always really… how do you get something to look good with six frames. People have gone back and have ripped all those files out of those games. I actually have a lot of the little walk animations for the different enemies I've done and that stuff. It's very interesting to go back and look at it and remember just moving pixels around to get just the right… cause you're using the blur of the television to get the things you need because you didn't have as many- y'know, there were 32 pixels by 32 pixels for the characters most of the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I was going to ask if you had any involvement in Dick Tracy, but it sounds like that happened just before you got there.'''<br />
<br />
Correct. I thought I was going to be working on Dick Tracy. I got there and they were already, I don't know, pretty close to shipping it. I didn't work on it. They were working on it when I got there, but yeah, I didn't have anything to do with it. I remember being bummed because at the time, the movie was a big thing. It was like, "Oh, that's really cool. That's exciting." I was bummed.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Kid Chameleon was following Dick Tracy, which was Disney's, Touchstone's thing. It seems like Kid Chameleon was the first chance that STI's artists and staff got to really flex their creativity.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. At the time, Sega was looking for a mascot. Nintendo had Mario and Sega didn't have anything. Mark… one of the things on Kid Chameleon was… we wanted to be Sega's mascot. Cause there was no Sonic yet. We're doing it and it was loosely based… There was another… who was the "Kid"? There was another "Kid" game that was in Japan on the Genesis, and it was strange.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Alex Kidd.'''<br />
<br />
Alex Kidd, yeah. I can't remember what the relationship was there. There is one, I don't know what it was. We were hoping… There were a couple things. One, Mark wanted to make the biggest game ever made, the longest game ever made on the Genesis. It's like 1,800… You used to measure the side-scrollers by screens. It's 1,800 screens, if I remember the number right, so it was huge. Kid Chameleon was an enormous game with no saves and no battery backup. Part of that was money. It was cheaper to not have a battery cartridge, but also Mark didn't want to have a save. He wanted people to have to play through.<br />
<br />
It was interesting though, cause it was- this actually affected the way some stuff I did later on, is when we did finally see… We got this early beta game that was being done in Japan called Sonic. We went into the break room and put it on and played it, and it was beautiful. I remember sitting there with Mark and we were trying to figure out how they both did the art and the programming for like the loops and some other kinds of cool stuff that was new. We played for a few minutes and laughed. It was like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really pretty." But we were like, "No big deal." At that time there may not have been any Rings at all in the game. If there were Rings, there was definitely no splash.<br />
<br />
A month or so later, however long, we get the new version and there's definitely Rings and a Ring splash. Now we're fighting over who gets to play. "Give me the controller! I want to play!" because now it was fun. Now it was addictive. Now we went, "Ah, crap. This is Sega's character. Kid Chameleon's gonna be a fun game, but we're not going to be Sega's mascot. This is definitely the mascot." That was interesting looking back at that transition of Sonic being a pretty game, but who cares, to being addictive. I think it was just the Ring splash added something, at least to me, that just completely changed the feel and dynamics of the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I think that does quite a lot. Speaking of that early Sonic 1 build. Did you just die immediately when you got hit or was there some counter which decreased, like a health meter?'''<br />
<br />
I am trying to remember. I don't remember if there was… now I'm gonna guess, now this is just guessing. I'm going to guess you didn't die immediately. Actually, I don't know. It probably just didn't have the Ring splash visually.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''But it had Rings that you had to collect as "health?"'''<br />
<br />
The code would have been prepared for that incoming- they would have been preparing for that. Whatever the death was… I don't remember being frustrated because you get touched and die. But I don't remember what that was.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah. No worries about remembering the specifics. I appreciate all you can give me so far, this is already quite a lot. So actually I wanted to go back to… You had mentioned something interesting, you had brought up Alex Kidd. I noticed some of your Kid Chameleon concept art. You always seem to mark a two letter acronym for the game under your art. All of the Kid Chameleon stuff is marked KK. At first I thought, "Oh, maybe Chameleon was spelled with a K." But then you had sent me a Dark Empires, and we had someone [MDTravis] open it up and look at the ROM header, and we found the name Kevin Kidd. Which is surprisingly similar to Alex Kidd.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Does the name Kevin Kidd ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
That comes down to that whole marketing thing I was talking about of marketing telling us how to name stuff. Originally we had the character named Kevin. It was funny you said that, you were saying, "Why did I mark KK on everything?" Yeah, it's cause he was Kevin. Then marketing didn't like the name Kevin. They wanted to name him… let's see, Dylan? There was this whole kerfuffle about naming the character.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dylan Charles.'''<br />
<br />
Dylan Charles! Yes. Where did you get that name? That was- did Brenda remember that?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, that was actually on our… I'm in front of my computer right here, that's on our Kid Chameleon page. It looks like it was sourced from… a 1992 players guide. I don't know how they got that.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Wow, man. Yeah, that was his name. I know what's somewhere on one of the levels, there's some carving in the stone or maybe it's on one of the title screens. There's these runes carved into the rock. If you look at it, it says Kevin. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, interesting.'''<br />
<br />
Just a little personal saying that no one's going to care about. I remember the name being a big deal. It was the same issue down at Insomniac. Naming stuff. The hardest part of any of these games is naming stuff. You've got to find something everybody likes. You've got to find something that marketing likes. You've got to find something that passes legal. That's hard. That's a really hard labyrinth to wander through.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on Kid Chameleon, how much artistic freedom were you given on the project?'''<br />
<br />
A lot. I don't remember anything other than trying to work out of whatever the art bible was for, "What is the look of it?" It was whatever we wanted to do and could do. Well, all of us, it was our first game. That was Mark's whole thing. That was that ad in the newspapers: "Wanted, artists and designers with no experience." Mark wanted to build a company with… he didn't want to bring people from other companies that had their way of doing things. He wanted to train people in his way of making games and his way of thinking. None of the artists… I don't know about the programmers, but none of the artists had ever made a video game and never done anything like this. It was all brand new.<br />
<br />
I remember Paul Mica. Another one of the artists, incredible artist. Some of his stuff was gorgeous. I remember him just really beating his head against the wall and just always having to go back and make things smaller or… "Paul, you've got way too many colors. You can't use that many frames." He really had a hard time working within the limitations. I remember him being really frustrated by that. I remember learning some little tricks about how to make eyes look alive when you've only got four pixels. Like, "How did he make his eyes look so cool? Oh, okay. He's got one little white pixel right there." Which is actually something I still think of every single time I draw something or I'm painting something and I've got an eyeball. Thank you, Paul. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned you had worked on the Digitizer. Was that working on the Digitizer exclusively, or did you ever dip into something like Amiga Deluxe Paint as well?'''<br />
<br />
Some of the people in the office were using the Amiga. I was just on the Digitizer. I think some of the work on Dick Tracy… I'm trying to think what it was. Cause I didn't work on it, but it was… right. It was such a tiny little office, we're all climbing over on top of each other. Cause I remember somebody showing me something on the Amiga, some auto features like, "Oh, that's really cool that it does that." Like putting a black outline around something. "Oh, that's cool, that saves time." I didn't do anything [on the Amiga], I was all Digitizer.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was the most challenging thing about working on the Digitizer? Other than everything.'''<br />
<br />
I was just gonna say, "Other than everything?" It was… Once again, your limitations, not so much on the Digitizer issue, it was just the Genesis, of just having the memory and frame rate issues of… you've got so few frames for each animation. One of the tools I really wish it had was, and this would have been for building the worlds, is you had a certain number of little eight by eight squares. What did we call them? Tiles? Stamps? Tiles.<br />
<br />
Everything went down to an eight by eight little pixel box that then you'd use four of those to make a 16 by 16. You could reuse that 16 by 16 into a 32 by 32. That's how you save memory was you reused these ever-increasing size chunks that then would fit and click back and forth. Then you could rotate and change colors and it was free as far as memory was concerned. I remember very specifically, on the Sonic games, of really wishing I had some tool that could sort through and find the doubles or ones that were close.<br />
<br />
Cause you always end up with a little- you just needed a little bit more of, and there would just be squares in there that were never used. Actually… they finally did come up with a tool that showed… Oh, they did! They finally came up with a tool [CMM] you could run that would show how often each eight by eight, in these different tiles, how often they were each used. You go, "Hey, this was only used once. I can get rid of it. Or this one's never used. Yeah, let's cut this, pull that out and save that memory." I'd forgotten about that. That was so nice. That was the dealing with memory and was, yeah, it was a nightmare. I remember it being fun to figure out the colors of those palettes, but frustrating also.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''There's a certain dance to that, a balance of what you can get and what you can't get out.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! A dance. I love the word dance there. When you make it work and you get it to come together… Which is funny, cause that's something you don't even think about. PS1 on, it didn't cross your mind. Like I remember the very first time I was in Photoshop. I'm in L.A. and painting in Photoshop and learning… Actually I just started to use Photoshop at Sega just before I left for something. I remember asking one of the programmers [in L.A.] "How do I pick my palette? How do I choose palettes?" He just kinda looked at me weird. "You don't have to, the programming does that thing. I was like, "Really? Awesome!" It was so much fun. So nice to not have to mess with that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you were mentioning that tile identification program. It might not be the same one but I wanted to run a "Do you recognize this name?" question by you. Yuji Naka had made a tool called the Super Character Maker or CMM. Does that one ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Vaguely.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wasn't sure if that was the one that you were talking about, cause it is something that worked with the Digitizer, but I'm not sure if it was 'tile'-related or not.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. That rings a bell but I have no idea. I don't know if it was that tool or a different tool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was working with Yuji Naka like?'''<br />
<br />
[reticent] Hmm.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You can be honest.'''<br />
<br />
He didn't like Americans. He didn't like speaking English. He was a dick. I really have nothing nice to say about Naka. On the other hand, Yasuhara I love and would… There's very few things that would get me back into the game industry. If Mark called or Yasuhara called and said, "Hey, I've got something I'd want to do with you." I'd say, "Yes." Naka didn't like Americans, he didn't like Americans on his team. I'm particularly pissed at him because at the end of Sonic 2, Roger Hector, who was the head of STI at that time, told me that I was going to be a lead artist on Sonic 3 and was very excited about that. But Naka being Naka- cause the way Naka got what he wanted is he threatened everyone. If he didn't get what he wanted, he threatened to quit. So he was going to quit. He wasn't going to do Sonic 3 unless he got his own all-Japanese team in their own office with separate key cards. That was all Japanese. So Sonic 3 was done across the hall behind locked doors. Which pissed me off cause I was supposed to be one of the lead artists on it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You're not the only one.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at it… Am I the only American that ended up with environment art in Sonic 2? I think I am. Cause all of Brenda's stuff got cut, and all of Tom's stuff. I'm the only American that had finished art in the game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Naka. "I'm going to take my ball and go home" was his go-to plan on everything. You'd give him a big bag of money and give him what he wanted and he'd stay. But he was the exception. The other guys, Yasuhara and… Yamaguchi.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Yamaguchi.'''<br />
<br />
Yamaguchi, the other environment artist, was incredible. He's someone I'd enjoy working with again. He was a machine. He just lived at STI. He never went home and he would redo levels and redo- They'd be beautiful, and he wouldn't be happy with them, and he'd redo them again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You still keep in contact with Yasuhara and Yamaguchi?'''<br />
<br />
Yasuhara, we're friends on Facebook. Occasionally I have asked him questions here and then, occasionally. I do occasionally see him comment or click a like on something I post. The last time I contacted him was… I just digitized the resume videotape I made when I was leaving Sega. This was like maybe five, ten years ago. I was going to say a couple of years… No, it's probably more like 10 years. I had put it up on YouTube and a friend was watching it and says, "What is Treasure Tails?" I went, "What?" Cause I hadn't thought of this in like forever. He goes, "Yeah, it's one of the games you said you worked on" and all of a sudden these memories start coming back. I pulled out the tape quickly and looked at it and sure enough, here's this Sonic universe game with Tails. It's this… not ortho… the weird three quarter angle view…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Isometric? No… something like that. I know what you're talking about.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It'll come to us later. It was a puzzle adventure game for Tails. I had forgotten completely, I completely forgot I'd ever worked on that. It was the one of the last things I did at Sega before leaving. I remember doing all the research and all that got done for it was like three mock-up screens. Just static. I actually contacted Yasuhara cause I was trying to find out who was designing this, who was working on this. I got a hold of Bill Dunn to see if he remembered anything. I wrote to Yasuhara and he got back to me and Yasuhara says, "I don't remember anything from that time." His brain is so burnt from that period in time, he just said, "I don't remember."<br />
<br />
Then I got digging into my journals and found a little bit of information, so I was able to put some times, some dates down and that stuff on it and found out the designer on it was Hoyt Ng and there was a programmer's name written down as far as I remember. We worked on it for… I think a few months. I don't remember how long now, but it got cancelled. Like so many things at STI. That's the reason I left STI: all these potential games, some of them almost finished, that would have been A plus, incredibly beautiful games that got cancelled just because of incompetent management.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Out of all those games that you just mentioned, what was the most complete that you were upset about being cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
That was one I didn't work on. I think the character's name was Jester.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, Jester.'''<br />
<br />
I think the name of the game was called Kinetix? Kinex or Kinetix. I always used to think it was Jester, but I did find a little bit of information. I'm not sure, but I think the name of the game was actually Kinetix with an X. Anyway, Jester. So this little character made out of clay. The whole point of the game was watching him die. [laughs] There were all these horrible ways of, when you died, if he would get smashed and he didn't look like he was made of clay, but he was made of clay. He'd get smashed, he'd mush out like clay or he'd get set on fire or burned in acid or… it just all these wonderful deaths. They had been working on that… I don't know how much of that was done.<br />
<br />
The two people I know that we're working on it are both gone. Alan Ackerman was one of the artists on it and he passed away a number of years ago and Rick Macaraeg died shortly thereafter. He [Rick] was the designer on it. I don't know who out there would know anything about it, but that's the one that got cancelled that was just a beautiful game that could have been so awesome.<br />
<br />
Then there was Spinny & Spike by Steve Woita. I don't know how far along they got on that. Then there's my Segapede slash Astropede game that didn't get very far, although we worked on it a little long time, but we were just never given the resources. They were trying to do too many things with not enough people.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was not being given enough resources to work on a project a recurring theme at STI?'''<br />
<br />
Absolutely. The one game that did ship was The Ooze, which… I have no idea how it made it out the door. I think it's because it had a very, very, very small team. I think it was me and Tom… Did Brenda- I can't remember Brenda worked on that. Me and Tom were doing the environments, which were pretty simple. I actually did the Ooze. I remember, that game, is way back. The primordial stage of that game was Mark Cerny asking me to do a set of little tiles for animation that were just the Ooze, of every different little shape that you could have, so that the program group would then do the animations. There would be no animating the Ooze. You would just have every conceivable shape in a eight by eight little square that would make any curve.<br />
<br />
Cause he was doing a test with- was it Dave Sanner and Jason Plumb, were doing- cause I think they had this idea for a game and this little test ended up becoming The Ooze. It was funny, I bumped into Dave Sanner just a couple of weeks or a month or two ago, cause I was over at the Video Game History place scanning the last of something in with those guys. We got talking about The Ooze and they [the VGHF] went, "Oh wait, one of the guys that worked on it is like, right upstairs." It's a very small world.<br />
<br />
