Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 193: Mark Turmell on NBA Jam & NEMO

Episode Date: January 11, 2019

In an episode that's nearly retro itself, we go back to GDC 2018 for an interview with Zynga's Mark Turmell on his historic work, including NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, Hasbro's failed NEMO console, and the spiritual connection between arcade and mobile gaming.

So I am here at Game Developers Conference 2018 with Mark Termel, a self-describe a grizzled game designer who presented this morning talking about NBA Jam, but you worked on a lot of other games in your time at Midway and also before that and after that, you're still in the games industry. Sure. Yeah, I might be the longest holdover ever. My first game came out in 1980. I was making Apple II games. Okay. I bought an Apple 2 with 16K of memory and a cassette drive. started to make a game, and it took me a few months, but I made a game called Sneakers. They came out in 1980. It was a big hit. I was, I know, about 15 years old and started getting royalty checks for about 10K a month. Wow. And didn't really know the value of a dollar.

But started college early, went off to college, and then when I realized the value of a dollar, and what a college graduate would make back there in the 1980s, I said, you know, let's go make games for a living. And so I never looked back. Yeah, so I don't know anything about this game Sneakers, actually. I, you know, I read your bio and everything, and I didn't see any mention of that. Who was that published by? There was a big company on the Apple 2 for games, Serious Software, SIR, I-U-S. Okay, sure. And so I made a couple of games for them, and then they actually had reverse engineered the Atari 2,600, the VCS, and said, why don't you come out move from Michigan, where I grew up to California, to make VCS cartridges. And so I did that,

made a couple of games. First game was called Fast Eddie. And then I did a game called Turmoil. Those came out through 20th century Fox. They were publishing games back in the day. And then eventually our little group got sucked up by Activision, so I ended up working for Activision there in the heyday. Okay. I didn't realize you had grown up in Michigan, but that would explain why you favored the Pistons over the Bulls and NBA Jam. That's right. It was my only way to kind of level the playing field with Jordan and the Pistons. Yeah, I actually was born in Michigan and my parents, you know, had lived there. So I didn't follow sports a lot, but there was definitely a great love for Pistons in our household and Red Wings and Tigers.

So, yeah, it's a little connection I can definitely relate to. You know, usually interviews like this start, you know, kind of tell us about. you know, your past and how you got into video games. And I'd like to get to that. But I'd like to actually talk a little bit about what you're doing now because you're with Zinga. And I feel like there is a very clear line of connection between your work on coin-op games and your work on mobile games.

It's true. Because the, you know, the drive to keep people, you know, paying microtransactions, it's really pretty much one of the same. Very, very similar. So, yeah, I'd be curious to, you know, just kind of, hear about what you do at Zinga and like what lessons you've taken from your time working at Midway and other arcade makers to, uh, to, uh, bring that to Zinga. Well, it's, it's interesting. I joined, uh, Zinga about, um, six and a half, almost seven years ago. And, uh, the very first game that I

wanted to do was more of a traditional video game. I wanted to make a, a bubble shooter or some arcade action thing. You know, that's, that's in my, my blood. And, uh, the reaction right off the bat was like, well, no, we don't really make games where you could lose. You can't lose in our games. And when you think about, you know, Ville type games, a cityville or a farmville, they're, you know, open-ended. And it's a great experience. It's just something that wasn't what I was trying to lean into. And so we had a small window to, okay, show what you can do. And my first game was called Bubble Safari, which ended up being the number one game on Facebook there six years ago. It was, we had 7 million DAU, and we're just kind of crushing it, just killing it.

DAU daily active users? Correct. Okay. I don't know if necessarily the retro audience knows all the current mobile terms, but yeah. There are a lot of abbreviations, that's for sure. Yeah. So, you know, how did your history with Midway help inform the kind of work that you did? Yeah. Well, very clearly we had a feature in the bubble safari game where basically the concept was you had a monkey that was at the bottom and he's shooting balls up into these, you know, racks trying to save his friends. And we had an on-fire mode where when you drive.

dropped a chunk of the, you know, the gems three times in a row, you would get on fire and then you would be shooting a cannonball that was on fire and do more damage to the rack. We played the music and, you know, we put on a big show when it happened. And so that was actually a direct lift from NBA Jam. And even NFL Blitz used that same three catches in a row to the same wide receiver. and then you're on fire. It's a simple mechanic that actually works really well in translates to virtually any genre.

Interesting. Do you mostly work in, you know, like game design, or do you also kind of think in terms of like managing monetization and kind of coaxing the payments from people? I know where you're going. Yeah, it's, well, it's hard for me to vocalize what I'm thinking without bringing in negative terms because I think in the core gaming audience, there is so much hostility and negativity toward mobile apps. But again, like in a lot of ways, the well-made mobile apps are very much the descendants of something, you know, in the arcades like gauntlet, which was, that was not a fair game. Sure, right.

