Everyone Deserves a Good Origin Story

(The Texas Instruments TI-55 programmable calculator which came out in 1977)

I have been feeling a bit nostalgic lately as I started thinking about how I got into the game industry. The other day I stumbled across an old scrapbook which contained clippings from when my first game was published. This inspired me to write the following elegiac post.

The first time I ever got my hands on a device that was programmable was in 1979 at my high school graduation.  My parents bought me a TI-55 programmable calculator which supported a grand total of 32 programming steps.  I was completely enthralled by the power of being able to program into the device my own equations and functions.  My older brother was working towards an electrical engineering degree at the time and, when he saw the things I was making this calculator do, he encouraged me to pursue a degree in computer science instead of my original plan to follow his degree path.

When I first started college I got my hands on an original Apple II computer which, I must admit, was a giant leap forward from the TI-55 calculator.  I quickly went to work mastering this incredible machine that Steve Wozniak built.  During college I was already creating educational software and, from that, I got my first ever paid programming gig writing a report card system for a local high-school.  This turned out to be an early life lesson since, long after I pocketed the $450 they paid me to write an entire system which computed the GPA for every student, tracked all progress, and printed out report cards, they kept expecting me to maintain it for free for years to come.  This life lesson would repeat itself over and over again throughout my career whenever I tried to market a piece of middleware.

After college I got my first job writing educational software for a forward thinking company called Milliken Publishing.  During the early years Apple had a strategy of getting their computers into every school in the country, offering them for free or at deep discounts.   This created one of the first software markets as schools suddenly had all of these computers and wanted to make use of them in the classroom.  Milliken was innovative enough to hire computer programmers to create a wide catalog of educational software that was curriculum based.  They designed it so that a school which bought their books and supplemental materials could also get the same curriculum delivered on the Apple II computer as well.  Unlike other companies who were just turning basic math drills into simple games, Milliken produced teacher developed curriculum and used innovative teaching methods.  Even though we delivered a lot of solid curriculum, we also went out of our way to make the software fun and engaging for the students.

At the time, even though I wasn't directly creating computer games, I was certainly following the industry.  In the summer of 1979 Richard Garriot was working at a ComputerLand store when he had his first encounter with the Apple II computer as well.  Just a short while before I was busy writing report card software for New Haven High School Richard was creating one of the first computer games in history; Akalabeth.  He took his game, stored on a cassette tape, put it in a ziploc bag, and sold it at the local Apple store.  Richard only sold about a dozen copies at the store but one of those copies made it to a company called California Pacific who signed a deal with him.  Ultimately the game sold 30,000 copies with Richard receiving about $5 apiece.  At the time this was considered a blockbuster mega-hit computer game.  Richard went on to create the Ultima series and has had an amazing career and a life of adventure.  Today he is probably just as famous for becoming an astronaut and being part of the first father-son team to make it into space.

As my career as a software engineer continued I, like so many others, desperately wanted to break into the game industry.  I knew I could make a game, but I just didn't know how to get started.  I had created a piece of graphics technology to render a 3d height field as a solid shaded visualization and I thought I could use it to create some kind of first person shooter.  With this idea in mind I created a game prototype and was ready to send it off to Electronic Arts.

Electronic Arts was established by Trip Hawkins on May 28, 1982.  Trip had a lot of great ideas about how computer games should be created and marketed that are almost entirely responsible for how the industry evolved over the last three decades.  Trip wanted to co-opt the movie industry studio model and apply it to video games.  His plan was to treat game developers as �creative artists� who would work against advances on royalties while the studio would market and distribute the finished product.  All of the job titles which exist today in the game industry, that of writer, producer, artist, production assistant, arise from Trip Hawkin�s original vision.

Trip�s vision of the company initially was also a pretty good business model.  When Electronic Arts initially started, the company itself didn't actually create video games, or relatively few of them.  Only over time did they move more and more game development in-house.  During the early days hundreds of geeky kids working out of their parents homes would �pitch� ideas to the �studio� and try to get a production deal. It is important to remember that in these early days an entire computer game could be created, start to finish, by just a handful of people.  Electronic Arts used a shotgun approach at the time, signing up a whole bunch of young people to try to create their games at very low cost.  They offered advances on royalties which were only paid out as milestone deliveries were met.  They could cancel the project at any time to mitigate risk if they felt it wasn't going well.  Once a game was finished they would decide how much money to throw at it for marketing.  If they didn't believe in the project, they would not put much money behind it at all.  If they thought it could be a hit then they might put a stronger effort into print advertising.  This was pre-internet days, so video games were primarily promoted through the dozens of dedicated gaming magazines which covered newsstands at the time.  If any of the games were a big hit, then Electronic Arts would make enough money off of it that it could easily offset the costs of a few that never really went anywhere.

In 1987 I desperately wanted to create a first-person-shooter.  This wasn't even really a genre at the time.  Pretty much the only 3d games back then were flight simulators and one or two tank simulators, some of which were still using wireframe graphics.  I had created a visualization technique which allowed me to render a 3d height field as a solid shaded terrain covered by rotoscoped sprite images for trees and players.  It ran at an interactive frame-rate on a PC and, at the time, I thought it was pretty cool.