It was just very interesting to meet somebody that you haven't seen in 20 years. The last time you saw them, they're in a flannel shirt with long hair and just this easy-going stoner vibe. The guy walks in and I'm like, "Okay, that is Dave, but that is not the Dave I remember from 30 years ago."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Everyone's grown up… I was looking at the early concept art for some of your Ooze work cause it was also in your Video Game History Foundation archive there, and it looks pretty gruesome. There's one concept art of a guy's leg being pulled off into the Ooze. I was going to ask, were the early concepts for that game more gruesome or more adult than the final product?'''<br />
<br />
Well, the art there, I did. Just to clarify, I did the coloring of that because the actual art drawing were done by… Burt somebody, I can't remember his name [Kurt Peterson], but he did the line art, and then I just did some quick color work on them. Those drawings, I think, those are more an emotional… I don't know how serious the game is supposed to be. As a top down-looking game, there is [nothing] like a game being made today. These three-dimensional, running around first-person, third-person thing. I think that art was more for pitching the idea of Ooze versus what it would actually look like in the game. Cause you never see people in the game. It's like your satellite view of buildings and the Ooze. People are a few pixels tall. I haven't played that in a long time either. I don't think I even have a copy of that… Yeah, I never got a copy of The Ooze.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. I would have imagined that they would have given you at least one copy of the game that you had worked on.'''<br />
<br />
Well usually that's true. I think cause I left… I'm not sure. I'm trying to think. It came out just as I left Sega. I don't think I got a copy for that reason. That's also the same reason I don't have a copy and I never bought a copy of the last Ratchet and Clank game I worked on? Was it Deadlocked? Cause I left before it actually physically came out.<br />
<br />
The one thing that's gone missing is somewhere there's a box that has all of my signed copies of games. I'd get my games and I'd have the whole team sign it. I've got all the games I worked on signed by the entire team, along with my Genesis and all the other Genesis games, and it's in a box and it's gone. I can't find it. All my Sonic, all my Spyro stuff, all the games are… I can't find the box. I'm a little afraid it's walked out on me.<br />
<br />
I'm hoping it's just mislabeled in a box, inside of a box somewhere. Cause I moved out from L.A. two years ago, back up to the Bay Area. I was really hoping that during this move I would find it. Then in this move, I ended up just shoving boxes in the truck at the end anyway. Hopefully it's in one of those boxes. I'm just hoping my garage wasn't open one day and somebody walked by and saw a box marked video games and picked it up and walked off.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. Hopefully it's still kicking around there.'''<br />
<br />
Hopefully not. Send some good energy out into the universe. Yeah, that had all my copies.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I wanted to ask a bunch of Sonic 2 questions and these are going to be a little more specific. If you have to say, "I don't remember that", no worries, I completely understand. A lot of us in the research community find the project especially fascinating. For editorial reasons, I'd like to thank one of our top Sonic researchers, Katsushimi, for providing some of these questions. To begin, could you describe your personal approach to drawing graphics when it came to the Sonic 2 project?'''<br />
<br />
I can remember thinking how it had a very computer generated look. It's all pixels, but it looked like it was made out of polygons. If you look at the palm trees and stuff, it has this very polygon-based look. That was my foundation, especially on the Hidden Palace artwork, was that this is made out of polygons. Trying to think of what else… that's the only thing that's coming to mind right now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Were you provided with much Japanese source material when you first started? Like what they wanted the game to look like or… kinda inspirations? Did they give you much material?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember. I don't remember anything other than the first game, other than playing Sonic [1]. I don't remember any other source material or reference material being given.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''We're curious about what feedback you got from other staff on your art as development progressed.'''<br />
<br />
I remember it being very positive. The one I do remember that was negative, and I had to agree, was actually both in Hidden Palace and Oil Ocean, the distant background, that independent layer in the background. I had a really hard time with those. I think that was also coming down to really limited memory. Those number of little squares, little tiles you had was very limited. I know on Oil Ocean, I wish I had a picture of what I did because I do not remember what it looked like at all. Yamaguchi was definitely not happy with it. The background that's in Oil Ocean in the game is actually Yamaguchi's. I remember at the time being frustrated a little bit. That it wasn't mine, that I couldn't do the background. The background wasn't mine. I also know that mine sucked. But I don't remember what it looked like.<br />
<br />
Hidden Palace Zone is the background that's there I'm not happy with. It was a tricky thing to do. That [background] was the hardest part. That's the only time I remember any negative comments was specifically the background on Oil Ocean. I know there's an original background I did for Hidden Palace that I think shows up in some of the magazine screenshots.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, yes. The cave-y stalagmites and stalactites look.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, the more cave-shaped looks. That got replaced with whatever is there now. So yeah, that's mine. Even that, I'm still not happy with it. The favorite artwork I've ever done on any video game is Hidden Palace Zone. I'm the most proud of that work. But not the background.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. Honestly it's a beautiful looking stage.'''<br />
<br />
I know one of the things that was very important to me, and this is true all the way through the stuff I did on the PS1, was I always did everything I could to not have artwork in the environment look like wallpaper. Because you did have this limited number of tiles, and if you had a large area, all of a sudden it got very repetitive. A lot of artists in a lot of games, it's just wallpaper. It's just so obvious that it's the same pattern just stamped. To a certain extent you can't get away from that because it is wallpaper. It is the same pattern. But there's ways of doing it to offset it and make subtle changes to try and break that up. So even if you go back to Kid Chameleon, I remember spending a lot of time trying to come up with these interesting shapes that were in fact repeatable, but they weren't on a grid.<br />
<br />
One of the ones I'm the most proud of is Hidden Palace Zone. It's this geometric, polygonal, crystal-based stonework that everything's built off. That's this repeating pattern, but it's off at a weird angle, and so you only see that it repeats if you get a good half a screen full of the same image of the same wall. You go, "Okay, there is a repeating pattern there." But it bothered me even on Sonic. I look at some of the other Sonic levels, but even in Sonic 3. I look at Sonic 3, and I'm maybe more judgmental there because I was supposed to be on that. There's wallpaper. There's some levels like, "Really? That's… Naka doesn't like American art? That's crap. That made it into a Sonic game?" There's just a couple of levels that are just like… y'know, most of the stuff's gorgeous. Some is like, "Really? This is acceptable?"<br />
<br />
That was one of my big things on the side-scrollers was trying not to make that wallpaper. Even on PS2, you've still got textures that you're repeating on large areas. I really tried to hide the fact that you were reusing textures over and over and over again.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So another thing I wanted to ask about Sonic 2, some of our researchers have characterized Sonic 2 as just scraps of things compiled into a game, maybe not as cohesive as it could be. Would you agree with that?'''<br />
<br />
I wouldn't have thought of it that way, but I also can't disagree with that perspective of it. I think that may be because… I remember when Yasuhara gave his initial pitch for this massive multi-universe time traveling extravaganza, that would have been incredible. I remember at the time going, "You're nuts. There's no way. We don't have the time. We don't have the memory. We don't have anything to do that."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More lack of resources.'''<br />
<br />
So I think that's where maybe the hodgepodge aspect of it comes in is it's in bits and pieces. It could also just be just the nature of… I'm trying to compare Sonic 1. It's been so long since I played the other one. Y'know, how homogenous was Sonic 1 versus Sonic 2? I remember thinking levels like Casino [Night] Zone were beautiful! But it didn't fit. "Where's this in the world? Why is this in the world? What is this?" Then deciding it didn't matter because it's pretty and it's fun and who cares?<br />
<br />
So, yeah, I can definitely see how there's this hodgepodge… The worlds don't have a lot of throughput into each other in a continuous story way. There's some of them that were a little story driven, but a lot of them are just like "What's cool looking?" Maybe I should say… that would be a good question for Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You proposed a sidekick named Boomer for the sidekick competition that they had. Why a turtle? What inspired that idea?'''<br />
<br />
For me, it was the Tortoise and the Hare thing, fast versus slow. Sonic is known for being fast, and so his buddy is slow, he's a turtle… although he's not actually slow cause that wouldn't work. That's how I ended up with a turtle. That and I was trying to think of a second player character that would interact with Sonic, gameplay wise. In the pictures, if you've got them there, the turtle would drop down and… then also I was thinking of the Godzilla Kaiju monster…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gamera.'''<br />
<br />
Gamera! I was gonna say, it starts with a G. Gamera. He'd pull his legs in and become a little jet pack, so Sonic could use him as like a jet-powered skateboard or surfboard to get over obstacles or to do whatever. That would allow Boomer or Boomy (I'd said it a couple of different ways depending on where I wrote it down and when I wrote it down) to be able to keep up with Sonic. But also I was looking for something to compliment Sonic as opposed to just being the same [thing].<br />
<br />
I know people have sent me links where somebody has actually, in pixels, animated this little character. They were just like, "Okay, if they had done that, what would he look like?" I'd love to actually see that in the level. I'd love to see what he would look like in the Sonic world. I mean, Tails is a better character. But it would have been fun to have invented… it would have been fun to have my character be that guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. You could add to the gameplay that way. Tails can seem like just another Sonic. He had flying, which expands the gameplay, but it sounds like with Boomer you were trying to build on the gameplay that was already there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. But I can also see from a realistic point of view, pragmatic point of view of… if they'd done that, that just complicates everything with programming. You've now got an entire new thing to program completely from scratch and it's going to radically change your gameplay and affect it with that… which is what you also want to do. But where Tails is… he's more of the same, but that's also good. There's not a right or a wrong there, depending on if it's done well and Tails was done well. I was looking for more change and interactivity.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oil Ocean seems to derive a lot of thematic inspirations from Chemical Plant. A lot of the graphics look pretty similar. Is there any direct connection there or is it that just a coincidence?'''<br />
<br />
I think that's just coincidence. I don't remember… I mean, it would be very likely we're doing those at the same time. Although Chemical Plant was one of those ones that Yamaguchi redid at least three times from scratch where he wasn't happy with the first one and you'd come in and then he'd completely changed it. That one went through like three almost complete revisions. No, there wasn't any conscious choices there being made as a similarity.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another two Zones that we think might have been related: Oil Ocean and Hidden Palace. Some people believe that they were meant to recycle graphics from one another at some point in development. Does that ring any bells?'''<br />
<br />
Hmm. Not that I know. I'd be curious to see which piece of the graphics they were thinking of. Cause I… there's nothing in common in either one of them. Trying to think if there's anything… Yeah, that'd be a no as far as I know. I did Hidden Palace first and then Oil Ocean.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What was your idea to create Hidden Palace Zone? What was the inception of that?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember… I think the only input I remember getting from Yasuhara was the map. I don't even know if many sketches exist. In my sketchbook, there's a couple of sketches that show the beginnings of that crystalline polygon-shape stone structure that ended up being the foundation for Hidden Palace. The core of that was that rock formation and just being a cave, but wanting to make it something more than just rock. I don't know if there was any palette input from the Yasuhara or Yamaguchi. I don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So that golden-green vibe was yours.'''<br />
<br />
I think so… I think so.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you feel when it was cut?'''<br />
<br />
It's changed over time. I remember going in to like the conference room to sit down and play Sonic 2 just for fun and went to pull up my- cause I said, that was the first level I did. I moved on and was working on Oil Ocean and really close to the end of the game [project]. I remember it being really close to the end of the game, but then checking dates, it's gotta be a little… based on other people's information, there had to be a little more time before the game actually shipped. I remember going to pull up what was the official (at that time) version and it was gone. You couldn't access it. So I went and talked to… I may have asked Yasuhara, but I know I remember talking to Roger Hector and he told me that it had been cut because of memory. Cause they didn't have enough memory, enough room on the cartridge. I remember being really pissed. Like once again, that's my favorite art period to this day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine.'''<br />
<br />
So I was very pissed. Then the game ships and… then the cool part of that- tangent here, I got to carry the chipset from Sega of America over to Tokyo, cause it was faster and more reliable to physically carry the chipset back then versus to electronically transmit it. I got a free trip to Japan for- I have no idea why they chose me. Then again… While I'm on the plane on the way over, they discovered an A bug, so they did end up actually having to at least electronically transmit something.<br />
<br />
The game had shipped and within a few weeks or months of the game being out, people had used… was it GameShark, Game Genie? One of those to hack into the cart and found Hidden Palace Zone, or a ghost of Hidden Palace Zone. I was pissed. "Well there was room cause it's still there. It's on the cartridge." But it actually turns out that they just didn't have time to program it. They had to do a quick rewrite of both story and… That's where you were supposed to get all the Chaos Emeralds and get your Super Sonic powers or something was in Hidden Palace Zone, by completing Hidden Palace, or something like that.<br />
<br />
There were only ever two levels to Hidden Palace Zone, and there was no boss level. When the guy, I don't remember what his name was [Christian Whitehead], did the handheld phone version of it that brought it all back to life again, he added that weird organ [Egg Gauntlet]. No idea why it's an organ [laughs], but there was no boss on the original.<br />
<br />
I think it was maybe memory as well, but it was definitely they didn't have time to finish the programming and get it into the game proper. I'm actually lucky that parts of it were still on the cartridge and that there was this huge mystery and all these urban legends. Also the fact that it's named Hidden Palace and it's hidden, literally, in the game, kept it alive. I think that's why it is in the game officially now, finally, as of a few years ago. That whole thing kept going cause it did exist. I'm really glad it. It took a couple of decades, but the artwork's out there now.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. We get to see your art.'''<br />
<br />
It finally made it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Another Hidden Palace Zone question. I believe it was you that had previously… it might've been someone else, but I think it was you that said "Hidden Palace Zone was a secret level that was originally accessed through Mystic Cave Zone." Do you remember anything about that?'''<br />
<br />
One of the 'fall to your infinite death' holes in Mystic Cave… you would fall and not die. You would fall and find yourself in Hidden Palace Zone, which is why I think it works now [in the 2013 port]. I think that's how they implement it now… is the way it was supposed to be. Although now I think it is just a hidden level, it doesn't do anything, where before it was the Chaos Emeralds and it was part of the story and part of the gameplay, as opposed to being just another level, which is why it didn't have a boss level or it was only two levels. It was a separate little thing on its own, which is probably the also reason why it got cut. It was a tangent thing to do something cool, and it was the easiest thing to cut when they ran out of time. Other than the fact that it was being done by an American.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of cut Zones, you'd mentioned working on a clown slash roller coaster themed Zone. What would that have been like?'''<br />
<br />
That was just an early thumbnail sketch of me just coming up with different ideas of playing off of that loop de loop idea for the Sonic levels, of having more of that. It didn't get anywhere beyond… did I do? I'm trying to think… I have a vague memory of, on the Digitizer, for some reason, I see red and white checkers and some early concept stuff on the Digitizer. But I really don't remember. The only thing that does exist is a couple of very quick, simple sketches in that sketchbook. I know I had one where the level was nothing but a rail, running around- So it'd be like a metal path, a metal tube doing a ring around the planet and having loops and spins and drops in it. The background would be this Jupiter-type, Saturn planet behind you and you're running around on the ring. But that was just a concept that was just early, early on that didn't get past a few sketches.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''You know, I'm interested… You had mentioned, on that clown slash roller coaster Zone, remembering red and white checkers. When I read clown slash roller coaster, I immediately thought of Sonic 3, cause they have Carnival Night Zone, and Carnival Night Zone has a theme of red and white checkers. Do you think there's any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
I don't know. I don't think so. Once again, that content work I did would have been done in like early or mid '91, before Sonic 2 actually officially started or [had] any work done. Then Sonic 3 would have been two years later in a locked office across the hall. So probably not. I'm trying to… I've got these weird images now of that checker and trying to come up with a way to do that curved tent and make it efficient with those little eight by eight… Huh. I remember watching the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space to get ideas. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's awesome.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think there was some [clown/roller coaster] graphics done on the Digitizer, just to have stuff to pitch to Yasuhara.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did that Zone have a name at all, an early name, or was it just graphics at that point?'''<br />