You had to keep paying. Yeah, your health would sap. There were way more enemies than you could kill. Like, that game was cheap. Right. Shoot the food. I think that's a fair assessment. You're right.

In the arcade space, we needed to hook players really early, you know, get a lot of flash, get them into the game. You know, it's easier to get the first quarter than it is the second quarter. And so we were really kind of trained in that, and it was really ingrained into us that we needed to hook the players fast. And to a very similar degree, it's the same way in all these genres that are the mobile free-to-play product. you need to really grab them, show them the production values, show them a great package, a great potential, a good mechanic that they can sit down and actually easily pick up. And when you think about the sports games that I developed, they are first and foremost easy to pick up, but difficult to master. It's easy to hit the pass button, the shoot button, but to actually get

around and navigate and find your right spot. And there's a lot of mastery that's required. And the same thing applies to the mobile games today. And in my role, my title is senior creative director at Zenga. I'm focused on the match three games that we have. Wizard of Oz is our most recent game that has been growing for the last year and a half since it came out. We have a couple of additional games in development, but my daily life is looking at metrics. It's looking at levels. It's being in the trenches.

It's working with the engineers, working with the artists, even the sounds, the particle effects, to try to craft the best experience, the best kind of aha moment for the player to hook them. Because in a game, in a Match 3 game, you need to keep on coming with variety. You know, you need to go through a chapter and then see something fresh. And it's actually a lot easier to do something fresh than you would imagine.

When I look at the match three space, today, all I see is opportunity for innovation. And most people, when they hear me say that, react with, well, wait a minute, you know, match three has been done. It's over. I know what match three is. But that's short-sighted. I was that same way a few years ago, and now all I see is the innovation opportunities. So it's really interesting, talking to players, listening to players, looking at metrics. It's really all about that fun factor in listening to the players, and that means looking at the metrics.

So in your panel this morning, you talked about, you showed a slide actually of basically like metrics charts from NBA jam installations in arcades. that showed, you know, hours played and how many minutes of those were inactive hours and which players scored the most and that sort of thing. How has that data, you know, like that process, did you pretty much create that with NBA Jam? Yeah, that's, it's interesting. Toward the end of NBA Jam, I knew that we had this battery-backed-up CMOS RAM that would be there, sustain, if you had powered down the machine. And so I kind of stepped back and thought about, okay, what data do I want to know?

And I was curious about what teams would be popular, but I knew that would be Chicago. And, you know, of course, we're at whatever town you're in, it would be that team. But there were deeper things, like the percentage of players advancing from the first period into the second period, into the third and fourth, what was the point differential? Because what we learned was when the point differential was high, whether it was a law, us or a victory, people tended not to continue. Right. And so there was a lot of ideas and metrics that we tracked, the duration of a period. How long did it take?

How much was the CPU scoring versus the human? A lot of things that actually had us dial in the game even better in those final few months of development. So you mentioned also in your panel that you could basically refresh the boards because they were e-proms. So how did those metrics, you know, from actual live installations? Like, how heavily did that shape the evolution of NBA Jam post-launch? Significantly, but not post-launch. Because when we make a coin-up game, we put it on location at maybe the 80, 90% completion point. And then you watch it, and you learn from it. You

keep on fixing. And those final fixes are the critical ones. You know, they often say the last 10% is the hardest, the most important, and it's certainly true. We had, in fact, on NBA Jam, we eventually, when, if you were to look at that game today, you pay 50 cents per period. When we first launched it, you would pay for time. You would pay like three minutes for your money. And that ended up being weird because sometimes you would pull up just short of the end of a period. Sometimes you'd have to pay and you'd only get, you know, 30 seconds of play time because the level, the game was over. It was a fourth quarter. Right. And so, you know, the learnings from watching games on test have, you know,

significant impact to the final product. So how is that process evolved over the years, like compared to NBA Jam and the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, the written-out documents that you showed on the slides versus how you handle, you know, feedback on Wizard of Oz, like, how has that evolved over the years and what parts of it have remained the same? Yeah. Well, the most important thing then or now is to actually listen to the consumer, to understand, you know, how the consumer is reacting to it. So nowadays, we have, we send stats back. We send data. back based on what modes a player goes into. How long they stay in those modes? How long are

their play sessions? How many play sessions per day? And in a match three game, of course, looking at win rates, where they lapse, when they get engaged, what they're excited about when we open up an event. And so there are a lot of avenues to be tracking. But just like in the early days with NBA Jam, the things that we were able to track there, that were more, you know, paramount just to that gameplay, were equally important. It's very similar because we're looking at the consumer. We're listening to the consumer. Okay. So going back to, you know, you were in college and looked at, you know, what kind of job prospects you had and decided, okay, I should make video games. How did you get from that point to NBA Jam? I feel like that's a pretty long journey.

