Craig Stitt (2025 interview)

Craig Stitt
Subject Sega Date 2025 Interviewed by CartridgeCulture

Alexander Rojas: Thank you so much for giving me your time like this. That's very kind of you.

Craig Stitt: 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.

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. And just [sharing] information; that's a great mindset to have.

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.

Oh no, that is really unfortunate. I'd be so anxious knowing that.

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.

Right, right.

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.

Well, maybe this interview can act as a sort of verbal version of that.

I hope so. I hope so.

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?

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.

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."

That clicked. That clicked something in my brain. Even then I was still "OK, you can make a living as an artist?" And 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.

Interesting. What was the first computer you worked on when it came to designing graphics on the computer for the first time?

It was called the GeniGraphics.

That was the GeniGraphics?

Yeah. It was huge. The first generation ones I worked on used eight inch floppy disks, so actually truly floppy disks.

Actually floppy.

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. And that's what I was doing, and I had gotten to the point, though, where I was really not happy doing it.

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.

Right. Were you hired directly by Cerny? Like, was he the one who was in your hiring interview?

Yeah, 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.

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.

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.

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…

Video Game History Foundation.

Yeah, Video Game History. I think they've got a copy, if not it's around here somewhere. Yeah, would have been 1990.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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." And 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.

Just to familiarize yourself with them?

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.

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.

Right. It's your work as opposed to it being filtered through so many teams or like… the 'too many chefs' feeling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oh yeah.

How difficult did you find that?

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.

I can remember once, and this was for Dark Empire, there was a boss character and… Dunn… William Dunn? Man, my brain…

Bill Dunn, yeah.

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."

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.

I was going to ask if you had any involvement in Dick Tracy, but it sounds like that happened just before you got there.

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." And I was bummed.

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.

Yeah, 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.

Alex Kidd.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

But it had Rings that you had to collect as "health?"

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.

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.

Yeah.

Does the name Kevin Kidd ring any bells?

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.

Dylan Charles.

Dylan Charles! Yes, yes. Where did you get that name? That was- did Brenda remember that?

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.

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]

Oh, interesting.

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.

So on Kid Chameleon, how much artistic freedom were you given on the project?

A lot, 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.

I remember Paul Micah. 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]

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?

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.

What was the most challenging thing about working on the Digitizer? Other than everything.

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.

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.

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.

There's a certain dance to that, a balance of what you can get and what you can't get out.

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.

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?

Vaguely. Vaguely.

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.

Yeah. That rings a bell but I have no idea. I don't know if it was that tool or a different tool.

What was working with Yuji Naka like?

[reticent] Hmm.

You can be honest.

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.

You're not the only one.

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.

Right. Yes, yeah.

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.

Yeah, Yamaguchi.

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.

You still keep in contact with Yasuhara and Yamaguchi?

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?" And 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…

Isometric? No… something like that. I know what you're talking about.

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."

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 was 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.

Out of all those games that you just mentioned, what was the most complete that you were upset about being cancelled?

That was one I didn't work on. I think the character's name was Jester.

Yeah, Jester.

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.

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.

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.

Was not being given enough resources to work on a project a recurring theme at STI?

Absolutely, 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.

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.

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."

[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?

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.

Interesting. I would have imagined that they would have given you at least one copy of the game that you had worked on.

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.

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.

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.

Oh no. Hopefully it's still kicking around there.

Hopefully not. Send some good energy out into the universe. Yeah, that had all my copies.

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, KatKurin, 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?

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.

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?

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.

We're curious about what feedback you got from other staff on your art as development progressed.

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.

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.

Right, yes. The cave-y stalagmites and stalactites look.

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.

Understandable. Honestly it's a beautiful looking stage.

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.

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?"

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.

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?

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."

More lack of resources.

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?" And then deciding it didn't matter because it's pretty and it's fun and who cares?

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.

You proposed a sidekick named Boomer for the sidekick competition that they had. Why a turtle? What inspired that idea?

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…

Gamera.

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].

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

What was your idea to create Hidden Palace Zone? What was the inception of that?

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.

So that golden-green vibe was yours.

I think so… I think so.

How did you feel when it was cut?

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.

I can imagine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Right. We get to see your art.

It finally made it.

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?

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.

Speaking of cut Zones, you'd mentioned working on a clown slash roller coaster themed Zone. What would that have been like?

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.

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?

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]

That's awesome.

Yeah, I think there was some [clown/roller coaster] graphics done on the Digitizer, just to have stuff to pitch to Yasuhara.

Did that Zone have a name at all, an early name, or was it just graphics at that point?

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.

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?

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.

[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?

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.

Understandable. There was so much going on with Sonic 2.

Yeah.

How was working on Spinball?

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.

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.

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.

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.

So the actual sprites for him spinning, when he was a little blue ball?

More Sonic's normal sprites.

I would have assumed it was Yamaguchi. Did Yamaguchi do Spinball? I'm trying to think if he did Sonic…

I don't think Yamaguchi did Spinball. I can't find his name on the production credits…

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]

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?

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]

[laughs] So let's talk about Dark Empires. Could you give us a top-down summary of Dark Empires?

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.

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, 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…

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.

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?

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.

Strategy was new back then. Console strategy.

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.