<br />
No, this would have been just me mocking some quick stuff up to show Yasuhara for potential ideas. Cause all the actual design stuff would have been Yasuhara's. So it's just putting together ideas to… it's like Boomer. They may have done this for the levels as well, but Boomer, they definitely put a call out. They said, "Hey, everybody, we need a player two. Pitch us some ideas." They maybe did the same thing for the levels but I don't know. That was me just pitching ideas and trying to get something visual to show Yasuhara. That's somewhere in a landfill in Redwood City.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Aw god, that pains me. So, another Sonic 2 experiment you did. You had mentioned your burning forest Zone, and that's actually something I asked about in our previous emails. You experimented with the idea of a burning forest Zone and the ways of designing graphics with the intent to make in the trees look like they were on fire. Can you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Is that… is that me? I don't… I don't remember. Was that Brenda? I don't think that's me. Did I… really? Wow. If I did, I've completely drawn a blank on that. Although… [thinking]. Oh man. Once again, I have this very weird memory of… You know, my first response is no, but then- this vague memory of struggling, trying to figure out how to do fire and… Wow. It's almost more of an emotional memory… Yeah, there is something in there, but yeah, it's gone.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Speaking of early Zones, do you remember much… Brenda had made that mockup for the magazines… actually I think it was a little bit more than a mockup. Her Desert Zone that you could recycle into a Winter Zone. Do you remember that at all?'''<br />
<br />
I'll say superficially… When you're doing this stuff, you're so nose into your screen. Most of what I remember of Brenda's work is stuff that I have seen or talked about or heard long after. I have very few… the only level I remember… watching Brenda and walking past her computer and remember her working on was the forest Zone [Wood Zone]. All the desert stuff is like, "Okay, she did it, and there's other people talking about it, but I don't remember anything from the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Understandable. There was so much going on with Sonic 2.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How was working on Spinball?'''<br />
<br />
Spinball was fun. It was a little frustrating cause I got pulled off of… did I get pulled off Segapede to do Spinball? I think so. Sometime I did, in fact, go through my journal and get a timeline of events. It was fun to be back on a Sonic title, even though it wasn't Sonic 3. It's interesting. This is another one where Brenda got screwed because they were supposed to be a hidden watery cave level as level one [Underwater Caves]. The game would start with Sonic flying into this cave at sea level, and then you'd come into those caves, and this toxic level, which I was doing, and then into these other levels on up. Then for reasons they had to cut a level, and so they kept Brenda's and smushed, theme-wise, her's and mine together.<br />
<br />
Now the bottom half of my level, I had to go through and convert what was slime, on the bottom of mine, into water that turned into slime the higher you got on the level. If you look at screenshots, the patterns of this bulbous rocky formation that make up the cave is, in fact, Hidden Palace artwork dressed up. It's the same shape, it's the same repeating patterns, because that pattern worked so well, that I just rounded all the edges and turned it into these gooey bulbous shapes as opposed to squared-off polygons.<br />
<br />
I remember it was fun. It was a little frustrating working with Peter… starts with an M [Peter Morawiec], who was the lead designer and did a lot of artwork and did all that. He was a real perfectionist. He had a vision of how he wanted it to be. There was a lot of reworking stuff that was… sometimes he'd have a good point and other times it's like, "Why? No. That's just… that's fine." But once again, both he and Adrian, the programmer, were both really nice guys and just working their butts off. Yeah, so it was good. It was good to be back on a Sonic title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So I have a very specific question that you might know as an artist. Do you know who drew Spinball's sprites? We think it's either Macaraeg or Brenda.'''<br />
<br />
So the actual sprites for him spinning, when he was a little blue ball?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''More Sonic's normal sprites.'''<br />
<br />
I would have assumed it was Yamaguchi. Did Yamaguchi do Spinball? I'm trying to think if he did Sonic…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I don't think Yamaguchi did Spinball. I can't find his name on the production credits…'''<br />
<br />
Oh! For Spinball! For some reason, my brain snapped back to Sonic 2. For Spinball, I don't know. It was probably… if I had to guess? Tom, but that's a guess. It could have been Brenda. It wasn't me! [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of, do you recall Brenda's project titled Fat, Daddy? The one with the cats and the jazz themes and the bebop, beatnik themes?'''<br />
<br />
Very vaguely. Once again, if you'd have asked me, "Did Brenda pitch anything or doing any of these?", I would have said "No." Somewhere else that has come up and then I get these "Oh I saw some images." There's nothing I remember of the fact that I know "Oh yeah, there was something." But then again, like Treasure Tails. I was working on that and I forgot about it! [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] So let's talk about Dark Empires. Could you give us a top-down summary of Dark Empires?'''<br />
<br />
So Bruce Dunn [Bill Dunn] was the designer on it. I was doing that… That must have been before Kid Chameleon. Cause it seems like they were at the same time, but that makes no sense, so it hadn't been before, because they got cancelled… We were at the little office in San Jose. By the time we got to the office in… is that Menlo Park? I'm not sure where you actually are on the freeway, where that building is, halfway up the 101 [freeway], halfway to Sega headquarters. I think by the time we got there, Dark Empires was dead.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was, cause we were doing Sonic 2 during… We were doing Kid Chameleon, cause I remember going in to Mark and saying, "Hey, I get some extra time to work now cause I'm going through a divorce. I'm going to be spending a lot of time at work." [laughs] No real reason to go home anymore. It almost had to be before [STI moved]. It wasn't a type of game I typically played much of, but the style and… William, he's a really nice guy. A pleasure to work with, really easy going… Bill. Bill Dunn. The style was right up my alley. This fantasy Dungeons & Dragons [style] - monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build. Did a lot of sketches that didn't…<br />
<br />
Ken Rose, who was the programmer, just sent me like a month ago that playable version. That's another thing that's in that box that is missing is my actual ROM card for Segapede, and I had one for Dark Empires. Luckily Ken still had the code for those. I wasn't able to get it to work, and then my son was supposed to come over and help me figure it out, and we never got that done. It'd be interesting to play it again, cause the only thing I have is to watch that videotape of my resume. But yeah, that was Bill's baby.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall what the impetus was for STI making what is essentially is a real time strategy game, or feels like a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, that's what I was just trying to think of. I was just trying to remember… cause I remember some conversations with Bill and Mark. I remember Bill being concerned that it was too much of a niche game for what Mark wanted to do, what Mark wanted STI to be, and him not being surprised that it got cancelled. Not happy about it, but not being surprised, because it wasn't the game that Mark wanted STI to be making that was going to be these A-title, top of the playlist games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Strategy was new back then. Console strategy.'''<br />
<br />
I remember the only real strategy game I ever played at that time was a Genesis game called Herzog Zwei. I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played. Tried to get into like Starcraft and those and just never got into them.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Did Herzog Zwei and other titles… was that what inspired Bill, or you guys as a team, to make a strategy game?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I don't know. My memory is just of drawing pictures and doing the animations and "writhing dramatic death" for the boss… No, that was Kid Chameleon. The writhing dramatic death was Kid Chameleon. It wasn't really a boss. It was this snake creature that didn't end up being used. No, that was Kid Chameleon. I remember having a lot of fun doing the artwork [for Dark Empires]. I remember really enjoying working with Bill, and that art style was very natural for me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, I feel like you naturally gravitate towards creatures and particularly I've noticed a theme of dragons that continued on later in your career.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. It's interesting because Spyro… the idea for Spyro, was one of mine. I'm the one that pitched the idea for a dragon. It's interesting that once we got the go-ahead on that, it was an art style that was outside… the actual environment there, outside of what I would normally do. It's much prettier, it's much softer, much more painterly. It was one of the other artists, Kirsten, can't remember her last name. [Kirsten Van Schreven‑Butler] It's hyphenated, the last name. She's another environment artist and her texture work was this very loose, very painterly look in these pastel colors. That was it. I was, "Okay, that's Spyro. That's the look we want."<br />
<br />
I remember always looking at her work and then actually pulling out some of her textures to use as a canvas to start on, to learn how to do that painterly loose quality. It was a different, it was a look that is outside of my go-to, which is a little more monster-y and a little more hard-edged.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on Dark Empires, it looks like the game starts in more of a traditional medieval fantasy, and that proceeds into like a sci-fi setting. Do you remember whose idea was it to have the game focused around like growing, evolving time, like time would progress?'''<br />
<br />
So once again, I don't really remember. I don't know how much of this was a collaboration between Bill and Mark. I think it was mostly Bill. Those would be questions for him. All I remember is the visuals on it. I don't remember anything story-wise or gameplay-wise beyond a clicking, moving strategy type game.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So you had mentioned that you were working on it, we have Bill working on it, and I think Scott Chandler was on programming. Do you recall anyone else working on Dark Empires?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. No, like I wouldn't have remembered Scott did the program until you mentioned it. I'm trying to think if Rick did anything on it… I don't think so. Did Alan [Ackerman] do anything on it? I don't think so. If I ever get that up and running where I can run through it and see… I don't know if there's any other pieces that are not my artwork that I'd recognize as, "Hey, I didn't do that." I don't remember any other artists, but it all blurs together. Somewhere in my mind, I want to say I'm doing that at the same time I'm doing Kid Chameleon, but that doesn't make any sense. Too long ago.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall why exactly it was cancelled? You had mentioned Mark saying that it was against the ideology of STI (to make these big franchise-creating series). Do you recall the exact reasons you were given why Dark Empire was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
No. I think it was just too much of a niche game or… I don't know if there was conversations about it just wasn't working. It wasn't fun.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I wanted to ask was: in your VHS resume for both Dark Empires and Treasure Tails. You're looking at the art through the same debug display. There was a crimson line and text at the bottom that says WINDOW 0,223. Was that your art tool or… was that a specific tool?'''<br />
<br />
That's the Digitizer. I think if I remember it, I'm literally videotaping the screen of the Digitizer. This is like real low-tech. I literally had my video camera on a tripod recording the screen, if I remember right. Hm…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It does look like it's direct feed. I can't speak to a hundred percent for sure, but the VHS resume looks like a direct feed.'''<br />
<br />
I just remember having my little camcorder. Maybe I did have it feeding in directly. It's all very primitive. No editing tools or anything. To edit it, I would like literally hit pause and start the next one.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''To hop to Jester really quick. Do you remember whose idea was it to make a game starring a protagonist made of clay? Cause you can do a whole lot with that concept, it's a creative idea.'''<br />
<br />
Oh yeah. I don't know… that would either be, to the best of my guessing memory, would be either Mark or Rick, or a collaboration between those two. I'm trying to think how much game design Rick was doing. I know Rick was doing a lot of game design and artwork, cause I think Rick did the animations for Jester. I'm trying to remember if Mark was doing game design on that. I think Mark and Rick were doing game design. Once again, I didn't work on it.<br />
<br />
I know he [Rick Macaraeg] did the animations for Jester. I don't know if he was doing level art. I know Alan Ackerman did level art. I don't know who… I want to say Mark was probably doing some game design for that as well, but I don't know, don't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''And just to confirm, this is Mark Cerny?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, Mark Cerny. So the primary designer and my memory was Rick Macaraeg. That was his baby. But I don't know if he was working with Mark initially to come up with the concept or if that was Rick's idea. I don't know.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''A question you may have already answered, I apologize if you did. Do you remember exactly why Jester was cancelled?'''<br />
<br />
I mean, not a good reason. I think it was… it had to have been almost finished cause it had been in production for like two years. Part of it is Mark Cerny had moved on. He had left Sega. I want to say it suffered the death of any project that dies after its lead promoter leaves, after its producer leaves. Sega was really bad for: a producer would come in and would start a bunch of projects and then they would leave, and then a new producer would come in. Well, the new producer doesn't want to be working on somebody else's projects. They want to be doing their projects.<br />
<br />
My best guess is that that was a major contributor to [the cancellation of] Jester was that Mark Cerny had left. So there was no huge person- the person that was really behind it was no longer there, and we had new producers that didn't have any interest in doing somebody else's game. I wish I knew, I wish I could remember how much of the game was done. Cause I remember it just didn't make any sense to cancel it. Of all the games that got cancelled. That's the one that just should have gotten done. It was new, it was fun, it was creative. It was very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Speaking of another cancelled STI project, this one we actually know less about than Jester: What was SpellCaster?'''<br />
<br />
SpellCaster! Okay, so it never got beyond a pitch. So after Sonic, they said, "Okay, you can pitch ideas." The head people from SoA would come down… Toyoda… I can't remember the name. It was a Japanese guy, was really nice guy. Tom Kalinske, another really nice guy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda.'''<br />
<br />
Wait, what was his name again?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Shinobu Toyoda, I believe.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah Shinobu, a really nice guy. I think he's the one that chose me to go to Japan for some reason. They would come down with whoever from marketing and they would sit around the conference room table and you can come in and pitch an idea. SpellCasters was me and Dave Sanner, the programmer I just re-met, and we came up with this idea of this combat game, but to set it apart from every other Street Fighter-type game out there, two things is: my big thing was you were going to be able to actually affect the environment, not just throw spells and weapons, hit, hurt the other players. If he was standing on a platform, you could shatter the platform or you could hit something to have it fall on him and you could also interact with the environment.<br />
<br />
Then Dave's big thing is he wanted the spells to be a sound-based, music-based. As you push the buttons, it would play a sound. You would hear notes as the players were mashing their buttons. That would do two things. One, you could hear the other player. Once you got playing enough, you could recognize songs, recognize a short tune, and you'd get a little heads up as to what the other guy was going to do. We did up a document, I did up some artwork, and we pitched it to Sega and that's as far as I got. They said, "Oh, thank you, but no."<br />
<br />
That's as far as that got, just the documents you see there and a single pitch meeting. I also came back after that and just myself put together Segapede and pitched that. That's the one where Sega went, "Hey, we like that. But we want to see a proof of concept." So that's when Segapede ended up coming about.<br />
<br />
The foundational idea for Segapede was it was initially it was supposed to take place in the Sonic universe. The core concept was that… the memory I talked about, that very first time I ever played Sonic and there was no Ring splash and then playing it again and there was a Ring splash and how much the Ring splash made it fun was, that was the core. The base idea that started Segapede was the character was going to be the centipede that each of the body segments was this little ball bearing, a little unicycle thing, with your power-ups sitting on top of that. It could be an extra engine to go fast. It could be rocket launchers. It could be spikes. It could be whatever gameplay characteristics, things you needed, would be these different body segments.<br />
<br />
Zip the character is basically a unicycle. He's just this one little ball bearing with this little character on top, and as he runs around the level, he collects these body pieces, and you collect your power ups like any other game. The difference here is that when you get hit, those go flying just like Rings. You'd have a body part splash and these body segments, your power-ups, would all go rolling off screen and you had to run around and grab them all before they went off screen and disappeared like the Rings. I also liked the idea of that centipede shape. Once again, playing off of a Sonic world of these loops and the roller coaster feelings of this… like a roller coaster train, this whole string of pods rolling and sliding around in a Sonic world, basically, was the foundation for Segapede.<br />
<br />
Sega liked it, but two things: they wanted a playable prototype, a proof of concept, and they didn't want it to be in the Sonic universe, which I'm still bummed about. Because the original idea had it where Robotnik was experimenting with Chaos Emeralds in his lab and they exploded and they vaporized and he breathed in all this Chaos Dust and it was going to kill him, putting him into a coma, and it was going to kill him. Sonic decided he wanted to save him. This goes back to the movie Incredible Voyage [Fantastic Voyage], where they shrink everyone into this important person. They shrink everyone down… Raquel Welch, and put them in this little submarine and inject them with his blood and they gotta go do brain surgery. That was the gameplay. Zip is in fact microscopic, he's a nanite, but Zip was a friend of Sonic's. So Sonic gets Zip to go into Robotnik.<br />
