I’ve always been fascinated with game industry stories. From the first day I started in the business, I’ve always been eager to hear anecdotes from other people that had seen and heard so much. Many years on now, I’ve some of my own stories. Some of which I’m actually part of myself. It’s kind of surreal to feel like I’m on that other side of the fence now.

Recently I picked up this book again: “Masters of Doom”, by David Kushner. It’s the third time I’ve read through it. Nuts eh? I don’t think I’ve ever read any kind of book that many times over. It’s just a very well told account of id Software‘s birthing, and what happened to the key employees up until around 2003. I’ve recommended it to several people over the past couple of years, since I first picked it up. In fact it was suggested to me in the first place by a coder colleague here at Neversoft.

I think what had me going back to it again, was how inspiring a story it is. From being a kid who downloaded the Wolf3D shareware originally from a BBS, and picked up the Doom the same way. The stories in the early half of the book are amazing to me. These people created their own genre, they created groundbreaking tech. To a kid fascinated with videogames, and computer programming these people were my gods!

As someone now who’s all grown-up, and has coming up to a decade of time in the industry under my belt. These stories still resonate with me, they’re extremely inspiring, and make you believe that there’s still room for innovation in the future. I think these days with conservative big-time publishers, you only see that innovation in the indie scene. I really can see something very special coming out of that section of the industry soon.

 

What else is out there?

Well, that’s what prompted this post really. There really isn’t anything that comes close to this book right now. There’s a real gaping hole here for this stuff. You might say that people interested in the inner workings of the games industry are a very small group. But really, I don’t think this is the case. Even if you remove the gaming part completely, it’s a great account of a technical-led success story. I’m sure books about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates fly off the shelves. I can’t see why the same can’t be true about this material either.

There are a couple that I managed to find that I thought could be good reads. The first one looked initially very promising, but on reading the Amazon reviews I was greatly turned off. The book in question being: Rogue Leaders: The Story of LucasArts. I adored playing the old point-and-click LucasArts adventure games, so reading about these seemed a real treat. The reviews however mention that these games are only discussed very briefly, and in no sort of detail at all. So not my cup of tea, I’m not much of a Star Wars fan.

The second book I actually did pick up, and have got just over halfway through. It’s SmartBomb. It’s been a bit of a slog and I think I’m going to give up on it now. The story about how Atari started was a high-point, interesting stuff that I’ve not heard about before. But on the other hand you have a poorly-researched version of how id Software got big, and lots of fluff about gaming tournaments and CliffyB’s visits to trade shows.

The id mistakes were odd. They mentioned their key titles which “started it all” were “Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake”… Doh! To spare their blushes though, they do refer to the correct name “Wolfenstein 3D” later on in the chapter. The other doozy I remember was saying that they were told to “make three games, we’ll give away the first two for free and sell the third”. They then referred to that as being Shareware. That’s probably how my mum would try and describe how Shareware works, if in some bizarro-world she was researching a book like this.

The CliffyB stuff could have been so much better if they had talked some about how he got into the industry in the first place. I still have no idea if he ever wrote code himself. I mean take Sid Meier, he actually coded Civilization as well as designing it. Not that it takes away from his designer skills if he’s not a coder. I’m just curious, I enjoyed ‘Jack Jackrabbit’ back in the day. In the book his early days are relegated to one sentence that mentions he sent off a floppy disk in a ziploc bag. MobyGames actually says he did some games before Jack, but his role isn’t clear. At least one seems to indicate he did the whole thing himself. Anyway, this is a far more entertaining CliffyB story. Even though it is completely made up.

 

Engerlund, Engerlund!

As I tend to do when I write these blog posts, I’m going off track. The real point of this post, and the namesake of the post itself is about British game developers. Why is there absolutely nothing written about them in books? I also feel whenever I read any sort of modern game website about the ‘good old days’; it’s always just Atari, Nintendo and the Apple II. There was another golden-age of gaming, from the mid 80′s through to the early 90′s. This one occurred and originated in Britain. Take the Spectrum, the C64 (and the Amstrad!). Then you’ve got the Amiga, and in turn some PC and console conversions of the same games. There’s so many good games for those systems. Nowadays though whenever a modern site like Kotaku gets misty-eyed, it’s like these games never existed.