I began by cold-calling Electronic Arts asking to speak to someone about submitting my game idea.  I eventually got to speak to a nice guy named Jon Manley who said he would send me a product idea submission packet in the mail which I received shortly thereafter.  When I got the packet it included the following intimidating advice: �Is this product pretty good?  Very good?  One of the best 100 products on the market?  If your answer of to any of these questions is �yes�, don�t send it yet.  The personal computer software market is so crowded that the only titles that have any real chance of breaking in are those that can be considered awesome, earth-shaking, world-class.  Is this product unique?  With the hundreds of submissions we receive, you can imagine how many times we see virtually the same product go by.  The world is not clamoring for another graphics/text adventure game, climbing game, maze game and any number of other genres.  To get the market�s attention-and ours--you have to be different.�

Fast forward to 2014 where we see the same exact games getting recycled over, and over, and over, again, and you can read whatever irony into this that you want.  Clearly somewhere on this journey we lost our way designing video games.  To understand why, I can simply cut to the chase and explain exactly what happened.  Video games became mainstream mass-market products.  While in the early days Electronic Arts could fund twenty game projects built by small teams and be satisfied if just one or two of them hit, that isn�t the case any more.  Today a single game has a budget larger than most Hollywood movies and massive teams of often hundreds of people working on it for years.  There is almost zero margin for error.  Back in 1984 if Electronic Arts had a game that sold 100,000 copies this was considered a monster mega-hit.  Today, if a game was projected to sell 3 million units but only sells 2 million, well, you can expect to hear of yet one more round of layoffs in the game industry.

Cover Page from the Electronic Arts Submission Packet

The Electronic Arts product submission guidelines page

What started as a place where innovative ideas could be thrown out to a largely hobbyist market became a mainstream mass market and with all of the restrictions that this implies. Fortunately, due to the recent development of the mobile platform and certain break-out games like �Minecraft�, every now and then the industry is reminded that no matter how fancy your graphics are, no matter how much money you spend on production, at the end of the day it should be about new and exciting game design.

Getting back to my own story, in 1987 I sent in my, quite frankly, somewhat embarrassing product submission into Electronic Arts.  It included a fully functional interactive demo which showcased the 3d visualization technique that I was proposing and the following cover page.  Yes, I actually submitted this to Electronic Arts and, yes, I drew that ridiculous cover art myself.  I will at least take some credit for having the vision at the time of wanting to create a first person shooter with a capture the flag element which later became a staple of the game industry.

The actual embarrassing cover page of my product submission to Electronic Arts

Here is what happened next.  About a week after I sent that off I got a phone call from an �associate producer� at Electronic Arts by the name of Paul Grace.  To say I was excited would be an understatement; getting a call from someone, anyone, at Electronic Arts about my game submission was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.  Paul was blunt on the phone.  He made it immediately clear that he thought my game idea was lame and his first question was whether or not I was married to the ideal, with a tone in his voice that the call would soon be over if I said I was.  What Paul was calling about was really two things, first he liked the 3d rendering technology and second he liked the fact that I could just program a game by myself.  Even though Paul was just an associate producer at the time, what he really wanted to do was design and produce an entire game.  At the time Tom Clancy had just published �Hunt for Red October� and submarines were all the rage.  Paul wanted to make a submarine game and somehow he saw in my programming a way that he might possibly be able to do that.  When he asked me, �How do you feel about working on a submarine game?� my eager and immediate response was, �If I can do a game with Electronic Arts I�ll do anything you want!�  And, thus, was a partnership formed.  I have asked around and no one at Electronic Arts can remember anyone else ever getting a game contract by sending in a cold submission to the mail-room before. I may not be the only one, but it was certainly rare.

Paul helped get my contract through the system so that he could use me to create the game that he wanted.  We worked long and hard and the fact that I was married, had two kids, and a full-time job, meant that it took way longer to create this game than either of us were happy with.  I worked on this game in the evenings and weekends, doing pretty much 100% of the programming myself while Paul hooked me up with a sound designer and artist to get the rest of the content for the game.  Paul did almost all of the game design and created the missions.

The game used my 3d visualization technique to render ships, shore, and explosions for when the periscope was up and a simulated underwater contour view when you were below surface.  Since sound is such a central part of all submarine stories I had to try to get sound and music to work in the game, something which was not at all easy to do since few people even had a sound card in their computer and there was no standardized way to use them.  

During the course of the development of the game 16 color VGA graphics evolved into 256 color MCGA graphics.  Most people have no idea how much it changed the computer gaming world when you could finally use 256 entire colors to display images.  The difference in quality was astonishing, it was as if everything went from a cartoon to photo-realistic over-night.  Simply due to this coincidental timing my game became one of the first products to take full advantage of 256 color graphics throughout all of the artwork.  The game also took advantage of true digital audio on as wide a range of sound cards possible while, at the same time, even managed to produce crude digital sound through the PC speaker (for which I was threatened with patent violation by a patent troll even back then, but that is a story for another day.).  Another unique feature at the time was that the game had multiplayer capabilities, one of the few that would let two players go against each other head to head via a crude low-speed modem connection.  I remember having my modem dial and connect to Paul�s modem in San Mateo, hearing the screech resolve, and then the two of us fighting out imaginary submarine battles thousands of miles apart.  It was a truly amazing experience at the time.