<br />
The levels are in fact inside Robotnik, and you're collecting this Chaos Dust and trying to save Robotnik. That was the original idea, which I still really like and still think would have been a good game, but Sega didn't want it in the Sonic universe. I had to come up with this other idea that I was never happy with, story-wise of the concept or the reason for anything being. But at least they wanted the game because they gave us like a couple months to do the prototype. That's where I realized I had all this finished artwork for Hidden Palace Zone just sitting on my desk. That enabled us to do a really quick and dirty first playable, proof of concept, but have it look finished.<br />
<br />
The playable version that you [Alexander Rojas] just got sent was what Ken Rose and I managed to do in a couple of months or less. I don't know how much time we spent on that. That's another one that we got… just the lack of support from Sega and our management. Cause they had me managing and I don't manage. I don't know anything about the background of making the games. You know, "Let me do the art." Then they had Ken who… no actually, we didn't have Ken. Ken did the prototype. Then when the game went into production… No, we still did have him, but there was something going on between Ken and management cause Ken wanted some assurances, "What was going on?" I can't remember what the politics were going on there, but there were some politics going on between Ken and management.<br />
<br />
We had at least one Japanese programmer but Ken said he just was a terrible programmer and the other two artists they hired… One was a very talented fine artist [Marte Thompson] and she had been working on the computer, but had been doing technical schematics, literally line work and text, so she had no clue about making video games. I don't think she was even a big game player. Then the other guy was this incredible artist. His name was Alex [Niño]. He was extremely famous in the comic world cause he did like the original Tarzan comics. He's an older guy. The art director hired him just because he could. [laughs] Cause this guy was a legend in the art world. But he'd never worked on the computer at all. I don't know if he even owned a computer at the time.<br />
<br />
He's sketching in his drawings and his concepts and that's something else that got lost is… I have a stack of enemy concepts that he drew for Segapede that I wish I had. That just dragged on and I think that's when they finally needed people and pull me off, I think to do Spinball. [sarcastically] Awesome.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So on Segapede, it looks like the name Segapede came first and then I believe you changed it to Astropede near the end as you were preparing to leave Sega. Is that true?'''<br />
<br />
Well, Segapede was literally just a working title. In fact, I should have put just "working title" because I had no intention of ever calling Segapede. That was just a working title. But then once we get the final approval… So that prototype was called Segapede, but then once we got final approval, the new working title, hopefully final real title had it shipped, would have been Astropede. Once again, that never went down the path of, "Does everybody like it? Does marketing like it? Does legal like it?" It never even got to that point. Segapede was just the prototype working title.<br />
<br />
I got teased a lot. Brenda used to tease me a lot about the name [laughs]. But yeah, it was just a working title.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Do you recall the name of that fine artist and the Japanese artist? Can you recall either of those names?'''<br />
<br />
I can see her [Marte]. Then Alex Niño. Alex Niño was the older guy that had drawn the Tarzan comics, like back in the fifties or sixties. Really nice guy. His sketches were just gorgeous. But just kinda useless when it comes to making video games. Mark may have wanted to hire people outside the industry in the beginning. That's not what we needed then. We needed the people that could hit the ground running, and a producer that would actually produce.<br />
<br />
What was her name… It was frustrating because she was often calling in sick. She'd say, "I had an anxiety attack and I had to turn around and go home." I didn't understand at the time. I'll say, maybe you know this, but I left the game industry in 2005 and am on disability still because of anxiety and depression. I totally get the anxiety thing now, how it just shuts your brain off. "Oh, I get it now." I wish I was more understanding back in the day. What's her name? I can see her.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''No worries. No worries at all. If you remember it all, shoot me an email. I'll get that added to our production credits. You said there was a producer on that. Do you remember the producer's name?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, he was English, and he seemed very supportive.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Dean Lester?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah! He seemed very supportive but I remember Brenda and I think Rick Macaraeg both not liking him and telling me to not trust him. And… yeah he stabbed me in the back.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh no. You're not the first one to say that they had issues working with Dean Lester. Could you tell us more about that?'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. We got along wonderfully and he was very supportive, it felt like, on putting together Segapede. When he came in it would have been called Astropede. So once it was actually a game in production… He seemed very supportive but he didn't ever actually do anything. Looking back at it… Once again, we needed a project manager. We needed somebody that would actually knew how to schedule and knew all the things that have to be known to make a game and keep things on schedule and keep things moving and all that business end of it.<br />
<br />
I guess he was expecting me to do that and I was trying to do it. I wanted to do that, but that's not what I did, it's not anything I actually knew anything about. This was in, what, my third game, fourth game ever? When time came and Sega realized that they needed to… Cause I think they had like five games running simultaneously. He didn't support keeping Segapede going. Didn't give it the resources it needed at all, ever. As I said, he got me a couple artists, but that weren't fit for the job. According to Ken, a programmer that was not fit for the job. At that point I realized like, "Oh, this is why Brenda and Rick didn't care for Dean." They knew this was going to happen.<br />
<br />
There was another programmer, a woman. I do not remember her name at all… Once again, she had her own thing going, had projects that she wanted to do. When she came in, you could feel things shift. Her and Dean were there at the same time. I was also butting heads with Roger Hector, because morale at this point was low. They had Spinny & Spike, Steve Woita's game. Segapede, my game. Spinball, which was Peter's game. The Ooze was going on also. They were trying to do Sonic on for the Mars, 32X, or whatever that chaotic transitional crazy thing that Sega screwed everything up on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah [laughs].'''<br />
<br />
You had least five games going simultaneously in a company that really, at best, could do two or three, as far as manpower. The morale was in the crapper. I remember going into [the office of] Roger Hector, who had taken over after Mark left, and saying, "Hey, morale is just really crap right now. Everybody is just miserable." I spent probably an hour in his office. I remember I got about three steps out his door and realized I spent the last half hour or 45 minutes apologizing to him because the morale was 'my problem'. It wasn't the company's. I got about three steps out and I went, "What the fuck?" Because that was Roger's superpower. He's a nice guy, very charismatic. His nickname was Teflon Don. Nothing stuck to him. If anything bad happened, it was never his fault.<br />
<br />
I guess that followed him from his time at Disney. He was really good at avoiding blame. He had to add this power of when you're with him, of… he just had incredible charisma or something. At that point, I literally walked to my desk and called Mark Cerny. "Sayyy, Mark, I understand you're looking for someone, you're putting a new team together." I mean, that was the transition. Like, "Oh, crap, it is time to get out of here," and called Mark.<br />
<br />
Although when Sega didn't get a Sonic for the 32X Mars slash Saturn… that bullet, even Roger couldn't avoid that one. He ended up leaving Sega shortly thereafter because I think he finally couldn't dodge that bullet. That's how I ended up in L.A. with Mark was "OK, it's finally time for me to get out of here."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Interesting. That was actually going to be one of my questions, how you moved to Insomniac. I did want to ask one final STI question before we get off. I do appreciate the patience. I know this is a long interview. I'm actually on my last page. We're getting to the end.'''<br />
<br />
Oh that's fine. Don't worry about me, I can talk all day.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.'''<br />
<br />
I enjoy sharing and talking.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So my question was, and this is something that you very likely might not know… The whole reason this interview started was because I was asking Brenda about some Michael Jackson Sonic 3 stuff. Do you remember seeing Michael Jackson or ever sitting in a meeting that he was a part of?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Very much so. That's my golden answer to: "Who's the most famous person you ever met?" "See if you can beat this one." I guess he was there signing or doing some contracts or talking about doing the music for Sonic 3 and was a huge Sonic fan and wanted to meet the team. We knew about it. We knew he was coming. We were all in the conference room and it's kinda surreal because I'm siting there and I'm like five feet away from… at that point, that's like the high point of Michael Jackson. He's like the most famous person on the planet, practically. I remember sitting there and thinking, "There are people who would literally kill me to be sitting here."<br />
<br />
I think I asked him one question, mostly it was just him asking questions and talking to people. Most of the time was focused on Naka and Yasuhara and maybe Yamaguchi. Because I know he invited… at least Yasuhara went and spent a day or had lunch at the Neverland Ranch, so went and had lunch with Michael at his place. I'm not sure if not Naka and who else went, but I know I know at least Yasuhara went. I know we gave Michael Jackson one of our Sega jackets. It was the Sega letterman jacket.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yes.'''<br />
<br />
Which makes the one I have worth a lot more money because there's pictures of Michael Jackson wearing his.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Yeah.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, it was fun, it was exciting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''In that meeting that you were in with Michael Jackson, was Brenda there with you?'''<br />
<br />
I'm trying to remember. I'm going to say yes? She could've been, should've been, but I don't remember who else was the meeting. I know it was shoulder to shoulder around the table, but I don't remember who all was there. It was after hours, so it was it was later in the evening. Not late, but after normal hours. I remember I was like one of the last people in the room, so I was just busy working on my desk waiting for somebody to say something, and I looked around and "Where is everybody?" I'm like, "Oh, crap." I got up and poked my head in the door and everyone's… he's already there and I snuck in and sat down. He was on crutches. He never on crutches and never took the sunglasses off.<br />
<br />
He was on crutches because he'd hurt himself doing some commercial. He was filming something and hurt himself, so he's on crutches. Very, very nice, very soft spoken, very complimentary. He had nothing but nice things to say about the game and [he was] thankful to the team. But very quiet, very.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Would you be able to tie a specific date to that? The reason I'm glad you said crutches was because we actually know the date that he did have that accident. That was in early March. So it would have to be sometime in March or later in 1993. Would you be able to tie that to a specific date?'''<br />
<br />
I'm going to be fairly certain that that's written somewhere down in my journal. But off the top of my head, I can't. I know… it was after he would have been injured. Then unfortunately, very shortly thereafter, his life imploded, and Sega cut all ties at distance themselves from him. It'd be in my journals. I've just gotta know where my journals are.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Was it just that one meeting or two? That you attended?'''<br />
<br />
With the team, yeah, it was just the one that we know of. I don't want if he came other times to talk about doing the music. That was the only time we met him, the only time the only time I knew he was in the building. I remember they put little footprints after he left, they put little footprints where we walked. [laughs]<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] Oh that's really funny.'''<br />
<br />
One of the things, when I when I moved back up here, is I drove over and didn't know Sega had moved. I drove over because I hadn't been there in 20 plus years and hardly recognized it because there's so many new buildings and everything. I looked at the building, I wondered who's in there. Same thing when I drive past the STI offices that are off the 101 here, if there's any gamers in that building that know what was created in those rooms… If you had a Sonic fan and they're actually sitting in the room where Sonic 2 was made or where this is made or that was made, I always just wondered, "Do they know or would they care?"<br />
<br />
My favorite celebrity story was for the big release for Sonic 2. So it's a huge party at… a Toys "R" Us or FAO Schwarz? It was a big toy store in New York City. They flew the team out. The morning of the event, I go downstairs from the hotel and there's a limo waiting. I get in the limo and I've got a denim Sonic 2 jacket [on that] they'd given the team. I get in the car and there's Dylan Taylor Thomas [Jonathan Taylor Thomas], the middle son on the TV show Home Improvement, in the car. Home Improvement at the time was a big show and Sega had brought in a bunch of the big kids TV celebrities to play Sonic 2 for the cameras. So he was there. He was already in the car waiting and I go in and I get in the car with him and his mom's there, and he looks at me and he goes, "Oh, are you security?" I went, "No, no, I'm one of the artists." And he's like, "Really? Can I have your autograph?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Ah, that's so cool.'''<br />
<br />
So I would see him on a TV show and be like, "He asked for my autograph. He asked for MY autograph." Then later that night… there was the TV show Saved by the Bell, they had the character name was Screech. Kid's name was Dustin [Diamond]. He was there as well. A bunch of us ended up having dinner with him and his dad, and then his room with the hotel was just down from mine. So we come back from dinner, we're sitting there walking and talking, I said, "Good night" and they walked down the hall. I go into my room, I just flip the TV on and there he is. It just happened to turn on to Saved by the Bell with him, and I'm like, "That's weird." That was just really bizarre. Like, "Wait, I just had dinner with you. That's weird." Yeah, every time I see Taylor Thomas I'm like, "Yeah, he asked for MY autograph."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's an awesome story, holy crap. [laughs] So to move onto Insomniac, what was early Insomniac like? Because you were there from the very early days.'''<br />
<br />
From the very beginning, from the almost very early beginning, yeah. I left Hector's office, called Mark, and Mark said, "Yes, I need an artist," But I thought he's still here in the Bay Area He's like, "Oh, but I'm in L.A. I do have a team, they've never made a game." But they need an artist, and we're talking and I said, "Well, I can't come to L.A." My son was six years old. I'm divorced, but I'm right here with my son, he's six, I can't move to L.A. Mark said, "Well, tell you what? If you can come down for just three months, and help them finish the game, we'll put you up while you're down here and we'll fly you back to San Jose every weekend." "Hey, OK, I can do that for three months, that'd be kinda fun."<br />
<br />
I flew down, I met Ted and the Hastings brothers and really liked them. [I] wasn't overly impressed with Disruptor, the game they were working on, it was just a Doom clone. There's no way I would have gone down to work with these guys, who've never made a game, on a Doom clone, except I really wanted to work with Mark again. Mark's one of those people who I think either you really enjoy working with or you really don't like him. I really enjoyed working with him, luckily.<br />
<br />
I went down for three months, and we're doing Disruptor. I was learning 3D, learning Maya, Alias on the fly. I'm kinda learning Photoshop on the fly, because I really didn't know Photoshop very well yet, and then flying back and forth. Disruptor was originally for the 3DO platform. Mark's superpower is seeing the future and knowing what the future needs. You can start work on it now so that it's ready when the future needs it. That really is his superpower. He says, "Okay, at 3DO… this is not going to work. Let's go start talking to Sony and the PlayStation." We didn't have to do much art change, but we had to rework some stuff.<br />
<br />
At some point, shortly thereafter, Ted asked me if I wanted to go permanent with them, as opposed to just my three month contract. Flying back and forth was fine. I talked to my son about it. Like, "Okay, we'll just keep doing this. I'll just keep flying back and forth." So that three months flying back and forth… ended up [as] 25 years in L.A. Ten of that with Insomniac. I never planned on moving to L.A.<br />
<br />
We did Disruptor, which got wonderful reviews… and didn't sell, because Universal didn't advertise it. No one had ever heard of it. Also, Tomb Raider came out at the same time. And Dark Empires [Star Wars: Dark Forces] and Doom. Star Wars, which was actually a good game on the PS1. Doom, which was almost unplayable on the PS1, but it was Doom. Then Tomb Raider, which is Tomb Raider. Disruptor didn't sell. No one ever heard of it.<br />
<br />
It was after Disruptor that… at that point, it was just the two Hastings brothers (Alex and Brian Hastings) and Ted Price who'd started the company. I was their first employee. They had one contract artist in before me that I left shortly after I started. I think it was just me and the contract artist and the Hastings and Ted, and there was Michael Johns and Mark, with Mark's little company Cerny Games. That was it.<br />
<br />
That game shipped. At that point, there's just the four of us. There's just the Hastings, Ted and myself. Ted said, "Okay, everyone go take two weeks and come up with a game and come back, we'll all pitch them to each other, and we'll decide what we do next." So I think Al Hastings came back with like this Martian… no, this off-road racing game, which came from the fact that, on Disruptor, when you're running around Mars, there's these rolling sand dunes you're running across, and it was really fun just to run around out in the desert and catch air on top of the dunes. He was thinking, "Okay, we can make a game out of that." I'm pretty sure Ted pitched an alien invasion game, that I'm guessing eventually became Resistance on the PS3. I don't remember what Brian pitched.<br />
<br />