Did Herzog Zwei and other titles… was that what inspired Bill, or you guys as a team, to make a strategy game?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And just to confirm, this is Mark Cerny?

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.

A question you may have already answered, I apologize if you did. Do you remember exactly why Jester was cancelled?

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.

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.

Speaking of another cancelled STI project, this one we actually know less about than Jester: What was SpellCaster?

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. And Tom Kalinske, another really nice guy.

Shinobu Toyoda.

Wait, what was his name again?

Shinobu Toyoda, I believe.

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.

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."

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. And 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

I got teased a lot. Brenda used to tease me a lot about the name [laughs]. But yeah, it was just a working title.

Do you recall the name of that fine artist and the Japanese artist? Can you recall either of those names?

I can see her [Marte]. And 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.

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.

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?

Oh, he was English, and he seemed very supportive.

Dean Lester?

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.

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?

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.

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. And 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.

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.

Yeah [laughs].

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." And 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.

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. "Sayy, 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.

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."

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.

Oh that's fine. Don't worry about me, I can talk all day.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

I enjoy sharing and talking.

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?

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."

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.

Yes.

Which makes the one I have worth a lot more money because there's pictures of Michael Jackson wearing his.

[laughs] Yeah.

Yeah, it was fun, it was exciting.

In that meeting that you were in with Michael Jackson, was Brenda there with you?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Was it just that one meeting or two? That you attended?

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]

[laughs] Oh that's really funny.

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?"

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?" And I went, "No, no, I'm one of the artists." And he's like, "Really? Can I have your autograph?"

Ah, that's so cool.

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."

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.

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."

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.

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. And 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. And 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Oof.

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."

Oh, that's nice!

"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?" And I'm like "Crap, I'm busted. I'm in so much trouble." And he goes, "Hey, Craig, couldn't do this without you. Thank you. Here's a raise." "Oh, okay."

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."

[shock] No.

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."

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.

Ted just came in like, "Tough, do it, figure it out, make it work." And 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."

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.

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.

Sounds like you had to deal with more than you deserved there.

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.

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…"

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." And he goes, "Yeah, maybe, but you wouldn't be here." I went, "Oh, yeah." And 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.

My times at Insomniac were a real mixed bag. They went from incredible to literally breaking me.

Yeah…

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.

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." And it was just so nice to hear that.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

It sounds like they had an inclusion problem.

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.

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.

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.

It sounds like you handled it as best you could within what you were given.

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.

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.

Oh, please. I can get off my sob story and actually get back to talking about games.

Oh, no, you're good. That's an important part of it. That's an important part of your career.

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.

Anyway, back to questions about Spyro.

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.

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.

Oh, geez.

I'm like, "Okay?"

"So you can't understand my position on this, but you can open up an entirely new branch in a different state?"

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.

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?

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.

How did you eventually settle on the name Spyro?

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.

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." And 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.

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." And 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.

One final Dark Empires question, and I appreciate you letting me hop around here.

Oh no worries.

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?

Not that I remember.

Gotcha.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, absolutely.

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."

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.

It must be rewarding hearing feedback like that.

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.

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.

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.

[laughs] That's really sweet.

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.

Oh!

I don't know if anything ever happened to that, but somebody bought the rights. So yeah, very fortunate life.

What advice would you give to young artists entering the industry?

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.

That's not going to happen nowadays.

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.

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.

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." And 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.

Yeah, it's gonna be an interesting new time.

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.

If you could return to game development, what kinda game do you think you'd most want to make today?

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.

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.

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?

It's vaguely familiar. I don't think I've seen it.

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.

Yeah, of course.

Looking back at all of your work in the game industry, what are you the most proud of?

[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. And 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.

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?"

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…"

Talking to these people, it's surreal. That tattoo… Wow. "You did something that touched people."

Your work had a huge influence.

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?

I've seen clips of it, I haven't seen it all the way through, but I'm familiar with spaghetti Westerns.

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.

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.

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.

I bet. Thanks again for the patience with this long interview, we're almost about done here.

No worries, I enjoy it.

I can tell.

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.

I want those people to find some of this stuff and hear some of these stories. I want to get out there. And I'm getting older. [laughs] I want to make sure it's out there.

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.

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.

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.

I'd be putting off what I'm supposed to be doing anyway. [laugh] I'm accomplishing something.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Oh yeah, I'd love to track him down.

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."

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.

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.

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.

[laughs] I mean, that's low priority, but I appreciate whatever you're able to dig up and send my way.

But you think… okay, so the accident [Michael Jackson had]. Knowing it's in March of 93, did you say was his accident…

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.

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.

If you can find a date… no worries. We're just always like to piece together timelines on Sonic Retro.

Yeah, every little piece of information leads to the next little piece of information.

Right, it's like archaeology.

It literally is.

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.

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.

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."

Yeah, they were trying but it was wrong.

"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?"

Right. History is an interesting thing.

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.

Yeah, we really appreciate the openness.

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.

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."

Yeah, my pleasure. It really has been my pleasure.

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.

[laughs] But now you've got to edit this.

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.

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.

Thank you so much, Craig. This is absolutely wonderful again.

Okay. Well, talk to you later.

All right. Talk to you later. Bye bye.

This interview was originally published on Sega Retro on August 7, 2025.