Craig Stitt (2025-08-02 interview): Difference between revisions

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.

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?'''

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.

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

'''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." 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. 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?'''

'''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.'''

'''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.'''

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

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.

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.

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.

Yasuhara, we're friends on Facebook. Occasionally I have asked him questions here and then, occasionally. I do occasionally see him comment or click a like on something I post. The last time I contacted him was… I just digitized the resume videotape I made when I was leaving Sega. This was like maybe five, ten years ago. I was going to say a couple of years… No, it's probably more like 10 years. I had put it up on YouTube and a friend was watching it and says, "What is Treasure Tails?" I went, "What?" Cause I hadn't thought of this in like forever. He goes, "Yeah, it's one of the games you said you worked on" and all of a sudden these memories start coming back. I pulled out the tape quickly and looked at it and sure enough, here's this Sonic universe game with Tails. It's this… not ortho… the weird three quarter angle view…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'''I wanted to ask a bunch of Sonic 2 questions and these are going to be a little more specific. If you have to say, "I don't remember that", no worries, I completely understand. A lot of us in the research community find the project especially fascinating. For editorial reasons, I'd like to thank one of our top Sonic researchers, Katsushimi, for providing some of these questions. To begin, could you describe your personal approach to drawing graphics when it came to the Sonic 2 project?'''

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.

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?"

'''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?'''

So I think that's where maybe the hodgepodge aspect of it comes in is it's in bits and pieces. It could also just be just the nature of… I'm trying to compare Sonic 1. It's been so long since I played the other one. Y'know, how homogenous was Sonic 1 versus Sonic 2? I remember thinking levels like Casino [Night] Zone were beautiful! But it didn't fit. "Where's this in the world? Why is this in the world? What is this?" Then deciding it didn't matter because it's pretty and it's fun and who cares?

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.

'''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]

'''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?'''

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

'''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.

'''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.'''

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 [style] - monsters and weird stuff. I remember just working up a whole bunch of different ways, different things to build. Did a lot of sketches that didn't…

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.

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. 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."

'''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 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?'''

'''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?'''

'''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.'''

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

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. Tom Kalinske, another really nice guy.

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.

That's as far as that got, just the documents you see there and a single pitch meeting. I also came back after that and just myself put together Segapede and pitched that. That's the one where Sega went, "Hey, we like that. But we want to see a proof of concept." So that's when Segapede ended up coming about.

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.

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.

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. 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.

'''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."

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

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. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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."

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." 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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyway, back to questions about Spyro.

'''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?'''

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." 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.

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

'''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?'''

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?'''

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[thinks] Spyro. My favorite artwork that I'm the most proud of… I'm really glad it got cut from Sonic 2 because it made it more than just another level, is the Hidden Palace artwork and the Hidden Palace level. I'm really proud of that. It's kinda taken on a life of its own. Then Spyro. Specifically in Spyro, the skies. The rest of the artwork in the game is beautiful and fun, but after having talked to so many people about the skies… and then myself going back and looking at them. Cause people have gone through with various editors and pulled the skies out. I'd love to see the meshes without the vertex lighting. I'd love to see the meshes of these skies.

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.

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.

'''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?'''

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.

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."

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.

::''[https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Craig_Stitt_(2025-08-02)_by_Alexander_Rojas This interview was originally published on Sega Retro on August 7, 2025].''