Elite? I don’t think I’ve met an American who knows what that game is. Manic Miner? No chance.

Manic Miner is a good one to pick up on. It pre-dates “Super Mario Bros.” on the NES by almost two years. Whilst it’s missing the scrolling element of Mario, it was at the time a revelation in the British home computer market. The author, Matthew Smith famously dropped off the face of the planet after the follow-up: “Jet Set Willy”. He apparently joined a commune in The Netherlands, and stayed there for a number of years. Take a gander at this YouTube clip for some nostalgia. The gangly-guy on the new “Doctor Who?” is the Matt Smith eh? No, Mr. Manic Miner is the Matt Smith, and always will be.

• Elite. Just mentioning this one again. Braben has his own company now, curious as to why Ian Bell didn’t join him. The game itself was a groundbreaking use of procedurally-generated worlds on a huge scale.
• Mythos Games. Laser Squad, Lords of Chaos, and the X-COM/UFO games of course. Turn-based strategy joy.
• Imagine. No really outstanding games I remember, but there’s a very interesting backstory about how piracy killed the company.
• Codemasters. The Darling brothers, and the Oliver twins. Redefined the pricing model for games at the time, selling (mostly) quality newly developed games at budget prices.
• The Bitmap Brothers. Speedball and The Chaos Engine. Outstanding art-style. Best looking games out at the time.
• Psygnosis. Nuff said. They are now SCEE Liverpool.
• Rare. Killer Instinct, Goldeneye 64, Donkey Kong Country. They used to be ‘Ultimate: Play The Game’. Sure there’s a good story there. Throw in some ‘Mr. Pants’ and it’s gold.
• Molyneux and Bullfrog; Syndicate, Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Magic Carpet. All groundbreaking, classic games.
• The GTA guys up at Rockstar North. Tie in the DMA design days too, and you’ve quite a story. Lemmings is an all-time great.

Anyway, just some food for thought. There’s a gap in the market here for someone willing to put in the research time. Can’t see why it wouldn’t sell well. The GTA stuff would probably sell it in the States!

A few weeks ago I mentioned on twitter that I was working on an Amstrad CPC emulator, written in XNA. There are plenty of the things for the PC and various other consoles, but not one for the Xbox 360 yet. So it seemed a cool little exercise to undertake.

A long time ago, I wrote one of my own for the PC. The website I setup for it is still live, here. I developed it initially around 1997. Back then I’d pretty much just gotten it to be able to boot, and be able to type things on the keyboard. I revisited it a few years later when I needed something flashy for my portfolio, around the time I was trying to break into the games industry. With that version I managed to get a handful of games running nicely.

Little bit of history

I used to be really into the emulation scene back in the day. The first one I stumbled upon was on a BBS, some random BBS I found in the pages of Computer Shopper (wow, that mag is still going!). My father used to go to his work to wash his car on the odd weekend here and there. I used to use his Apple Mac computer when he was doing that, was one of the old Mac Quadras. This would have been around 1993 I think, so I’d have been a spritely twelve or thirteen years old at the time!

Anyhow, I’d use some terminal software on the Mac, downloading various interesting programming bits and bobs via the trusty ZMODEM protocol. One weekend I was stunned to see something called CPCEMU. This was the first Amstrad emulator ever to see the light of day. I didn’t even know such a thing was possible at the time; I’d pretty much figured that it could well be a joke download. So after copying my weekend’s haul to a floppy as per-usual, I was excited to give it a try.

This software and much of the rest of the stuff I downloaded was PC-only. I didn’t have a PC at home at the time; I’d just use the ones at my school during lunchtimes. It was really cool to see the emulator fire up on that PC at school. Unfortunately though the Amstrad ROM wasn’t included in the package, so all that worked out of the box was a single sample game written to interface directly with the hardware. That year I remember my ‘big’ Christmas present was a 3.5” disc drive for the Amstrad, primarily so I could dump the ROMs from the machine so I could get the emulator working! What a nerd.