You know, it's almost two years, right? Yeah, I mean, I'm perhaps the grandfather of video games here. My first game came out in 1980. I had gone off to a four-year school. I had started actually local community college at 15 or 16 years old, so I was able to graduate early. And when I got to the four-year university, they had a course, a program,

called SIGI, where you would put in your interests, and it would kind of learn what you had the aptitude for or the interest in, and would advise what kind of career you should pursue. And when I looked at the income of all those, you know, 35K, 40K, and here I was, you know, collecting 10K a month on royalties for a game that took me, you know, a few months to make, it didn't really make any sense to me. So when Serious Software offered me that position, I moved out. I was just 18 or 19 years old, moved to California, and it took a few years before the video game business flamed out.

I mean, you remember it. You know, things really hit the wall. We were truly wondering if video games were a fad. You know, we thought it might be a fad and it might be over. and you had games like Dragon's Lair that stacked up against me, too, thinking, well, I can't make Dragons Lair, so I'm the odd man out. So I joined a company that was called ISEX, but it was really a Hasbro division,

and they had developed a piece of hardware that would hook up to any VHS tape player, and we could encode fields of video, with an ID, and that piece of hardware would display only the fields that have that ID. So we could do a lower frame rate video feed, have multiple tracks of video, and it was very exciting. I became, you know, like an evangelist of that technology. I think you're kind of bearing the lead here because that project was what gave us Nighttrap, which, you know, has just been reissued, rematch.

mastered, and we actually had a presentation on that a few months back. So our listeners are very familiar with that. But, I mean, that game has a very unique style that is a direct result of the technology that you help partner with the Nemo system. Exactly, right. So you're totally in the loop on all that. Tom Zito and David Crane, Rob Fullup, you know, I was in the mix with those guys developing these titles, actually made a...

interactive police academy game. So I moved down. With the actors, we actually went down and we had, you know, all of the production and, you know, weeks of filming. And it was all interactive. So, you know, you can choose this path or this path. And so everything was a big flow chart. And that was a very exciting project.

So we were in the mix there for a few years before then Hasbro, of course, decided to pull out of the financing of that project. Right. And what was it that eventually killed Nemo? Was it just Hasbrod decided this isn't a good idea? Or was it the advent of CD-ROM? I'm curious to know. Like, I've heard different things, but it's always kind of hearsay.

Well, as I understand it, Stephen Hassenfeld became ill. I believe he had HIV. And he was the champion of this investment that was, a significant investment for Hasbro and creating a new hardware platform and controllers and he basically came

out and said to California where we were and said that he had to kind of button up everything that he was really had put the company at risk from for and that they were going to stop the financing

on it and he would be moving on to a different you know a different role and indeed he eventually did pass away um not too long after as i understand it and uh so we were all kind of left uh you know saddened because we were onto something and we were really passionate about the products and the potential uh but then we all kind of win our separate ways and and continue to make our mark elsewhere right the idea behind the nemo just absolutely fascinates me because it's taking an inherently linear medium, you know, cassette tape in VHS and making it interactive,

which is really a difficult proposition. It was magic to me. It was magic. When I first came down from Sacramento to Foster City, San Mateo, saw this demo. It was magic to me that how are you doing this? And of course, it was all in the hardware of being able to freeze those frames and store them and keep them displayed. Yeah, I'm not actually familiar with the nitty-gritty of how that system worked.

I just know that it used like a multi-track VHS tape. Yeah, it just pulled in every single field. There are 60 fields per second, and they would read in a field and then display that field into a buffer that was then being displayed on your TV, and that could be for multiple frames. In fact, I was doing a game called CitizenX right when they shut down. That one eventually made it to Sega CD, right? Yes. And CitizenX was kind of going through tunnels in almost like a pitfall type of a game

where you're advancing around. You had a character running. And when you would run off the screen, we had a big, you know, flowchart, if you will, of which scene to pull up next. And sometimes it might take 60 or 70 fields. So it might take you a second for that new screen to appear. The old one would just sit there, and then the next one would be able to stream in off the tape a second later, and then it would pop into place. And so you could have as many tracks as you wanted just at degrading the frame rate.