Then I pitched this game where you get to be a dragon, as opposed to riding or slaying a dragon. You are the dragon. In the original pitch, you started out as a hatchling, you started out as an egg and it hatches, and the premise is that as the game progresses, you get bigger and bigger and bigger and become more powerful. The gameplay is you need to leave your little den and go out and gather gold and gather treasure and bring it back, but then you also have to protect it, it's your lair, and you've got to protect it against various people coming in to try and steal your treasure. Then that changes throughout time as you live to be… you can live for thousands and thousands of years. The world, so to speak, would change through eras in time.<br />
<br />
I pitched that idea to Ted and the Hastings and everyone said they liked the dragon idea. We polished it up and then pitched it to Mark Cerny and Universal Studios. This is where Mark's superpower comes into play is… Universal liked it. Mark liked it. But he said, "Two suggestions. Keep the dragon the same age. Because sequels will be easier." Wow, yeah, never occurred to me that we'd be making two of these. Then the other one was him looking ahead knowing it's going to take two years to make this game. In two years, who's going to be buying and playing the PS1. He said, "Keep him the same age and keep the game cute and a little more family friendly," because your average player age is going to drop a couple of years by the time you guys get this game out.<br />
<br />
That's when we did another rework and we ended up with this little dragon named… once again, never his real name. People always think it's his real name. His working title name was Pete because it was a play off Pete's Dragon. It just drives me nuts, where people say, "If you named him that Disney would sue you." It's like, "No, the dragon in Pete's Dragon is named Elliot. That's the little boy named Pete. That's the joke here, people. We're not going to name him Pete." But by the end of it, I really did want to name him Pete, cause after 18 months… once again, that naming thing, it took forever to find a real name. By the time we got around to it, I liked Pete.<br />
<br />
We reworked it and brought in Charles Zembillas as a contract artist, just to do some character design, cause he also did all the character design for Naughty Dog. Crash Bandicoot and the other stuff for Naughty Dog. We brought him in and I think he was there just for an afternoon or morning, early afternoon. Then we couldn't decide… he did a whole bunch of drawings. He's incredible. He did a whole bunch of drawings, but no one liked any one drawing as our little dragon. We had pieces we liked. I took the ones we liked, photocopied them, then I cut the head off of one and I either shrunk it down a little bit, or I blew it up bigger, and I used some Wite-Out and I taped these things all together. I took a photocopy of that and I brought that into the conference room and everyone went, "That's our dragon. That's our character." That's one of the scans I still have, that cut and paste Spyro.<br />
<br />
He was originally green. I did the color comp and he's green. But we very quickly realized that he's green, and for a lot of the game, he's going to be running around on grass. So that's not going to work. Plus there was Gex and Croc and at least one other… Yoshi. There's all these other green reptile mascot characters. "Y'know, maybe not green." That's the one of the other things I still have is this 25 year old videotape of Spyro in all these different colors, trying to find what would look good. We ended up on purple, and that's how we ended up with a little purple dragon.<br />
<br />
I remember the very first time Al Hastings had it up and running. Literally just a flat green plane. I think maybe it had like one little square in the middle for a reference point, and it was just this flat green plane with a grass texture on it. But you could run around with Spyro and it was fun. You could sit there and just run around and chase your tail for ten minutes and have fun. I remember telling somebody, "Okay, this is our game to screw up. Cause this is fun with no gameplay and no world. If this is not fun when we're done, WE'VE screwed up." That was the beginning of Spyro.<br />
<br />
Of all the games I've worked on, Spyro is the one that's near and dear to my heart. If I hadn't been at Sega, somebody else would have done the artwork on Hidden Palace on Sonic, or if I hadn't been around later on at Insomniac, somebody else would have done Ratchet and Clank's artwork, and maybe it wouldn't be as good, maybe it'd be better. Had I not been at Insomniac when I was, there would be no little green dragon or a little purple dragon. You would have an off-road racing game or an alien invasion game that may or may not have been a hit.<br />
<br />
He's near and dear. Ted was always really good at- anytime somebody would ask him, "Why did you guys make a game about a dragon?" he'd always say, "Well, Craig Stitt said he always wanted to make a game about dragons. Craig said he's always liked dragons." That was awesome at the time. I really appreciated the fact that Ted always made sure to mention my name. I think as time went on… you say something enough and that becomes fact. I think as time went on, all Ted thinks I did was say, "Dragons are cool. Let's make a game about a dragon."<br />
<br />
No, there was this whole concept and there was so much more there. It's gotten to be a little frustrating that there wasn't more acknowledgement. As years went by at Sega and Insomniac… there was some crap going on there, and it literally broke me. That's why I left in 2005 was I basically had a nervous breakdown and pretty much lost the ability to paint or draw. Which I'm just now starting back after 2015 years. It was very hard when Insomniac wanted, or I should say needed, to leave Universal Studios, because it meant leaving Spyro behind, because Universal owned the IP.<br />
<br />
Ted didn't have the emotional connection I had to Spyro. But he did have to deal with the BS of Universal on a regular basis, which I guess was just nonstop. They finally had to break ties. Then after Spyro, Sony is like, "Hey, you guys come over here!" Before, when we sent out for resumes during Disruptor, trying to staff up for Spyro, it was really hard to even get resumes. We're sort of this no-name company and "Who's going to send their resume in?" Then after Spyro, we're stealing people from Disney, we're stealing animators from Disney, we're getting stacks of resumes. It really helps to have a little name recognition and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Sony really wanted… for their new game, they wanted a character that had hands. I think the game designers did as well, because it was it was problematic trying to figure out ways to get Spyro to do things since he was a quadruped. Then Spyro ended and then we did… there was another game that would have been really awesome. At this point, Insomniac is now off the lot from Universal, we've got our own building, floor of the building.<br />
<br />
Paul… what's last name… he was one of the game designers and pitched an idea called Monster Knights, like Knights with a K. Monster Knights. The play dynamic was the character, all of his power-ups and weapons and tools, so his shields and his armor and his guns or his bows or whatever, were actually monsters of different kinds that he would use as a shield or as armor or as a weapon. Beautiful art, great concept, and some reason, you know, Ted and the Hastings didn't like it.<br />
<br />
Then somebody… I think Al pitch this game that ended up just being called a Girl with a Stick. Our working title was I5, Insomniac's 5th game. These beautiful worlds where this girl with this magical stick would run around, fight monsters, and she'd plant her stick in… you get to certain locations and you could activate these huge spells for these big boss fights. The worlds were gorgeous. We're working really closely with Naughty Dog, sharing the same tools and kinda the same 3D engines between each other. The game was gorgeous. I really wish I had videotape of particularly this one level I did. It was just… it was a painting. It was gorgeous. But the game wasn't very much fun.<br />
<br />
We worked on it for like, eight months, or even more maybe, and Ted finally comes in and says, "Okay, everyone, I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is we're canceling I5. The good news is we're canceling I5." Everyone, Sony, everybody was just like, "This is beautiful. But it's just not fun."<br />
<br />
Then pretty quickly thereafter, Ratchet and Clank popped up. I'm not sure who pitched that idea. Was it Brian? It may have been Brian. That one fell into place very quickly as far as names and characters, all the front end on that, at least from my perspective, which I had (from a frustrating point of view) almost no input on. It was very frustrating to go from being at the ground level, inputting ideas and being in all the meetings as you're building up a new concept, to literally not being invited to the meeting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oof.'''<br />
<br />
That just got worse as time went by. If I had to do it all over again, I would have quit after Ratchet and Clank 1. I should have quit after Ratchet and Clank 1. Right in the middle of Ratchet… like, during Spyro, I remember, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night, I'm at my desk banging away on something on behind schedule, and Ted would call me into his office. "Hey, Craig, can I talk to you?" and I'm like, "Oh man, I am so busted." I'd into to his office and I'm getting ready to get chewed out, and Ted would go, "Hey, Craig, just want to thank you for being here. We couldn't do this without you. Here's the raise."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, that's nice!'''<br />
<br />
"Okay! Oh, okay." Then I'd go back to work. Then like a year later, another late night, I'm at my desk, I'm behind schedule, like everybody always is. Ted says, Hey, "Can I see you at my desk?" I'm like "Crap, I'm busted. I'm in so much trouble." He goes, "Hey, Craig, couldn't do this without you. Thank you. Here's a raise." "Oh, okay."<br />
<br />
Then jump ahead to… halfway through Ratchet and Clank, this time during the day. Ted says, "Hey, can I see you in my office?" "Yeah, sure." This time I'm not freaking out. Like, "Hey, I'm getting a raise." I go in and Ted says, "If you're behind schedule again, we're gonna have to fire you."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[shock] No.'''<br />
<br />
That was so asinine, it was such a bizarre statement, my brain didn't register it. I just went, "Oh, well, I'll work harder. I'll put some more hours in," and I went to lunch. I'm sitting at lunch and all of a sudden I'm like, "What the fuck? Did he just threaten to fire me?" It didn't register until halfway through lunch. I go back into his office, and I go "Ted, did you…?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't react." I'm like, "Yes, because it's asinine. Everybody's behind schedule!" At the time, I think I was writing the schedule. So I said, "Okay."<br />
<br />
Then the next level is that Metropolis [Metropolis, Kerwan] from Ratchet 1, which is that level that I working with Tom on, which he was having a hard time [on]. I ended up pretty much doing the whole level that was impossible to do. It was three times the size it should have been, that we'd all agreed on. I remember pointing it out to Ted. At the meeting, they rolled the thing out on the floor because it's so big. I immediately go, "They've gotta cut at least like sixty percent." Because these are literally just still just paper… Was this still just paper taped together, or were they finally printing out stuff using Illustrator? It used to just be hand-drawn graph paper taped together.<br />
<br />
Ted just came in like, "Tough, do it, figure it out, make it work." I did. This is also the level that… When we pitched Ratchet to Sony, we use the Spyro engine. With all this forced perspective, and all these tricks, made it look like a PS2 game. There's all this trickery going on. It looks incredible, would love to have that videotape. "Okay, this has to look good. This is the level we sold the game to Sony on."<br />
<br />
It's still the flagship level of the series to this day, to the best of my knowledge. So that's done, and I remember Ted looks at me, he just gives me this nod and this wink like, "Yeah, you're good. Don't worry about it." But I wasn't. I was continually not invited to meetings and left out of stuff and given crap and I just got the feeling that they would love to fire me because they could hire three college kids out of college for what they're paying me. I should have spoken up. They'd hire somebody and have to give them some responsibility, so they'd take one of my responsibilities away. They just kept putting me down into smaller and smaller responsibility. I still had a half dozen artists under me and whatnot. It was just… it was getting bad.<br />
<br />
The end of the story is during Ratchet Deadlocked is they've already broken off a handful of people to start working on Resistance for the PS3, cause that's a whole new system, you gotta learn everything over again. So we finished Deadlocked. I remember I sat down, I learned how to use the new tools and do everything new. Then I go and I sit down and I teach my team, the environment team, how to use these new tools and how things are going to work. Then I go back and I go and I sit at my desk and… I can't do it. My brain just doesn't. The simplest decision. I can't decide do I want 10 polygons or 20 polygons on this curve. I just can't make the simplest decision. A little time goes by and I get called in by Ted. "Craig, can I see you in my office?" And it's, "We are firing you." You can either resign and we'll give you half of the upcoming bonus or we're firing you.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Sounds like you had to deal with more than you deserved there.'''<br />
<br />
I don't know where their mindset was. I look at what they've done for other employees who were having problems, that they bent over backwards for. Maybe if I had approached them and said, "Hey, there's something going on here. It's not that I'm not working hard enough or that I'm lazy. Something is wrong." Yeah, I should have left after Ratchet. I should have left when they threatened to fire me that very first time. I should have said, "Fuck you." [laughs] I really should have. I would probably have my sanity.<br />
<br />
They really messed me up. Although I was telling part of that story to a coworker… Currently, I'm working at a children's museum and I'm just on the floor. I just play with kids. I'm a camp counselor. I just sit and draw and play with the kids and do games and silly stuff. So not management. I'm on the floor. Most of my coworkers are like 20 years old or in high school still. This started in L.A. after I hadn't worked for a number of years, and a friend kept saying that I really need to come work at a children's museum in L.A. It was a long drive and I was like, "I don't know…"<br />
<br />
I just went down and went to one of her special events at the museum and just sat there for a while and talked to everybody and played around the museum. "Yeah, I need to be here." So this is my new calling. I was talking to this employee and I said, "You know, I wonder where I'd be if I had quit when I should have?" I love their response, because I said, "Well, if I had, I'd probably still be making games." He goes, "Yeah, maybe, but you wouldn't be here." I went, "Oh, yeah." I prefer this. I don't make near the money I make making video games, you make stupid money making video games. Here, I'm basically making minimum wage. But this is good. This is keeping me healthy, healthy and happy.<br />
<br />
My times at Insomniac were a real mixed bag. They went from incredible to literally breaking me.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah…'''<br />
<br />
I remember they took me out on a cruise once. At that big party on the cruise, Ted's going through the history of Insomniac, and he briefly mentions and moves on. Which is okay, it's fine, it's a big company and it's got a lot of history. But it kinda bugged me. Once again, it's like I'm very curious… I'm trying to not let too much ego get in the way here… I'm curious where Insomniac would be if there was no Spyro. Who knows what they would have done without it. Spyro was in the top five for the PS1 of overall sales. Cross-generational, cross-gender, beyond what we ever expected to have it be.<br />
<br />
So Ted's talking, and Al comes over… Al, very quietly (Al is very quiet) says "Thank you." He says that and it really touched me. "We could not have done this without you." It was just so nice to hear that.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can imagine… What changes do you feel could have been made which would have helped you avoid that burnout? That's kind of a big question.'''<br />
<br />
If I stood up for myself. So when they started taking responsibilities away… Like in one game, I would be in charge of something or I would have come up with the idea for something. Then the next game, I wouldn't need being invited to that meeting. It's like, "Okay, it's not like I did a really crappy job. I don't get to do it again." It's like, "No, I did a very good job. So why am I not even invited the second time around?" When we hired new people, if I had stood my ground a little more and said, "No, those are my responsibilities, find something else for them to do."<br />
<br />
This goes all the way back to the very beginning. When we first hired John Fiorito, who was the other art director at Insomniac in the early years… so they didn't really have an art director because there were just two artists and a couple programmers and Ted. As Spyro got going, Ted was telling me, "OK, you're going to be art director on the next project." But he never officially made it official. But when they hired John, all of a sudden, it's like, they've got to keep John happy. John's a great person and an incredible artist, and he's also a really good manager. I'm a sucky, horrible manager. He was a good manager.<br />
<br />
Instead of willingly saying, "Oh yeah, we'll just split up my responsibilities and John will take this and I'll take this." I wish I had said, "No, no, no, Find something else for John to do." John and I worked really well together and there was a nice division of responsibilities there, but that was the beginning of "Oh, we've got something new. Let's take some of Craig's responsibilities." I don't know what their motives were. I try not to be too hard on myself. "Well, John's a better artist than I am." John's definitely a better manager than I am.<br />
<br />
If someone's work sucks or isn't working right, and you need to say, "You're not going home until this is fixed." or "You're working extra because this needs to be fixed," I would point out what needed to be done or that it wasn't right. When they didn't fix it before they left, I would stay late and fix it. Which would put me behind on my schedule. That's why I'm a shitty manager. I would have done that as we hired more people, and I would have said, "Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being invited? Why am I not being asked about these things? Why are these no longer my responsibilities? Were you not happy with them? You never said anything."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like they had an inclusion problem.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, and I don't really know why. At first, I was definitely treated like the golden boy the first couple of years because I was the only person that made a game. I already had a couple of million-selling titles under my belt. I really tried to not act that way. I really tried not to be cocky or arrogant or to feel like I could get away with things. But I think it must have come across that way to some people. The only thing I remember getting called out on prior to "You're behind schedule" is… I actually was verbally told by Ted, "You are in charge here. You are the art director on this." This would have been on Ratchet or Spyro 2. "You're in charge of the art." At least for some small piece of it, because there was John still.<br />
<br />
Chad Dresden was there and I remember he was a great artist, really fast, and I did (as a crappy manager) make the mistake of asking him to fix bugs and fix things and do things that I didn't have time to do. He always had time because he was always ahead of schedule because he worked his ass off and he was fast. He started to resent the fact that because he was ahead, I was always asking him things to do. He talked to Ted and Ted called me into his office and chewed me out for always dumping stuff on Chad.<br />
<br />