Around the time I’d also written in to the only remaining Amstrad CPC magazine in production: Amstrad Action. They had some feature where they asked readers to write in with any sort of Amstrad-related article, and they’d print them up in some sort of ‘readers articles’ feature. This never actually happened though unfortunately; they never did run any reader articles. I’d written one in about CPCEMU, whilst it never appeared I did get a mention in the magazine. After a little googling, I managed to find it:

Amstrad Action – #104 – May 1994 (click for larger image)

Brought a smile to my face seeing it after all these years!

Other emulators

There were a number of other emulators I ‘followed’ back in the day too. GenEm; the first SEGA Genesis / Megadrive emulator out there, was one in particular. Was really something to see it improve over time. From humble beginnings where only a handful of early-era games are only playable. Through to audio emulation working (the Genesis/MD has a second processor; a Z80 funnily enough, which is primarily used for audio in games). Around this time was an explosion in emulators in general, for all sorts of other videogame systems of similar eras. There was a bit of a race between coders to get their emulator to be the most fully featured, with the highest game-compatibility rate. Competition drives technology, I guess?

Some other ones I remember too were KGEN and DGEN. But the real leap at the time I recall was Genecyst. It was really leaps and bounds above the other ones out at the time. The same guy (or group) that coded it also wrote the impressive Callus, and NESticle. Both landmarks at the time, particularly Callus which I think was the first Capcom arcade emulator that ran at a playable speed.

The UI for Genecyst, all emulators for the era were in DOS. Unlike most, this one had a GUI too

I also remember Executor well too, an Apple Mac emulator. This one took an interesting approach of not making use of any System ROMs at all. They essentially reverse-engineered the Mac. The emulation effectively emulated the services/OS calls that the system ROM would have provided. This I think was more of a legal choice than a practical one, but it must have been an interesting technical challenge. They updated it pretty often, it seemed like every week there was a new one to try that had a new slate of improvements. Unfortunately it was a paid-for emulator. I think it had a time restriction on it, it worked for ten minutes and then quit out. That was a rarity back then in the emulator scene.

Screenshot of Executor in action

As I was looking for stuff for this article, I was surprised to see that it’s now open-source. I think now there’s probably several other Mac emulators which take the more traditional approach, and have a near 100% compatibility with a real 68k-era Mac. I wonder how well it sold throughout its lifetime?

An XNA CPC Emulator

Christ; I do go on like an old woman, don’t I?

The point of this article was meant to be about the Xbox 360 version of the emulator I’m working on. I did most of the work for it over a weekend, about a month ago. The missus was away for work, and I had a nice block of time to tackle it. I essentially just used my previous emulator I wrote a few years prior, in plain C. I rewrote it in C#, in a much more OO-way.

It was as a pretty straightforward process. As I’d done with my older emulator, I took the Z80 CPU emulation from an existing source. Someone has already coded a ZX Spectrum emulator in C#, so I took the CPU code from there. The Zx360 project. I had to make a few modifications though. One was based on how memory is accessed on the CPC, to handle the ROM and RAM banking. The other was for the way interrupts are handled. I know very little about the Spectrum, but it seems like they do behave pretty differently in that regard.

So, dusting off the cobwebby corners of my mind, I got to implementing all the various bits of hardware of the machine. Using both my old source, and the Unofficial Amstrad WWW Resource for reference. The code quality was like night and day compared to my old plain-C implementation. That’s I guess what thirteen years experience will help you out a bit with! It a joy to debug too; all the little components of the machine browsable in the Visual Studio debugger, in a nice OO-d tree!

I worked on the actual XNA-specific parts last. Getting the screen drawn, and getting input working that is. It’s just as cool as I remember when you get that startup screen rendering the very first time. This old thing:

XNACPC bootup, the Amstrad CPC 464 startup screen

I then went on to get snapshot (.SNA) support working so I could load up memory snapshots of games. That was awesome to see as well. It had the exact same level of compatibility as my older emulator. I was a little worried the new Z80 core code could have some bugs or issues, but it seems solid now. So anyway, the same games that ran fine worked fine on this too. But of course the same ones with issues, also had issues on my new emulator too. Once I’d played a few games on the Xbox itself, I took a break from the project for a while.