Okay, so 60 frames per second is the NTSC television standard, but film was always at 24 frames per second. So were you, like, using the extra frames, the difference between motion picture standards and NTSC as part of the buffer there? It's a little bit, it's not quite that far off. There's 60 fields, but they're kind of interlaced, where on a CRT, they would draw every other line. And so it's kind of the equivalent of almost 30 frames per second if you had just kind of breaking it down into frames. But no, TVs operate at that refresh rate, and so there's a lot of processing that happens on a computer system to operate the operating system, the engine, the software that needs to be running in that extra frame time. right so so in a sense it's almost like a lenticular image where you have like if you look at it one way you see you know what's on the outside of the ribs and if you look at it the other way you

see what's in the grooves that's fair okay that's a really interesting approach i i didn't quite understand how it worked but it's really fascinating it was uh it's funny when i made the apple two games um 16k of ram uh and when i moved out to california i said okay uh i'm going to make a game for you guys. I rubbed my hands together. I said, you know, where's the screen memory? Like, you know, where do I, where do I draw my images onto the screen? And they said, well, there is no screen memory. And I said, what do you mean? There's got to be screen memory. And they said, and that's when they explained to me, for the first time in my life, I understood that in a CRT, there was a gun that was going painting the screen from the inside. And it was

taking so many cycles to draw one line and come down and come down. And that's where, you ended up with this kind of 60 hertz time frame that that's what it took and so the way the Atari VCS works is that you would have some registers that you would store a value into

and then at that point where that scan gun is flying across your CRT tube then it would turn on you know some pattern right there and so the famous racing the beam yes you're you're kind of tracking

the cycles that each instruction takes. We did everything in assembly language on those titles. So were you mostly involved in the hardware design of Nemo or more in creating software for it? Creating software. Okay. Yeah, I'm not a hardware guy.

The ideas and some programming, some of the effort that goes into making games where there's a lot of scripting and things of that sort, even back then. I'm an engineer initially and assembly language all the way through NBA jam NFL Blitz was the first game I ever made in the C programming language and now I'm just focused on the creative side and working with the teams and kind of leading the creative charge. Okay. So besides Citizen X, what other Nemo games did you work on? Well, it was really just police.

Academy and Citizen X. I did some work on Sewer Shark Night Trap. I didn't really touch, but Sewer Shark, I did. And so those three, we had a lot of ideas. I mean, we had, you know, Jane Fonda workout videos and, you know, so many interesting ideas that we were, you know, anxious to fund. But, of course, you can only fund so much. Right. So what happened? with the footage for that police academy game. I don't think the game actually made it out, did it? No, it didn't make it out. So there's like a lost police academy moves.

Yeah, they're a complete. I have a stack of, you know, of tapes, probably, you know, five feet high of all that footage. You know, we should probably do something with that someday. Yeah, I feel like, you know, if you get clear the rights, that would be a pretty amazing treasure from the archive. That's true. How much of the actual game around? around the footage had you created, did you just get to the, like, the filming part, or was there actually, like, something binding it all together? No, it was such an amazing project. I worked

with the writer and with the producer, and we basically, you know, every night, we were kind of, you know, rewriting scenes, preparing the scenes for the next day that we would film in, you know, A, B, C, D, you know, directions, the outcomes. A kid might be, you know, riding his bike and gets, you know, caught by, you know, one of the characters, but another track he gets away, another track he wipes out. And so it was really a big flow chart. We filmed all of it. We just never executed on the code. Okay. So, yeah, so it sounds like it's mostly there. I just need someone to piece it together. Yeah. It's kind of like a dragon's lair, you know, like a dragon's if you had all the footage, but you need to do the windows of interaction.

Yeah, that seems like it would be a really fantastic, like, lost curiosity. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it, but you're dead on that. I'm going to dig those up. That'd be awesome. Yeah, so, you know, Sewer Shark, Citizen X, Night Trap, those all made it to Sega CD. Did you have any involvement with the process of, you know, post-nemo of helping digital pictures, get those out on disk? Sure. No, when Hasbro melted down ISEX, I looked at the best opportunities for me,

and the NES had been out now at that stage for a couple of years, and there were a lot of games. And I had known people inside Williams Electronics since when I was 15 or 16 years old and had started making games. And so I called Ken Fidesna, who was the general manager, kind of VP, of Williams Electronics, and I went out for an interview and met Eugene Jarvis, who I was a big fan of. Robotron is my favorite game of all time, and, you know, joined Midway Chicago with the intent of making a dual joystick shooter game, because that was my favorite mechanic. So could you talk a little bit about the relationship between Williams and Midway?

because I know there was kind of like a union in the late 80s. And, you know, you talked about working with John Newcomer and Eugene Jarvis. And, you know, those were guys who made legendary games at Williams. And then eventually they were a part of Midway. Sure. Well, we eventually became Williams, Bally, Midway, Atari. So we... Right.