It was bad on me. I take that one. It wasn't fair to Chad. That's the only time that anything had been said that I think… I don't know. I don't know. If I stood up for myself earlier, and if they gave in, then great, I would have had what I wanted. And if they didn't, I would have left earlier.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It sounds like you handled it as best you could within what you were given.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I was still flying back and forth every weekend. I'd be curious to see what Ted's memories or perspective is on this, but… not that it matters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So while you were telling me that I wrote down a couple more Spyro questions, if you don't mind me hopping back a little bit.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, please. I can get off my sob story and actually get back to talking about games.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, no, you're good. That's an important part of it. That's an important part of your career.'''<br />
<br />
One more thing really quick here. Something I tell people, regardless of where they're working, is the mistake I made at Insomniac is: I thought of them as family. I had been there since the beginning. I was their first employee. I thought Insomniac is family. Work is never family. You are an asset. You are a tool. You're a cog in their machine. You are loved and taken care of as long as they want to take care of you, but you are not family. The second something changes, you're just replaceable. Don't make that mistake of thinking of someplace as family or home when it's not.<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to questions about Spyro.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One thing I did want to say on the topic of burnout. When I asked you what changes could have been made, I was more referring to the company, because even though you took it on yourself and you were very noble in saying, "What could I have done differently," I was thinking more of… because if you're undergoing burnout, that can be personal issues, but I feel like the company also has a responsibility to address, on their end, what's causing that issue to be saddled on you in the first place.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. I look at the few other people that I know had some diagnosed physical issues that made it very hard to work. Insomniac bent over backwards to keep them and make sure that they were happy and healthy and content. Chad's very talented. He was a good art director. When he needed to leave the company and go back to family in North Carolina, they opened up another branch of Insomniac in North Carolina that he could work from there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, geez.'''<br />
<br />
I'm like, "Okay?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''"So you can't understand my position on this, but you can open up an entirely new branch in a different state?"'''<br />
<br />
Yeah. For the longest time, for the first number of years… Insomniac fired a couple of people, but nobody left Insomniac because where would you go that was better? We were making incredible gains. The coworkers were awesome, the perks and the food and everything in the office was awesome. There was literally nowhere else you could go. Then as the company got bigger, and they got more corporate, it turned into just another company. Ted kept saying, "We're never going to go corporate, we're always gonna stay the same." Then it got as corporate as it could be.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So to hop to a couple questions I wanted to ask about Spyro. You said that originally, there was the concept for him aging and… because dragons are really old, the world would evolve around him. To jump back to our Dark Empires discussion, that's a theme in Dark Empires. You have both dragons and the world evolving around the player. Is there any connection there?'''<br />
<br />
Not consciously. But now that you say that? Yeah, there's definitely that transition there. I don't know if that was subconsciously still in my brain, that part of my brain liked, or… Yeah, that wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''How did you eventually settle on the name Spyro?'''<br />
<br />
We went around with that. Names are so hard. It took forever to find a name for the company because Insomniac was named Extreme Games when I first went down. We went on forever… It was like last minute. We needed to do press releases for Disruptor, and like, "We need a company name." Finally got Insomniac. Another company… We had Insomniac games, and there was another Insomniac Studios that had filed. You have to… the first one to get a product on the shelf can actually lock the name down. So we were in a race with Insomniac Studios to be the first one to ship and we beat them. I feel sorry for them because now they got to start over.<br />
<br />
Spyro is the same way. Pete was… I think it's one of the Hastings came up with Pete. It's like, "Yeah, perfect." But you're always thinking. We get closer and closer and then Sony starts pushing like, "OK, we need a real name." We're throwing all these different names out. I know Pyro got put out early, but it was too on the nose. Also we don't want parents getting pissed off because their kids are lighting fires. Finally, pretty close to the shipping of [the game], we're "We've got to have a name." Somebody at Sony pitched Spyro.<br />
<br />
Everybody liked it, except for Brian Hastings, who went, "Hey, wait a minute. I pitched that name like three months ago, and nobody liked it." We're like, "Oh, really?" So he was always a little pissed that he'd pitched it and we hadn't liked it. Somebody at Sony came up with Spyro. Luckily it passed all the tests.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''One final Dark Empires question, and I appreciate you letting me hop around here.'''<br />
<br />
Oh no worries.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''So we noticed that the Dark Empire's ROM, the existing ROM, doesn't have any sound. Do you recall if anyone was planned to be assigned to do music and sound for it?'''<br />
<br />
Not that I remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Gotcha.'''<br />
<br />
It's weird. I'm trying to remember if there was sound on… Well then again, it's been 35 years? 1990, when? 30, 35 years. [laughs] Since I would have last played that. Yeah, not that I know of. Sound effects, I guess, would have done in house. Then music… I know for Kid Chameleon, they brought in somebody outside to do the music. Actually, he did some of the sound effects, too. Yeah.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Going back to Spyro here. Of all the original Spyro games, or I will say, of all three of the original Spyro games, which did you enjoy working on the most?'''<br />
<br />
It's down to 1 or 2. It's a trade off because, short answer, the first one, just because it's new and it's this wonderful, beautiful world. But then, the second one, because… all the hard starts, all the hard, unfun stuff about the being the creative process, is done. Now you're just having fun. You know the tools, you know the world, and you can just build. So it's hard [to answer]. My favorite level of all the levels is Badlands, Skelos Badlands. Is that in 1? Just something about that one, I really like the artwork. I like skulls, if you can't tell from some of the other games I worked on. That was the first time I got to do skulls and bones in a Spyro game.<br />
<br />
The other interesting thing, that was my big surprise on Spyro, is the skies. Al Hastings came up with this way of doing skies with polygons where you're lighting the vertex and then the computer will gradate between whatever is on this vertex to the next vertex, so you can get these gradations. By shaping your polygons, you can create clouds or whatever you want in the sky. Ted did the first one or two. He then asked me to take over doing the skies. I really didn't want to. It was very tedious. They weren't particularly pretty. I didn't think there was much creatively you could do with it. The tools were really just very basic. The first couple were just a lot of work and a lot of manual, intensive, just not fun computer work. But as the tools improved, in the end, of all the different things I did in Spyro, doing the skies is my favorite.<br />
<br />
I really learned how to push what could be done with the tools and with polygons and vertex lighting. Jump ahead 30 years, and get talking to people… the people who find me or find out find out that I worked on Spyro they always bring up the skies. The skies were one of their favorite things.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, absolutely.'''<br />
<br />
That means so much to me. I've talked to a couple of different people who talk about how they didn't have the best childhood. Spyro was their escape. Particularly, there was at least at least a couple different times that people have told me that they had spots, their favorite spot, where they would just go sit and listen to the music of Spyro. The music of Spyro, you can't beat. They would just go sit and listen to the music and look at the sky. I'm like, "Wow."<br />
<br />
The worlds were fun to build, and I've got some favorite places and favorite things and had a lot of fun building the world. But the skies. I look back at those… I just recently here just came across this picture of a tattoo that's one of my skies. It's very clearly made to look like it's polygons and a vertex-lit tattoo of the sky, with a crystal dragon from Spyro 1 on top of it. This beautiful tattoo, it kinda freaked me out in a good way, because I've seen lots of tattoos of Spyro and different games I've worked on. I built the crystal dragon and I built the sky. I'm looking at this person's tattoo. "That's my artwork on your body." That is cool. That is wild.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It must be rewarding hearing feedback like that.'''<br />
<br />
Oh, it is. It really, really is. I'm trying not to cry right now. I gotta learn the word in Japanese, but there's a Japanese word that means your reason for being [Ikigai]. It's four different things. It's a Venn diagram with four circles. The first one is doing something that you enjoy doing. The second one is doing something that you're actually good at doing. The third one is doing something that they actually will pay you to do. And the fourth one is doing something that enhances or gives back to the world.<br />
<br />
I look at my time at museums, when working with kids, I'm like, "Okay, I enjoy doing it. I'm good at doing it. They pay me to do it. And it's definitely helping the world." That's a good reason for being. Back when I was making games, and was making really good money, and I had a lot of friends who were working like two or three jobs to barely keep paying the rent… I felt really guilty that I'm sitting around listening to music, drawing monsters all day, and I'm getting paid money. My one friend pointed out like, "No, what you're doing is important. It is affecting people. These are more than games to some people." I really understand that now. From talking to these people and seeing the way people's eyes light up, when I'm talking to someone and they find out that I worked on Spyro, and they just light up.<br />
<br />
Actually, at the museum down in L.A., every Thursday, they have 15 minutes in the morning for like, you could have a show and tell. You could sign up and bring in something to talk about a trip or a knee surgery or your favorite whatever. People kept asking me to bring in some artwork and video game stuff. So I did. My boss knew I'd made games, but that he didn't know anything beyond that. As I'm going through my artwork, and I pulled out the Spyro stuff, his eyes literally opened up and his jaw literally dropped and he's staring at me. Afterwards he comes to me and goes "Spyro! That was my game, that was the game." It's so weird to watch him try to be my boss and not go all fanboy.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] That's really sweet.'''<br />
<br />
I really had a very fortunate life. Not only did I get to make games, I got to work on some of the best base games out there. Sonic. I mean, come on, my second game ever was Sonic the Hedgehog. Then Spyro and Ratchet and Clank. They're still making Ratchet and Clank games. Sonic's got movies, Spyro's got a TV show. Although he's kinda butt ugly in it because Skylanders, but it's still Spyro. Ratchet and Clank's got a movie. Comix Zone, the rights got sold to make a movie.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh!'''<br />
<br />
I don't know if anything ever happened to that, but somebody bought the rights. So yeah, very fortunate life.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''What advice would you give to young artists entering the industry?'''<br />
<br />
What would I tell people? Because I do get asked that a lot. I do encourage people. It's as much luck and being in the right place. People ask me how I got into the industry. If I answered "An ad in the newspaper that said wanted artists, no experience necessary." I mean, come on.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''That's not going to happen nowadays.'''<br />
<br />
What kinda bullshit lazy writing is that? I had a sign on my desk for years. Well, I had two signs on my desk. I had KISS, K-I-S-S, which is 'keep it simple, stupid.' [laughs] To remind myself to keep everything simple. I need to make a sign here for my projects here. The other one was, 'if you love your job, you'll never have to work a day in your life.' I've felt very fortunate that that's almost my entire life, other than shoveling fries in high school, I've had jobs where I was really enjoying the work.<br />
<br />
When I talk to people, I tell them to pursue something that you really enjoy, because if you can get that, if you can make a living at that, it's not work. It's very hard, and there's not many people that can manage to do it, but if you can… Then I follow that up with my cautionary tale. "Don't be blinded by that." Because that will mess you up. But just have faith. It does happen. It happened to me, it can happen that you can you can follow this and do it.<br />
<br />
People ask specific suggestions on the game industry now and I just tell them, "It's changed so much. I can give you some generic stuff that worked 30 years ago, but it's so different now." It's changing again here with AI stuff coming in. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the art. Actually, it'll be interesting to see what happens to games across the board.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting new time.'''<br />
<br />
My nephew was just showing me this game that is entirely AI generated. It's huge, because it's just this computer continually creating worlds that you can fly to. It'll be interesting. It's not a bad thing. It's just a new tool, but it will be interesting.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you could return to game development, what kinda game do you think you'd most want to make today?'''<br />
<br />
I would love to make that original dragon game I pitched. Let's say we had made that. Let's say Mark had went "Awesome. Perfect." I think it would have been an incredible title, would have been a really fun game. It would have been kinda niche though. Moms and grandmas and girlfriends and four-year olds all want to play Spyro, but you also didn't lose the 15 year old boys. Where if you had this more realistic looking dragon, it would have been a good game, but it wouldn't have been with this worldwide hit. I would still love to play that, would love to make my original dragon game. What'd I call it? DragonSpan.<br />
<br />
Or I would love to finish up Astropede. That one could have maybe happened. I was talking to Ken, and we're bouncing back and forth like "How do we… what do we do here?" because we both wanted to see it finished. I would love to see that, because I still think… there were some technical problems and gameplay issues that we had never got to the point to where we had resolve, they were going to be a real problem, that I think now wouldn't be a problem. Just because resolution's higher on games now.<br />
<br />
I would love to make the original dragon game, where you're protecting your hoard and fighting off D&D adventurers coming in, but you also gotta go out and kidnap the princess so you have something to eat. Have you ever see the movie Dragonslayer, 1982?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's vaguely familiar. I don't think I've seen it.'''<br />
<br />
One of the most wonderful- it's not the most realistic dragon still to date, but the dragon in it is incredible in most scenes. That movie was definitely at the forefront of my brain as I was thinking of the original pitch for Spyro. That and Lord of the Rings; Smaug. By the end of the game, you're Smaug. Even more so, you're this D&D magic-using, talking, powerful dragon that's casting spells and all sorts of stuff. I would love to do that. And the artwork for that would be fun. That's right up my alley again. [laughs] Monsters.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, of course. Looking back at all of your work in the game industry, what are you the most proud of?'''<br />
<br />
[thinks] Spyro. My favorite artwork that I'm the most proud of… I'm really glad it got cut from Sonic 2 because it made it more than just another level, is the Hidden Palace artwork and the Hidden Palace level. I'm really proud of that. It's kinda taken on a life of its own. Then Spyro. Specifically in Spyro, the skies. The rest of the artwork in the game is beautiful and fun, but after having talked to so many people about the skies… and then myself going back and looking at them. Cause people have gone through with various editors and pulled the skies out. I'd love to see the meshes without the vertex lighting. I'd love to see the meshes of these skies.<br />
<br />
I'm trying to explain to people and they're like, "What?" "Oh, I can just show you." Somewhere, there's a magazine article that has a single screenshot with and without the light colors. I've been going through and looking at these panoramic views of the skies and just… Once in a while, I'll do a piece of art, and I step back and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that?" I've got one painting, the Calvin and Hobbes painting, which is up on that DeviantArt link. The Calvin and Hobbes painting, that's one where I finished and go, "Wow, that's really beautiful. Who did that? It wasn't you. Who did that?"<br />
<br />
I look at the Spyro skies, and I'm like, "Yeah, wow, those are gorgeous. Who did those?" It's nice. I like that feeling of, "Oh, I can actually look at that and I don't see all the flaws." You know, most other artists and people in general on anything, they look at something they did and all they can see is "Oh, I didn't get this right, I didn't get that right." I look at the skies and it's like, "Wow, yeah…"<br />
<br />
Talking to these people, it's surreal. That tattoo… Wow. "You did something that touched people."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Your work had a huge influence.'''<br />
<br />
There was a special about these guys who went to Spain because they were huge fans of the spaghetti Westerns, in particular, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. They were going to hike around and they were going to find all the filming locations. Are you familiar with the movie?<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it all the way through, but I'm familiar with spaghetti Westerns.'''<br />
<br />
You gotta watch it. It's a must-watch movie. It can be a little long, but yeah, it's classic, and it's Clint Eastwood. At the end of the movie, there's the three bad guys. There's the good, the bad, the ugly. There's this three-way Mexican standoff gunfight in the middle of this big circular cemetery with gravestones all around it. Incredible music playing, classic spaghetti Western gunfight. These guys are looking for that location, because it wasn't a real cemetery. It's a place they built out in the middle of Spain. During this special, they're talking about these different things and meeting people who were extras and whatnot, they get talking to Hatfield, lead singer from Metallica, James Hatfield, who loves the movie. In fact, Metallica starts every one of the concerts with the song that plays right before that gunfight.<br />
<br />