The classic ‘Roland in Time’ running on XNACPC, on an Xbox 360

A bit later on

What I really wanted to add was proper audio support. I dabbled for a while using XACT; playing a sound and messing with the pitch and volume of it. But it had pretty hideous results. It was encouraging to hear the tunes in there somewhere, but it really didn’t work well at all. What led me to stop bothering with this method was news that XNA 4.0 has nicer audio support. Specifically the class DynamicSoundEffectInstance. This class allows playback of raw audio data, not just samples. Exactly what an emulator needs.

The other avenue I wanted to make improvements on was to how I emulate the video hardware. My older emulator took a very naïve approach. It didn’t make any effort to emulate vsync, hsync or tie in the CPU interrupts with any of it. Over the past few weeks I’ve had some time here and there to mess with this stuff, and attempt to get something better working. I’m pretty pleased with the results. I managed to get split-screen working. Which means ‘Sorcery’, one of the classic CPC titles is now fully playable and looks just like the original.

Sorcery on XNACPC – A CRTC-splitscreen game

I’ve still a way to go though. My CRTC and video emulation isn’t quite up to par with some of the more accomplished emulators already out on PC. Well, that’s an understatement; it’s truly awful compared to most of those emulators! But it’s something I can improve at my leisure.

I plan to release the source code for the emulator, specifically once I’ve got my video code a little more stable. Whether that’s a matter of weeks or months, I don’t know. I’m pretty busy at the moment with work, so it may take a fair while. I’d probably expect it to be after XNA 4.0 is released too, since I’d probably get some crude level of audio support in once it’s out. I’d dabble with the CTP version that’s out now, but I’m really targeting Xbox which is not supported just yet. Yes, I could write the code on PC. But I really like firing up the emulator on the Xbox, and seeing the cool stuff running on there first. I can be patient…

That said, I’ve started to code a little in my free time. I got a block of time over the Christmas break and I decided to have a good go at doing some stuff with XNA and C#. Was a good experience, I feel a lot more comfortable with C# now. I’ve learnt to live with some of the annoying differences between it and C++. I code in the latter every day for my day job; for another language that’s so close to it, it takes a bit of a leap to leave the old ways behind.

So, hopefully I’ll give this blog a bit of a new lease of life soon with some tidbits from my XNA adventures. I’ve got a couple of ‘in-progress’ articles going already.

Anyway, Metallica…

The last time there was rumblings of a Metallica game was back in 2003:
http://cube.ign.com/articles/422/422960p1.html

… and I would know nothing about such a game at all of course… *whistles*

Damage Inc. [Metallica car combat title] (PC/PS2/GC/XBOX, Climax/VU Games)*

http://www.destructoid.com/surfer-girl-is-back-with-a-cancelled-game-list-50625.phtml
Seems like a very long time ago now… I’d like to say more about it, but it’s probably not a good idea.

Like Aerosmith last year, my involvement is pretty minimal; I’m working on something else right now. The Metallica game is based on the World Tour engine, so all four instruments are playable. Unlike with the Aerosmith game, where you were limited to just guitar and bass.

As per usual, with the press-situation for these sorts of things I really can’t say anything in more detail. It looks fantastic and I think the fans are going to be dead impressed with it.

I learned how to code on the Amstrad CPC 464. Used to be mad for the system when growing up, read and re-read magazines, and spent hours playing a lot of very bad games. Plus a few good ones, mind. I think I only stopped using it in 1994, when we got our first PC.

Fast forward fourteen years, and things are very different. Whilst I used the CPC well past it’s best (commercial software dried up in 1991), since then it’s only had a passing interest. Cool stuff going on with it on the internet like SymbOS, CPCZone and CPCWiki kind of passed me by.

It was a couple of months ago that my interest picked up again. I was showing a colleague the CPC3D emulator I wrote a few years ago, on one slow night whilst we were waiting for a build to be approved. I then spent a little while seeing what’s going on with the CPC. SymbOS I first read up about a couple of years ago, a very impressive coding feat. CPCZone is kind of interesting, mainly just nostalgic reminiscing about the old machine. What sucked me in though was EBay.

I remember in the early 90′s when the 8-bits were coming to the end of their life, you had labels like Codemasters releasing budget games. For usually two or three pounds each. A godsend when you’re on pocket money. Many of them were very good games too. By this stage of the machine’s life though older software from around launch time was hard to come by. The machine was initially released near the end of 1984, with a bunch of software from Amstrad’s own publishing label: Amsoft. The internet consensus is that some of the worst games were released on this label, but I beg to differ. Many of the ones I had were real enjoyable, fun games to play.