Yeah, there's a lot of names altogether. Yeah. So the... Shortly after I arrived, Smash TV was late. labeled as a Williams Electronics game. And then by the time NBA Jam came along, we were, in fact, total carnage, we labeled as a midway product. So somewhere right in there, they were acquiring the rights and they were kind of merging

and, you know, there were, you know, casino elements, pinball elements. So there's a lot of kind of wheeling and dealing at that stage on the business front. Yeah, Tim, I think, joked at the panel today that NBA Jam was the killer of the pinball game. Right. I take it that's kind of an inside joke. I'd be curious to hear more about that. No, Neil Nicastro made reference to that. That was kind of our mentality in that era because a great pinball machine could make, you know, 280, you know, 300.

Wow. and when you come out with a game like Mortal Kombat or then when NBA Jam came out it just started to make less sense for those operators to fund the pinball's so pinball really began to wane in that time frame

until of course eventually they stopped Yeah I think there are still people making pinball games a few of but it's it's definitely a lost art well stern stern has done great uh my direct boss is joe camico uh and he is still finds time to uh to help george gomez and the guys out there in chicago make games i think he's got a batman game that's the number one game right now in replay magazine uh i think they've found a real niche uh with um home buyers um but yeah it's great i mean everybody

loves a pinball. It's just that from a financial standpoint, it started to make less and less sense in that era. So it seems like, you know, the sort of multi-party marriage of Valley, Midway, Williams, and Atari was kind of, you know, in terms of arcade game design, sort of a best of all possible worlds, it was all the big hitters from the late 80s kind of bannered together. Like, what was it like working, you know, in an environment where so many different creative minds from different companies came together? Yeah, we had a few summits where we all joined up and talked about tools and ideas, the learnings. But we all had different hardware. You know, Atari had developed theirs. Of course, Chicago had our, you know, NARC-based system.

And so it was really difficult to get people to kind of switch to a different tool set or, you know, a different hardware platform. So because of that, everybody, you know, kind of stayed in their own groove, doing their style, their art. You know, the business was getting tougher and tougher. If, you know, if you didn't have a big hit, you know, you were selling fewer and fewer. and the biggest risk, of course, to coin up was that the home consoles were getting better and better visually and the performance. We always knew we had a leg up with 60 frames per second gameplay

because the consoles couldn't typically do that in those first couple of generations, but then they were able to do it and be very faithful to an arcade experience. Right. Yeah, you said you went to interview with Williams because you knew people there. Did you look into getting into the console space, or did you basically say, you know, I just want to go to arcades? Yeah, I did. I looked at, there was a spinoff from Atari Tengen, and so they offered me an opportunity to make NES games. And I thought, well, you know, it'd be fun. I like the NES. I like, you know, cartridge space.

I like that whole model, but Coinop was such a wild frontier to me because this NARC game was showing amazing performance on objects on the screen. And I still remember when I started and sat down in my office and somebody told me how to put things on the screen, a sprite. and I kept on turning on one sprite after another after another and I had a little character out on the screen that I could shoot bullets in any direction and I just kept flooding the screen and I just was stunned every time I added 10 more and 10 more that it was not bogging down

and so that was I was like a kid in a candy store with the performance that that hardware could provide Yeah I mean I assume there were limitations to the hardware but did you find yourself budding up against those when you were working on stuff like NBA Jam? No, never. In terms of like not just display on screen but also storage capacity, memory?

No, no, never. In fact, we had some video clips. We played in the attract mode. You know, we did as many animations as we could, you know, process with our, you know, kind of simple, you know, art approach. We had to do a lot of hands, you know, touch up on all these frames

of those digitized frames. So we never really bumped into memory limitations or Mitch in the way of performance. I think back on Mutoid Man, when I would kill the Mutoid Man boss monster, a lot of blood would come out of his head area. And I purposely put so much blood there to get right to the edge of kind of bogging out.

So, you know, it certainly had limitations, but easily managed. Thank you. logistical challenges with NBA jam were not hardware limitations, but just manpower limitations. The process of digitizing so much footage of basketball players and getting, what did you say, like 54 players? Yeah, 54 players. And we had, you know, all the different head angles, you know, about 11 different angles on the heads.

And remember, this is before the Internet. And so we were looking at VHS tapes. We were looking at magazines. trying to get head angles for Dominique Wilkins or Spudweb or, you know, Matumbo. You know, we would be trying to find, you know, images that we could utilize. So even though you had the NBA license, you weren't able to just go to the players and say, hey, can we get you for, you know, an hour to take a bunch of headshots? No, we asked that.