They're talking to him and he said something that really hit home with me. He says, people come up to him either at concerts or just on the street, and tell him how much his music means to them or how it changed their lives. He said he used to just say "Thank you very much," but then he realized that he doesn't see his music the way they see his music. To him, part of it's just a job, it's just what he does. To them, it's so much more. It can be the spiritual thing. It literally changed their lives. When he's talking to these people, he says he tries really hard to remember that, that this is more than just his music to them.<br />
<br />
As I'm listening to him talk, and I'm just starting to talk to all these people about Spyro, I'm like, "Oh, yeah." I mean, I'm not a huge gamer. I've got other things I spend way too much time and money on. This realization is like, for some of these people… like the look on my boss' face and these other people. It's huge. Wow.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I bet. Thanks again for the patience with this long interview, we're almost about done here.'''<br />
<br />
No worries, I enjoy it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''I can tell.'''<br />
<br />
It's cathartic for me. Sonic, Spyro, Insomniac… see where I am on that. Like, "Oh, no, I've still got to work on that." Well, my brain's dealing with that. It's all good. Like I said, I know how much some of this stuff means to different people. One of the things I really want to do is… I've been putting my artwork out there for quite a while. It's in like game forums and places where like the gamers are going to find it, but I know there's the casual fans that don't go online looking for these stories, that would love to hear these stories and see these pictures and know some of this stuff. That's not where they spend their time digging into the Internet.<br />
<br />
I want those people to find some of this stuff and hear some of these stories. I want to get out there. I'm getting older. [laughs] I want to make sure it's out there.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah… How do you feel about the influence Hidden Palace Zone had on the larger gaming community? Obviously, they named the game preservation group after it, but Hidden Palace has become kinda the symbol for like mystery in games. That must be a good feeling.'''<br />
<br />
It's another one of those surreal feelings. Once again, it makes me feel glad that it got cut from the game. Had it not been cut, it could be on somebody's ranking list of… "What's your favorite level in Sonic 2?" would be really the only place it'd ever be discussed. It's part of the whole industry now, especially within the Sonic world. It's surreal, very cool.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, it means quite a lot. That's all the questions I had to ask you. I appreciate so much again that you've given me all your time. We've been talking for almost three and a half hours here. That's incredibly gracious of you.'''<br />
<br />
I'd be putting off what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. [laugh] I'm accomplishing something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, actually, one last question. Speaking of Hidden Palace, you had previously donated Segapede to Hidden Palace for preservation, and they did a big history post about it and they were able to study it. If you don't mind, could we do the same with Dark Empires? Get it uploaded, write a little history post about it?'''<br />
<br />
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's fine. Once again, for the people that are going to be interested that stuff… I wish I remembered more about it. I remember doing the sketches and the only reason I remember doing those sketches because I still have those sketches. Maybe it'll trigger somebody else's memory now from something.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. I was so happy that you were sharing names, and part of the reason I was asking about names, was because I was actually going to reach out to get more information on just all the projects that we talked about, with all your former coworkers.'''<br />
<br />
I can't remember what I was asking Bill about… I know I talked to him or texted him probably a decade ago now. If you can track Bill down, he would definitely be able to give you more. I'm trying to think, who else… I think was Bill I contacted about Treasure Tails, and he said he didn't have anything to do with it, but I think he said Hoyt did. I don't think I… did I ever get a hold of Hoyt? I can't remember.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh yeah, I'd love to track him down.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I'd like to remember more about Treasure Tails. I do remember I do have my notes in my journal that talk about being excited about this kinda stuff. Then all of a sudden, "Eh, it's being cancelled."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''If you're ever able to find that journal again, please shoot me an email. As you said, there's probably tons of juicy information in there.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, I think in the relative STI days, I actually scanned in those pages. I've been meaning to go through and pull out… because the other thing is in the landfill and Redwood City. I was busy doing this, because I was really pretty good about writing in a journal every morning or whenever, and decided that I was going to have two journals. I was going to have my personal journal, about just likes and thoughts and dating, whatever. Then my other journal about work, I was going to do at work, and I was going to do it on the computer. I'd sit down every morning and type for a few minutes.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, that journal, the typed journal on the floppy disk, is probably in a landfill somewhere because it got left behind. It didn't get brought with me. As opposed to my books, I still have my books. Unfortunately, they're mostly full of who I'm dating at the moment. The key moments and dates are still in that, so that at least allows you to get some anchor points to lock in… I'm almost sure it'll have the date of Michael Jackson's visit.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''[laughs] I mean, that's low priority, but I appreciate whatever you're able to dig up and send my way.'''<br />
<br />
But you think… okay, so the accident [Michael Jackson had]. Knowing it's in March of 93, did you say was his accident…<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, so March of… Just to give you an overview of what we know from other developer statements. Brenda said some of this, David Javelosa said some of this. There was at least one meeting before he sprained his ankle because Brenda said that she remembered him not on crutches. That would have put in January or February 1993 or earlier, but probably January, February '93. Then there was a second meeting where he was on crutches that you saw him, so we think that might have been mid '93.<br />
<br />
That first meeting was him discussing Sonic 3 off crutches. The second meeting was him discussing Sonic 3 more, just discussing doing it. He was on crutches, so that was March or later. Then there was a third meeting where he was also on crutches, that was later in '93 because he was dropping off materials to STI for Sonic 3, probably demos or tracks like that.<br />
<br />
If you can find a date… no worries. We're just always like to piece together timelines on Sonic Retro.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, every little piece of information leads to the next little piece of information.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right, it's like archaeology.'''<br />
<br />
It literally is.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''It's like assembling… It's like you have a bit of pottery and you just assemble pieces and then you put some pieces in place and say, "Oh, the outline for this piece looks like this other piece." It's almost like a puzzle that way.'''<br />
<br />
There was something recently here… that somebody pointed out something online. I had made a comment on Reddit or somewhere. Somebody came back and they had they said something else like, "Oh, I thought this," or "I've seen this written." Actually, they posted a link to another article. I'm reading that and went, "Yes!" All of a sudden it flipped something that I remembered. These little pieces, like "Okay, that can't work because this is here now." So you have to change what was happening. Then all of a sudden, these other memories come back, because now you remember things in the correct order and whatnot.<br />
<br />
Yeah, it's archaeology. It's piecing together. Occasionally, you look at the paleontology and look at some of the early drawings of dinosaurs like, "Wow, that is so wrong."<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, they were trying but it was wrong.'''<br />
<br />
"You were trying. I can see why you got that. But that's not how it was." Then wait another 100 years and I'm sure they'll be looking at our drawings doing the same thing. They'll watch Jurassic Park and go, "What were you guys thinking?"<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Right. History is an interesting thing.'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, if you've got any more questions, go ahead and shoot them to me again. I'm always more than happy to do what I can and try to remember what I can.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, we really appreciate the openness.'''<br />
<br />
You've done this a couple times today. Where you're just asking a question, and I'd go, "No, I don't remember anything." But there'll be a certain word, you'll say a certain thing, and "Oh, wait!" Like the fiery forest thing. I'm like, "Oh, wow." I don't initially remember anything, but I now know that was a thing. Because I can remember trying to remember how to do flames on branches… weird.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Well, whatever you remember you can always find my way as well. I'll probably be following up this interview with maybe a couple more questions that I either forgot or I look at the interview and I'm like, "Oh, shoot, I should ask that. Something like that."'''<br />
<br />
Yeah, my pleasure. It really has been my pleasure.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Yeah, this was wonderful speaking with you. Again, you gave me over three and a half hours of your time. I cannot thank you enough for everything that you gave us today.'''<br />
<br />
[laughs] But now you've got to edit this.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Oh, my gosh, yeah. So with transcriptions… Because I do my own transcriptions, it's about two to three hours for every one hour of recording. This might be a nine hour project. So I was going to say, I'm going to take about a week to two weeks to transcribe this, clean it up, get it all together, and then I'll publish it, and then I'll send you a link. If you see any minor issues or if I got a name wrong or something, you can just let me know.'''<br />
<br />
Okay, yeah. Well, good luck, and thank you. I enjoy this, and I'm happy to do it. I'm more than happy to do it.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''Thank you so much, Craig. This is absolutely wonderful again.'''<br />
<br />
Okay. Well, talk to you later.<br />
<br />
<br />
'''All right. Talk to you later. Bye bye.'''<br />
<br />
<br />
::''[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas This interview was originally published on Sega Retro on August 7, 2025].''</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=News/Happy_Halloween_2025!_Dark_Empires_Prototype_%26_Craig_Stitt_Interview&diff=156788News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview2026-01-31T03:43:01Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
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'''[https://hiddenpalace.org Hidden Palace] and [https://segaretro.org/ Sega Retro] '''PROUDLY''' present...''' <br><br><br />
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[[Dark Empires (prototype)|''Dark Empires'' at Hidden Palace]]<br><br />
[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires ''Dark Empires'' at Sega Retro]<br><br />
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[[Craig Stitt (2025 interview)|Craig Stitt interview]]<br><br />
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[https://segaretro.org/Sega_Technical_Institute Sega Technical Institute] was Sega of America's first attempt at an internal game development division. Headed by [https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny Mark Cerny], an American developer who had spent the previous three years at Sega's Tokyo headquarters developing Master System software, the small autonomous studio first began operations in an unassuming San Jose business park in January 1990. It was deliberately positioned near Sega Enterprises USA (Sega of Japan's US arcade division) rather than Sega of America's headquarters in San Francisco to insulate the fledgling studio from what Cerny saw as unproductive and excessive oversight from company management. Most importantly, STI reported directly to Sega's Japanese management and was granted the unique privilege of bypassing Sega of America's concept approval processes.<br />
<br />
Cerny's original vision for STI had been to establish a hybrid training and development center where inexperienced American talent could learn directly from visiting Japanese developers, eventually creating an American-led studio capable of addressing what Sega of America viewed as an over-reliance on Japanese software. Sega had originally planned to send eleven Japanese arcade developers to California, but after the US embassy in Tokyo denied their O-1 visa applications and temporarily barred further submissions, Cerny was forced to build an American team without assistance from Japan. Despite these constraints, his concept of an open development environment encouraged staff to freely conceive and pitch their own ideas - principles that would give rise to the studio's history of experimental projects.<br />
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|}</center><br><br />
<br />
STI began development of its first original game in 1990, the action-platformer ''[https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon Kid Chameleon]'', a result of Cerny's initiative to create a character-driven global blockbuster franchise. However, it wasn't the only original project undertaken by the fledgling studio. That same year, [https://segaretro.org/William_G._Dunn Bill Dunn], a designer at STI and tabletop gaming enthusiast, conceptualized a fantasy-based tactical strategy game for the Sega Genesis. The new title would reference the design of Technosoft's recently released ''[https://segaretro.org/Herzog_Zwei Herzog Zwei]'', a novel title which brought real-time strategy gameplay to home console owners. Cerny approved the concept later that year, assigning programmers [https://segaretro.org/Scott_Chandler Scott Chandler] and [https://segaretro.org/Ken_Rose Ken Rose], alongside artists [https://segaretro.org/Yasushi_Yamaguchi Yasushi Yamaguchi] and [https://segaretro.org/Craig_Stitt Craig Stitt], to development. No audio staff were assigned to the game, but Stitt speculates that music and sound would have been handled by an outside composer.<br />
<br />
Stitt in particular was enthused to join the project. A traditional artist and illustrator who shared Dunn's love of tabletop games, Stitt specialized in fantasy artwork, regularly creating monster designs for his own tabletop campaigns, with his work characterized by an emphasis on dragons. He recalls, "The style was right up my alley. This fantasy ''Dungeons & Dragons'' [style], monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build." Alongside Dunn, the two collaborated with Cerny on designing a top-down fantasy tactical strategy game set in a world of dragons and monsters, with different factions vying for control of the land. The game which would become known as ''[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires Dark Empires]'' officially began early production at STI's original San Jose offices sometime in 1990.<br />
<br />
Stitt was largely unfamiliar with strategy games before being assigned to ''Dark Empires'', but was also a fan of the aforementioned ''Herzog Zwei''. "I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played." He went on to create over a dozen pieces of concept art for the project, including early artwork of the game's unimplemented science fiction setting and a range of distinct units and tiles. Genesis graphics were created on Sega of Japan's [https://segaretro.org/Digitizer_System Digitizer System], a light-pen-based graphics workstation shipped to California by Japanese management, with Stitt's artwork adopting a detailed medieval fantasy style inspired by his ''Dungeons & Dragons'' illustration experience.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DE_gameplay1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DE_gameplay2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DE_gameplay3.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DE_gameplay4.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
''Dark Empires'' would be structured around two opposing factions (consisting of gold and purple dragons and their respective leaders in the dumped prototype) engaging in battle across a selection of six different planets. Each faction would have a leader unit that functions similarly to a king in chess, with victory achieved by defeating the opposing faction's leader. The game was planned to progress through evolving time periods over the course of gameplay, with concept art depicting settings such as Natural, Fantasy, Prehistory, Horrific, and Cybernetic. Gameplay itself would alternate between two perspectives: a zoomed-out view reminiscent of ''Herzog Zwei'', where players move individual groups of four units across the battlefield, and a hexagonal unit-based view in which individual units can be commanded to both move and attack the enemy faction.<br />
<br />
The team had planned a number of then-novel mechanics for ''Dark Empires'', including neutral temples which players could enter to initiate a battle against a ram-headed enemy controlled by the opposing player. Defeating this enemy would reward the player with an additional single-dragon squad to command, requiring players to balance time and unit management against the possibility of expanding their forces. In addition to the two main player factions, wild dragons would roam the map as hostile forces that would attack either side, controlled by the enemy player once engaged. Units also possess nonfunctioning experience bars that gradually increase during play, seemingly intended as a leveling system for individual unit growth.<br><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles3.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
Development progressed into late 1991, when the game reached a first-playable state, featuring basic and mostly functional combat gameplay and the framework for a promising American-designed console tactical strategy game. However, as strategy games for home consoles were then an unproven and largely unheard of concept, Cerny's desire to focus on large blockbuster titles was bound to eventually clash with a game of relatively niche market appeal. Further, the studio was already beginning to suffer from recurring mismanagement problems, particularly in the allocation of project resources like assigned staff. To compound matters, Sega of America's marketing department had just tasked STI with starting production of ''[https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(16-bit) Sonic the Hedgehog 2]'' that November, with Yamaguchi leaving the project to help lead that game's development. Shortly after the completion of its first-playable prototype, ''Dark Empires'' was cancelled in December 1991.<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt later recycled certain ''Dark Empires'' concepts for use in future projects; among these was the design for a bald, disembodied human head with striking green eyes, a concept which would evolve into ''Kid Chameleon''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s final boss, Heady Metal. Also repurposed was one of ''Dark Empires''<nowiki>'</nowiki> more developed planned leader units, the Elf King, appearing as a playable character in his pitch for the ultimately undeveloped 1993 Genesis fighting game ''SpellCaster''. Stitt later noted potential connections between the cancelled project and his later pitch for ''Spyro the Dragon'', including the emphasis on dragons and the concept of evolving time periods. "That wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere."<br><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume5.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume6.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume7.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