Having old magazines listing the Amsoft games, I’d always wanted to get a few more, ones I’d liked the sound of. “Oh Mummy” was one that I’d always wanted. I first got to play that game on an emulator, in the late 90′s. No store near me whilst growing up stocked the old Amsoft titles. Once I remember there was a place that sold the disc versions of them, but at a ridiculously high price. But that was it.

Disc version? Yes, the vast majority of stuff I had wasn’t on disc. It was on cassette tape. Games took ten to twenty minutes to load, and you had to endure the modem-like screeching noise of the data being read from tape. Yes, I’m that old. Retelling this to some of my younger colleagues here, I felt positively ancient. Reminded me of teachers at University letting us know about the early days of programming with punch-cards. Ghetto stuff.

So yeah, after seeing some cheap Amsoft games on ebay I thought I’d like to try buying a few. From the image in this post, you can see though that the high-end price is a little ridiculous. Remember, this is for a cassette tape! I bought a number over the past few weeks, ranging from a few pennies each up to I think maybe $20 (USD) for the most expensive one. They have pride of place in my little bookshelf at home now, quite unique items to have in the United States. The CPC was never released out here.

By the way, the $67 game is ‘Roland Goes Square Bashing’. It’s actually one I wanted to purchase, but I really couldn’t justify spending that on a cassette tape that would sit on a shelf.

So, updating this site hasn’t gone entirely to plan. Fortunately though my workload has eased up a little now, there’s a number of things I wanted to write about so hopefully I’ll get the chance now.

Speaking of workload, the last ten months or so I’ve spent working on the now announced: Guitar Hero World Tour. It’s the first Guitar Hero game I’ve been involved with properly, having previously worked on the ‘Tony Hawk’ series at the same studio. I’m really proud of what we’ve done with the new game, and I’m sure everyone’s going to enjoy it when it gets released. Really hoping we can get into that 90-100 range on Metacritic, it deserves to.

It’s a double-edged sword working on something so popular. On one hand it’s nice to read the buzz about your game on the internet, people looking forward to new tracks being announced, and seeing how much some people can’t wait for it’s release. On the other hand, there’s the ‘fanboys’. I probably shouldn’t go into it too much, but our game tends to get a bit of rough treatment by commenters on various game websites. Our competition, Harmonix makes great games and has a very loyal following.  Some people have invested heavily into their product, both finanically and emotionally. It’s a shame this clouds objectivity of what we’re offering at times.

It’s widely publicized that our guys at Neversoft used to play the first two Harmonix-developed Guitar Hero games at company parties. In fact I think one of the first times I had beers with the guys I work with now, was over a game of Guitar Hero in our warehouse. We have massive respect for what those guys did with those games, they’re a quality developer. The first game prompted me to get my first console since emigrating to the US (I left my old ones back in England). I remember lugging that PS2 and the guitar bundle a few blocks back to my apartment from the local Best Buy, in the days before I got a car.

Most of my game playing time in this country has been on Guitar Hero. I’d played a decent amount of Tony Hawk before working on those games, but only casually on a couple of games in that series. GH though is a totally different story, one of my favourite games of all time for sure. I remember excitedly bringing my PS2 and the game in my luggage to Simon’s place in Colorado, for his birthday weekend in 2006. Went down a storm. I’d never have thought in a million years that I’d end up working on it.

Dream come true.

I’ve never heard of Crave, nor that they ever published my game. A bit of googling later, and indeed it looks like they paid $120k for rights to the game. I’m not sure what to make of Crave, with such titles as The Bible Game under their belt, I’m dubious as to whether they can be considered a quality publisher.

It looks like they only ever re-released it on Gamecube, I can’t find any for the Xbox or PS2. The copy I ended up purchasing from eBay was the Crave one, for $10. I’ll be curious to see what the manual looks like. But I guess until I get a Wii (again), I won’t know what the actual game differences are, if any… There was a bunch of movies and legal screens which had Acclaim logos in. But I’d be really surprised though if they managed to get hold of the old code and data and replace that stuff.

One thing is for sure, I didn’t see a penny of royalties!