and they kind of, you know, laughed at it. But, you know, these guys were, even then, were, you know, making big money, superstars, busy. But what it did do was it triggered the NBA in the next preseason during training camp. They hired photographers in each town, and they took, you know, what we call the mug shots, you know, the straight-on shots. for the players and those were of course used in on the TV broadcast as well as handed over to video game developers so you were part of that that process of nudging things along you become systemic basically yeah that's true is it weird to look at a big organization and think oh yeah I had had some influence on that yeah I never think about it that way but it's true

there's no question in my mind that we trained millions of players to appreciate the sport of basketball. It fundamentally has great rules with two-pointers, three-pointers, you know, shot clocks, periods, you know, passing, shooting. So it's got great rules just inherently, but I don't think all those kids were NBA fans, and they tell me that over and over. The NBA has actually confirmed that,

that a lot of people then became fans of the NBA based on, hey, I've been playing with this team because these two guys had the best stats, and now I see them on TV, and boy, that is, that does look like, you know, Carl Malone, and John Stockton really is fast. So we did have an impact on the success of the NBA. So with your digitized footage of, you know, player bodies and then heads kind of mounted on those, did you differentiate between, like, the actual bodies of general players? so, you know, like a shorter player would look shorter, or was everyone basically just one?

No, no. We had the ability to scale horizontally and vertically. So we would, Carl Malone, as an example, is a, you know, as a real wide, broad-shouldered, you know, six, nine type of guy. Whereas a guy like minute bowl is, you know, seven, four, and, you know, half his weight. you know, like super skinny, size 32 jeans, you know, kind of guy. And so we could stretch vertically and horizontally and adjust the flesh tones and change the heads and change their skills, their attributes, their animation sets. But you were still basically using one sprite that was just being distorted.

You weren't trying to necessarily capture their actual moves or anything like that. Well, we had, we captured four different apps. actors, ballers, basketball players. And they all had a unique, you know, gate to their run. They had, you know, unique jump shots and hook shots and dribbling. So what we did is we took all of those kind of puzzle pieces and we assigned them to different tables. You know, here's a table for a smaller guy. This is what he could do. Here's what he would do from these positions. And so there were a lot of tables of that individual players could point at. And then, of course, there were attributes specific to each player. So it felt in the end like maybe, you know, 20, 25% of the animations that every particular player would do were somewhat unique to him. So you didn't necessarily try to line up your animations with an actual player's play style,

but you did manage to differentiate and make it feel authentic. Yes. And in particular, though, we had hired, I found a baller, Willie Smith, was our star attraction. I found him, you know, playing in the inner city, invited him in. And he literally looked like Jordan. He had moves like Jordan. He could dunk like Jordan. He was an awesome athlete and basketball player. It's too bad Jordan wasn't actually allowed to be in the game. Exactly, yeah. He was initially. And so we had Willie doing all these moves like these other players. Dominique Wilkins had very distinctive style to his dunks. Jordan had very distinctive dunks.

And we duplicated those. So, besides, you know, the visual style of the game, which was very, you know, the visual style of the game, which was very, you know, flashy. Like, it was incredibly eye-catching in the arcades at the time. It looked so, quote-unquote, realistic. What else do you think set NBA Jam apart from the previous 10 years of basketball games? You know, it was pretty much 10 years since one-on-one came out from EA. Yeah, probably.

And that really sort of set the tone for basketball games. And I feel like, I don't know, like NBA Jam still stood out, and it wasn't just because of the graphics. Well, a lot of it, I think, really is the license in those, you know, when you would, every time I know I would do it, I would grab a new player. I would run him down to the bottom of the screen where he scales up as much as possible,

you know, because they'd scale into the distance and take a look at his head and kind of dribble him to the left, dribble him to the right, and go, you know, damn, that really looks like Carl Malone, or that is Scotty Pippen, or look at Horace Grant.

And so I'm sure that players really appreciate it, the having these superstar players that they did see on TV or perhaps we're fans of represented. So I think there was an immediate hook, the logo on the side of the cabinet, immediate hook. And I know that because whenever we do a coin-up game, you know, we go and we watch. And, you know, people walk up, they recognize it,

and they take money out of their pocket. And that's not always the case. Most of the time, there's a subset of people that go, ooh, new game, let me give it a shot. Most people wait until they see somebody else play it and go, okay, that's interesting. I'll give it a shot. You know, they save their 25 cents or 50 cents in this case. You know, we had raised the, amped up the prices around that time. And so we knew right then and there that it was attracting people.

So I think it's a combination. It's the brand. It's the logo, the characters, and the flashy visuals. Right. I feel like there's something about basketball specifically that really works in an arcade context, even with it just like a two-on-two game. Yeah. It's a much, it's a fast game. It's like really crowded, you know, as opposed to soccer where it's all spread out. Yeah. You know, football, baseball, those are very, they're almost like turn-based games.