Following its cancellation, ''Dark Empires'' went virtually undocumented until Stitt uploaded a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOlHbBTF8eI 1995 video résumé] of his STI work to YouTube in August 2020, including five Digitizer stills of gameplay and a set of sprite art from the game, publicly revealing the project for the first time. Commenting on the video, he also revealed that he had a working ROM image. Five years later in August 2025, Sega Retro editor Alexander Rojas [https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas interviewed Stitt] on his career and Sega Technical Institute work, including coverage of ''Dark Empires''. During the interview process, Stitt shared his copy of the ROM - which had thankfully been retained by Ken Rose after all these years. The game was subsequently documented by both Rojas and technical researcher MDTravis, allowing ''Dark Empires'' to finally see the light of day nearly 34 years after its cancellation.<br />
<br />
The dumped prototype, dated September 1991, identifies itself with the ROM header <tt>KEVIN KIDD</tt> - an early working title for ''Kid Chameleon'' conceived as a Western-oriented continuation of the ''Alex Kidd'' lineage - suggesting ''Dark Empires'' was built upon that game's source assets. At this point in development, however, the prototype is markedly incomplete. The password system and menu options are nonfunctional, with every stage selection loading into an identical battlefield. Units are also limited to a single attack per turn, leaving combat skeletal in design, and sound is absent altogether. Regardless, the build marks an early effort by Sega of America's flagship R&D studio to explore concepts outside the norm and exists as a fascinating example of Sega Technical Institute's pre-''Sonic 2'' development output.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:CraigStitt-2.jpg|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<center><br />
Special thanks go to [[Craig Stitt (gospyro)|Craig Stitt]], for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, [[User:MDTravis|MDTravis]] for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and [[User:Armadylo|Armadylo]] for editing and proofreading this article.<br />
<br />
[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture Alexander Rojas (CartridgeCulture)]<br />
<br />
<br />
Have a happy Halloween!<br><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_skeleton.gif|centre|frameless]] <br />
|}<br />
</center><br></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=News/Happy_Halloween_2025!_Dark_Empires_Prototype_%26_Craig_Stitt_Interview&diff=156787News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview2026-01-31T03:17:12Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>__NOTOC__<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:Hp-logo-240-2x.png|centre|frameless|link=Main Page]] || [[File:SegaRetro logo.svg|centre|frameless|x241px|link=https://segaretro.org/Main_Page]]<br />
|}<br />
'''[https://hiddenpalace.org Hidden Palace] and [https://segaretro.org/ Sega Retro] '''PROUDLY''' present...''' <br><br><br />
</center><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DE_title.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
[[Dark Empires (prototype)|''Dark Empires'' at Hidden Palace]]<br><br />
[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires ''Dark Empires'' at Sega Retro]<br><br />
<br />
[[Craig Stitt (2025 interview)|Craig Stitt interview]]<br><br />
</center><br />
<br />
<div style="max-width: 700px; margin: auto; font-size: 16px;"><br />
<br />
[https://segaretro.org/Sega_Technical_Institute Sega Technical Institute] was Sega of America's first attempt at an internal game development division. Headed by [https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny Mark Cerny], an American developer who had spent the previous three years at Sega's Tokyo headquarters developing Master System software, the small autonomous studio first began operations in an unassuming San Jose business park in January 1990. It was deliberately positioned near Sega Enterprises USA (Sega of Japan's US arcade division) rather than Sega of America's headquarters in San Francisco to insulate the fledgling studio from what Cerny saw as unproductive and excessive oversight from company management. Most importantly, STI reported directly to Sega's Japanese management and was granted the unique privilege of bypassing Sega of America's concept approval processes.<br />
<br />
Cerny's original vision for STI had been to establish a hybrid training and development center where inexperienced American talent could learn directly from visiting Japanese developers, eventually creating an American-led studio capable of addressing what Sega of America viewed as an over-reliance on Japanese software. Sega had originally planned to send eleven Japanese arcade developers to California, but after the US embassy in Tokyo denied their O-1 visa applications and temporarily barred further submissions, Cerny was forced to build an American team without assistance from Japan. Despite these constraints, his concept of an open development environment encouraged staff to freely conceive and pitch their own ideas - principles that would give rise to the studio's history of experimental projects.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:STI_San_Jose.jpg|centre|frameless]]<br />
|}</center><br><br />
<br />
STI began development of its first original game in 1990, the action-platformer ''[https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon Kid Chameleon]'', a result of Cerny's initiative to create a character-driven global blockbuster franchise. However, it wasn't the only original project undertaken by the fledgling studio. That same year, [https://segaretro.org/William_G._Dunn Bill Dunn], a designer at STI and tabletop gaming enthusiast, conceptualized a fantasy-based tactical strategy game for the Sega Genesis. The new title would reference the design of Technosoft's recently released ''[https://segaretro.org/Herzog_Zwei Herzog Zwei]'', a novel title which brought real-time strategy gameplay to home console owners. Cerny approved the concept later that year, assigning programmers [https://segaretro.org/Scott_Chandler Scott Chandler] and [https://segaretro.org/Ken_Rose Ken Rose], alongside artists [https://segaretro.org/Yasushi_Yamaguchi Yasushi Yamaguchi] and [https://segaretro.org/Craig_Stitt Craig Stitt], to development. No audio staff were assigned to the game, but Stitt speculates that music and sound would have been handled by an outside composer.<br />
<br />
Stitt in particular was enthused to join the project. A traditional artist and illustrator who shared Dunn's love of tabletop games, Stitt specialized in fantasy artwork, regularly creating monster designs for his own tabletop campaigns, with his work characterized by an emphasis on dragons. He recalls, "The style was right up my alley. This fantasy ''Dungeons & Dragons'' - monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build." Alongside Dunn, the two collaborated with Cerny on designing a top-down fantasy tactical strategy game set in a world of dragons and monsters, with different factions vying for control of the land. The game which would become known as ''[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires Dark Empires]'' officially began early production at STI's original San Jose offices sometime in 1990.<br />
<br />
Stitt was largely unfamiliar with strategy games before being assigned to ''Dark Empires'', but was also a fan of the aforementioned ''Herzog Zwei''. "I loved that game, played that all the time, but that was about the only strategy game I've ever played." He went on to create over a dozen pieces of concept art for the project, including early artwork of the game's unimplemented science fiction setting and a range of distinct units and tiles. Genesis graphics were created on Sega of Japan's [https://segaretro.org/Digitizer_System Digitizer System], a light-pen-based graphics workstation shipped to California by Japanese management, with Stitt's artwork adopting a detailed medieval fantasy style inspired by his ''Dungeons & Dragons'' illustration experience.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DE_gameplay1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DE_gameplay2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DE_gameplay3.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DE_gameplay4.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
''Dark Empires'' would be structured around two opposing factions (consisting of gold and purple dragons and their respective leaders in the dumped prototype) engaging in battle across a selection of six different planets. Each faction would have a leader unit that functions similarly to a king in chess, with victory achieved by defeating the opposing faction's leader. The game was planned to progress through evolving time periods over the course of gameplay, with concept art depicting settings such as Natural, Fantasy, Prehistory, Horrific, and Cybernetic. Gameplay itself would alternate between two perspectives: a zoomed-out view reminiscent of ''Herzog Zwei'', where players move individual groups of four units across the battlefield, and a hexagonal unit-based view in which individual units can be commanded to both move and attack the enemy faction.<br />
<br />
The team had planned a number of then-novel mechanics for ''Dark Empires'', including neutral temples which players could enter to initiate a battle against a ram-headed enemy controlled by the opposing player. Defeating this enemy would reward the player with an additional single-dragon squad to command, requiring players to balance time and unit management against the possibility of expanding their forces. In addition to the two main player factions, wild dragons would roam the map as hostile forces that would attack either side, controlled by the enemy player once engaged. Units also possess nonfunctioning experience bars that gradually increase during play, seemingly intended as a leveling system for individual unit growth.<br><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles1.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_conceptart_tiles3.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
Development progressed into late 1991, when the game reached a first-playable state, featuring basic and mostly functional combat gameplay and the framework for a promising American-designed console tactical strategy game. However, as strategy games for home consoles were then an unproven and largely unheard of concept, Cerny's desire to focus on large blockbuster titles was bound to eventually clash with a game of relatively niche market appeal. Further, the studio was already beginning to suffer from recurring mismanagement problems, particularly in the allocation of project resources like assigned staff. To compound matters, Sega of America's marketing department had just tasked STI with starting production of ''[https://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2_(16-bit) Sonic the Hedgehog 2]'' that November, with Yamaguchi leaving the project to help lead that game's development. Shortly after the completion of its first-playable prototype, ''Dark Empires'' was cancelled in December 1991.<br />
<br />
Craig Stitt later recycled certain ''Dark Empires'' concepts for use in future projects; among these was the design for a bald, disembodied human head with striking green eyes, a concept which would evolve into ''Kid Chameleon''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s final boss, Heady Metal. Also repurposed was one of ''Dark Empires''<nowiki>'</nowiki> more developed planned leader units, the Elf King, appearing as a playable character in his pitch for the ultimately undeveloped 1993 Genesis fighting game ''SpellCaster''. Stitt later noted potential connections between the cancelled project and his later pitch for ''Spyro the Dragon'', including the emphasis on dragons and the concept of evolving time periods. "That wasn't a conscious thing, but there very much is a connection there somewhere."<br><br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume2.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume5.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume6.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]] || [[File:DarkEmpires_MD_US_Stittvideoresume7.png|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<br />
Following its cancellation, ''Dark Empires'' went virtually undocumented until Stitt uploaded a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOlHbBTF8eI 1995 video résumé] of his STI work to YouTube in August 2020, including five Digitizer stills of gameplay and a set of sprite art from the game, publicly revealing the project for the first time. Commenting on the video, he also revealed that he had a working ROM image. Five years later in August 2025, Sega Retro editor Alexander Rojas [https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas interviewed Stitt] on his career and Sega Technical Institute work, including coverage of ''Dark Empires''. During the interview process, Stitt shared his copy of the ROM - which had thankfully been retained by Ken Rose after all these years. The game was subsequently documented by both Rojas and technical researcher MDTravis, allowing ''Dark Empires'' to finally see the light of day nearly 34 years after its cancellation.<br />
<br />
The dumped prototype, dated September 1991, identifies itself with the ROM header <tt>KEVIN KIDD</tt> - an early working title for ''Kid Chameleon'' conceived as a Western-oriented continuation of the ''Alex Kidd'' lineage - suggesting ''Dark Empires'' was built upon that game's source assets. At this point in development, however, the dumped prototype is markedly incomplete. The password system and menu options are nonfunctional, with every stage selection loading into an identical battlefield. Units are also limited to a single attack per turn, leaving combat skeletal in design, and sound is absent altogether. Regardless, the build marks an early effort by Sega of America's flagship R&D studio to explore concepts outside the norm and exists as a fascinating example of Sega Technical Institute's pre-''Sonic 2'' development output.<br />
<br />
<center><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:CraigStitt-2.jpg|centre|frameless|link=Dark Empires (prototype)]]<br />
|}<br />
</center><br><br />
<center><br />
Special thanks go to [[Craig Stitt (gospyro)|Craig Stitt]], for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, [[User:MDTravis|MDTravis]] for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and [[User:Armadylo|Armadylo]] for editing and proofreading this article.<br />
<br />
[https://segaretro.org/User:CartridgeCulture Alexander Rojas (CartridgeCulture)]<br />
<br />
<br />
Have a happy Halloween!<br><br />
{| style="text-align: center"<br />
|-<br />
| [[File:DarkEmpires_skeleton.gif|centre|frameless]] <br />
|}<br />
</center><br></div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=156561User:CartridgeCulture2026-01-27T05:46:01Z<p>CartridgeCulture: /* Interviews */</p>
<hr />
<div>'''Alexander Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer and researcher most active on [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro].<br />
<br />
==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 2; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==User stats==<br />
{{User stats}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=Dark_Empires_(prototype)&diff=155820Dark Empires (prototype)2026-01-20T07:55:25Z<p>CartridgeCulture: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Prototype<br />
|titlescreen=DE_title.png<br />
|Page name=Dark Empires (prototype)<br />
|status=Released<br />
|releasedby=CartridgeCulture<br />
|filereleasedate=October 31, 2025<br />
|game=Dark Empires<br />
|system=Sega Mega Drive<br />
|unreleased=Yes<br />
|news_page=News/Happy_Halloween_2025!_Dark_Empires_Prototype_&_Craig_Stitt_Interview<br />
}}<br />
{{Download|file=Dark Empires (prototype).zip}}<br />
'''''Dark Empires''''' was one of [https://segaretro.org/Sega_Technical_Institute Sega Technical Institute]'s earliest original projects, beginning production in 1990 alongside ''[https://segaretro.org/Kid_Chameleon Kid Chameleon]''. A fantasy strategy [[:Category:Sega Mega Drive prototypes|Mega Drive]] game inspired by the likes of ''[https://segaretro.org/Herzog_Zwei Herzog Zwei]'', it was an experiment in bringing tactical strategy gameplay to the early 16-bit market. Development progressed to December 1991, when management permanently shelved the project, reportedly due to its niche market appeal clashing with [https://segaretro.org/Mark_Cerny Mark Cerny]'s desire to focus on more character-driven blockbuster titles like ''[[Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Genesis)|Sonic the Hedgehog 2]]''.<br />
<br />
The project's dumped build, a first-playable prototype, contains a ROM header dated <tt>1991 SEP</tt>, three months before the game's official cancellation.<br />
<br />
==Screenshots==<br />
<gallery heights=160><br />
DE_planets.png<br />
DE_gameplay1.png<br />
DE_gameplay2.png<br />
DE_gameplay3.png<br />
DE_gameplay4.png<br />
DE_gameplay5.png<br />
</gallery><br />
<br />
==Videos==<br />
<center><br />
<youtube heights="320" widths="224">RVcqSYHl_7c</youtube><br />
</center><br />
<br />
==Acknowledgments==<br />
Special thanks go to [https://segaretro.org/Craig_Stitt Craig Stitt], for both sharing the ROM and for graciously agreeing to a nearly four-hour interview, [[User:MDTravis|MDTravis]] for his extensive technical assistance and for his detailed ROM analysis, and [[User:Armadylo|Armadylo]] for editing and proofreading [[News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview|the game's announcement article]].<br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
*''[[News/Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview|Happy Halloween 2025! Dark Empires Prototype & Craig Stitt Interview]]'' announcement article<br />
*''[https://segaretro.org/Dark_Empires Dark Empires]'' at [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro]<br />
*[[Craig Stitt (2025 interview)]]<br />
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{{Prototype Footer|{{Navbox prototype|Dark Empires}}}}</div>CartridgeCulturehttps://hiddenpalace.org/w/index.php?title=User:CartridgeCulture&diff=155803User:CartridgeCulture2026-01-18T21:35:27Z<p>CartridgeCulture: /* Interviews */</p>
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<div>'''Alexander Rojas''', also known as '''{{PAGENAME}}''', is an American interviewer and researcher most active on [https://segaretro.org Sega Retro].<br />
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==Interviews==<br />
<div style="column-count: 2; column-gap: 2em;"><br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Michealene_Cristini_Risley_(2025-01-21)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Michealene Cristini Risley (2025-01-21)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Tom_Kalinske_(2025-02-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Tom Kalinske (2025-02-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brenda_Cook_(2025-03-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Brenda Cook (2025-03-10)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kevin_McGrath_(2025-04-25)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Kevin McGrath (2025-04-25)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Javelosa_(2025-05-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Javelosa (2025-05-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Trizia_Hill_Magagnini_(2025-07-23)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Trizia Hill Magagnini (2025-07-23)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Alexander_G._M._Smith_(2025-07-28)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Alexander G. M. Smith (2025-07-28)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Craig Stitt (2025-08-02)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ian_Flynn_(2025-09-03)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ian Flynn (2025-09-03)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_David_Galloway_(2025-09-13)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: David Galloway (2025-09-13)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)]<br />
*[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)]<br />
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==User stats==<br />
{{User stats}}</div>CartridgeCulture