Once the game was finally done Paul faced a new challenge.  Even though it had taken me seemingly forever to finish the game because, as I said, I still had a full time job, he was able to keep the project alive because it was relatively low cost to EA and it was, of course, his personal pet project.  Now that the game was finally ready to ship the new problem we faced is that Electronic Arts didn't have any interest in putting a lot of money behind the marketing effort.  What happened next is a little bit of gaming history.  At that time there were a number of companies making a lot of money selling floppy disks.  Floppy disks were the primary way that people who owned computers back then would store their data and games.  One of the largest manufacturers of floppy disks at the time was Maxell and they had approached Electronic Arts with this crazy idea of putting a fully playable computer game on an extra free 11th floppy disk in each box.  Electronic Arts marketing talked to a number of teams about this idea but no one was really very interested.  It seemed completely insane to give away a fully playable version of a game.  Why would anyone do that?  Why would anyone buy the game if they could play it for free?  Now that my game was ready to release, and it didn't have a lot of money invested in it, they decided to let me be the guinea pig.  We made a full version of the game that you could play completely but, of course, only a single �game level� or �mission� was provided.

This was the promotional image used by Maxwell and plastered all over Comdex and even on Las Vegas billboards

At that years COMDEX there were actually billboards in Las Vega with our game splashed across it!  Over the coming months Maxell sold over a million boxes of floppy disks, each one containing a fully playable version of our game!  This soon led to my first game, �688 Attack Sub�, to become #1 on the bestseller list for several months and to sell over 150,000 copies which, at the time, was considered a huge hit.  Later I ported the game to the Commodore Amiga and someone else ported it to the Sega Genesis system.  After this the entire game industry was convinced that a free playable demo was an important marketing tool and I�m proud to have been the first one to be subjected to this marketing experiment.  When I was reviewing my old materials to write this story I came across this letter I received from Dave Luoto which brought back a lot of fond memories.

The first page of the Maxell insert

The second page of the Maxwell insert

The front cover of the '688 Attack Sub' box.  Note that my name is listed as if I created the whole thing myself. 

The inside flap of the box which includes a personal bio

The back of the box

The actual 5 1/4" floppy disk that contained the game

I used photographs of Electronic Arts employees as ship officers in the game.  Here Randy Breen pops up as the weapons officer politely informing the caption that he failed to select a weapon to launch.

The letter I received from David Luoto upon the games completion

A promotional advertisement from AdLib, one of the first sound cards ever created, and supported by my game

I have had a long career in the game industry with various levels of success on products, but always trying and pushing forward.  After �688 Attack Sub� we just turned right around and did another submarine game called �SSN-21 Seawolf�.  Here is when I probably made the biggest mistake of my career.  What I should have done was quit my �day job� and become more serious about this whole games thing.  I did not.  For some reason I was always afraid to.  With a wife and kids and a mortgage, I felt like I needed the security of a steady paycheck and I was not willing to take what I perceived as such a big risk.  So during the entire development of �SSN-21 Seawolf� I still maintained a full time job and this was really a disaster.  The game did finally get finished and ship, but I was not ultimately very happy with it and it cost me a lot of time with my children that I can never get back.  

I did improve the rendering technology and I definitely enhanced the audio substantially.  The game did well commercially nonetheless and, as before, Paul did all of the game design and marshaled it through the Electronic Arts internal politics keeping me largely insulated from most of it.  

After �SSN-21 Seawolf� was complete, Paul finally was able to get me a contract for the project I wanted to do more than anything else, which was a first person shooter with a great deal of strategy.  This time I did quit my day-job and took the plunge to make this my full-time effort.  However, I made yet another mistake,  While my friends and colleagues who were following a similar path went out and created their own game companies, hiring more and more people, I still just kept coding entire games by myself in my basement.  I would subcontract out art and audio design, but I was still the only coder.  A few years later when I would hear about my friends selling their companies for millions of dollars while I was still toiling away all by myself I was certainly a bit jealous.  The fact of the matter is that I am just a coder at heart and I had no real interest in the process of running an entire business.

After my next game shipped, called �Scarab� from Electronic Arts and it was a complete and total failure in the marketplace, it was finally time to move on.  Even though �Scarab� was a commercial failure it is by far my favorite game that I have ever been involved in.  I did almost all of the game design and it represented a genre of game that I wish there was more of, a first person strategy game.

Since then I have worked on a number of studio projects with ever increasingly large teams.  I was the lead programmer on �Cyberstrike 2� for 989 Studios and �Planetside� published by Sony Online Entertainment.

Today I am a principal engineer at NVIDIA corporation where I work on various GameWorks projects which allows me to contribute technology that ends up in hundreds of games throughout the industry. It is by far, by leaps and bounds, the greatest job I have ever had in my life.

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