Yeah, it's tough. You're right. So perfect rules for a video game. I've said that over the years that the just inherent rules of basketball are tailor-made for video gaming. But, you know, we, you know, as with any good game, you weave in interesting moments that keep them hooked. And that's what the dunks would do. That's what the on-fire would do. That's what the buzzer beaters, you know, would do with our kind of CPU assistance system. And so you kind of keep coming to the plate every couple of minutes with something new that they haven't seen before. and so it's really how you craft a game

is what gets that second and third quarter So you talk about sort of the realism of the game through the digitized graphics but I feel like NBA Jam stands apart because it's so unrealistic in a lot of it. I mean it is two on two professional basketball which of course doesn't exist but then you have stuff like the On Fire

you have the big head mode which I think the slides said operators could turn that on just as like the default for the machine They could. Yeah, they could. So, you know, I'm kind of curious, like, how much gatekeeping did the NBA do with this game to say, like, you're taking some liberties there? Yeah. They didn't.

In fact, I showed it on the slide presentation, the letter to the NBA once we knew we got the license. And one of the things was, hey, do you guys want to review the game? And there was very little, you know, correspondence or reviewing. you know, it's kind of like at the 11th hour they took a look at the game. And so they didn't certainly have a gate on what we were doing, but you're right. There's kind of an odd, you know, friction here where there's this over-the-top extreme action and this realistic, you know, kind of network broadcast style announcing names, license that, yeah, you wouldn't think would necessarily go together.

But, you know, in the era of Midway in that time frame, we were always trying to one-up each other. You know, very competitive internally. And a lot of, you know, we were driven to get reactions from people. You know, we wanted people to scream or to be shocked. And so, you know, doing the high dunks or the knockdowns or the fire was just as much in that vein of trying to get reactions as it was good mechanics. do you think anyone could create a game like this, you know, a licensed game that draws very heavily on the license and tries to recreate, you know, the players, but is also kind of wacky, has built.

No, it's very tough. But I tell you, the real secret is the hard work. The, you know, when I say that I worked 80 hours a week for our months, that would be an understatement. And every single move had, you know, tick counts for how many frames to stay on this frame, how high, how fast, the velocities, the tables of how often does the ball flash, how often does it get deflected, you know, the rim physics. So many nuanced decisions go into making a game like that that we were actually not even worried that the competition could compete because we knew we had put so much blood, sweat, and tears into that tuning

process that surely nobody else would be, you know, of that mindset. Yeah, I feel like the game kind of came out at just the perfect time to be what it was, because, you know, you did have the move into sort of like graphical fidelity, but not 3D. Right. So you still have this kind of, like a little bit of a cartoon abstraction to it. With just that element of realism, like recognizable characters, was it the first basketball game to have the broadcast style, the heads-up display or whatever it's called?

Sure, yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. No, we tried to lift that directly from the broadcast style at the time. And when you looked actually at what we did moving forward, whether it be with NBA Showtime or NFL Blitz, The camera moves we did, the presentation we did, actually influenced the graphics on the broadcast and their camera movements as well. So did you intend to become the sports guy at Midway? Did you just kind of fall into that? Yeah, I kind of fell into it, but certainly embraced it because I'm a huge sports fan.

So I'm a big basketball fan. I'm a big football fan. And so it was an easy win for me. But as I mentioned in the presentation this morning, we were really geeking out on just digitized imagery. So I worked with John Tobias on Smash TV and Total Carnage, great artists, but he wanted to go and test the waters with, you know, film and video and what you could do.

And so I had that same mind. set. And so basketball was a natural, well, you know, we could get real players. We could videotape cool moves because it's too hard to draw all those cool moves. That's twists and turns and arm movement. And so it was just a function of geeking out on digitizing, and that was the perfect platform. It wasn't until halfway through the game where Neil Nicastro, the president, said, hey, why aren't you pursuing the NBA? And it really really, hadn't even occurred to me because I was geeking out on, you know, just digitized graphics. And so I was surprised when we were actually able to work that deal out.

So what lessons, you know, from creating NBA Jam and what game design concepts did you bring forward into something like NFL Blitz, which is, you know, a sport that's very, very different in style and objectives than basketball? Yeah. A bunch of stuff. First of all, the turbo button. You know, seeing a player speed up, you know, slow down, when to use it, you know, meter running down. We use the same exact control scheme of three buttons. You know, the turbo in the pass and the shoot were used also for blitz. But the biggest takeaway for me was the communication to the player. You know, you are controlling this player. You know, here's your arrow.

Here's your color. here's your shoe color and when you run off screen people don't really notice this but your arrow floats along the edge of the screen but the farther you go off the screen the arrow pulls backwards

and so it actually creates distance between the edge of the monitor and you know where it's at and so that's an indication to the player on where he is you know, how far off-screen camera work is critical in these games, you know, the speed, the pacing. So a lot was taken directly from Jam and applied to Blitz.

Blitz to me is probably the best game. Blitz-99 is probably the best game that I've ever made. When players get deeply into that game, a four-player action, the variety, the speed, the pacing, the action. Uh, it's, it's really, you know, stands, stands alone. Um, I'm somewhat familiar with the NFL Blitz games. Did they start out as using like the digitized sprites in the NBA Jam style or did that start out with 3D models to be? Yeah, it's all 3D. Okay. So we, um, yeah, and the beauty, of course, of football is that there are helmets. And, uh, so we, we didn't have to do anything but a few, uh, flesh tones, you know, kind of a few different faces. Um, and then do the accurate numbers matching the NFL players and names.

So it was a lot easier to create that sense of authenticity. For sure. And it was 3D. So that was, you know, that's when we were geeking out on making a 3D game. And so it's low polygon counts. But, you know, keeping it 60 frames a second and keeping the action intense was the mission. So, you know, just to kind of wrap up, the sports games that you're known for working on with Midway, have a real high-intensity feel to them.

They're very fast-paced. They're very energetic, very physical. And, of course, the match three games you work on now are very much not like that. They're very sort of relaxing and play at your own pace. Do you see a way to kind of bring that high-intensity feel into the kind of work you do now, or do you think that there are just two ships that'll never...

It's a great question because it's a topic that comes up often. You know, I do have to think as close to the demographic of these match three games, and they are in an older group typically. They are more female, typically. And so a lot of things that I might have been inclined to do would be risky. And so it's something that I work at all the time, every feature. In fact, when we're making Match Three Games now, we always have a female point of view every step of the way and make sure that they're integrated into the process at every step, whether they're an employee or even external advisors.

And we think that's critical to, again, be close to the player, listen to the player. But a couple of years ago, we did a game called Ninja Kingdom. It was a Facebook game where you're battling, you know, castles and clans and so forth. And I had my fair share of explosions and, you know, body parts flying there. So I got a dose of it there. And now I'm really thinking about women. Also, I meant to ask, with NBA Jam, were there any players that you really wanted to get into the game besides Jordan that you couldn't? Was it hard to look at your favorite team, like the Pistons, and say, how can I get this just down to two people?

Yes, that's a great question, too. That happened a lot. And, you know, I've never really talked too much about this. I've taken a lot of heat over the years. But, and, you know, maybe it's not too politically correct, but we made some decisions based on the size of the players. So we might have said, well, this player is maybe the third. third best, but he's distinct. Whether it's size or even flesh tone, we would try to make the users be able to identify who they're playing with. Because the game is so lickety split.

It's so fast. In fact, that's the strength of the big head. When you have experienced players, they'll say, okay, are you going to be a big head or am I going to be a big head? Because one of us has to be, because it helps identify who you are in the mix. I mean, that goes all the way back to one-on-one, which was Johnson versus Byrd. You know, those are two guys who look very different. Sure. And so, you know, I take a lot of heat for, oh, how did you pick this guy? But some of it simply boiled down to distinction on the team to make sure that it was easier to play.

If we had two guys that, you know, looked too similar, then we found problems. So that gets back to my question, which was, what was the biggest heartbreak in terms of, I want this guy in there, but it just doesn't make sense. Yeah, yeah. Well, originally, you know, I wanted Dennis Rodman, and Dennis Rodman was a rebounding machine for the Pistons. The Pistons won the championship before Jordan. You know, they were shutting Jordan down for a few years. And Rodman was a big reason for that. You know, he played great defense. He was tough. They had an attitude of swagger. But, you know, I couldn't put him on the, you know, I couldn't put him on the, I couldn't put them on the team, you know, Isaiah, you know, Dumars, you had, you know, Lambere. So it wasn't until we got down the road a little bit and added more players where you could choose that Rodman made the cut. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, just to wrap, finally.

Can you talk at all about what your next project is or is that all still under wraps? Man, I wish I could. Some big hits even? Things people can look forward to. No, I can't. I can tell you that I don't want to get you in trouble with P.R. No, exactly. No, I can tell you that I believe that the game I'm working on right now

is going to be a top 20 game in the industry in over the next few years, long term. It's going to be huge. And I can't believe that I'm actually. actually working on it. It's like a dream. And so my life is, I'm in for a lot of excitement in the next few years. Okay. Well, I'm very intrigued now. So I will look forward to seeing whatever that turns out to be. Do you have an estimated ETA for that? Um, no. No, no. But, well, I'll, I'll say this. Within, you know, the world will see it, uh, within 12 months. Okay. Well,

I guess everyone can look forward to that. But anyway, I will let you go now. Thank you very much for your time and for this great conversation. I hope I managed to hold my own despite being a sports idiot. No, that's great. Love retro games.

Love this side of the business. So thanks for holding the candle. Absolutely. It's always great to talk to the people who, you know, were there making the games that everyone loves. So, well, thank you. Thanks for all the great work you've done. And thanks again.

Okay, appreciate it. The Muller Report. I'm Edonohue, with an Apoller Report. I'm Edonohue with an AP. News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly

fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.