Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 211: A Conversation with Rebecca Heineman

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Legendary game programmer Rebecca Heineman discusses her journey to becoming a game developer, her most interesting projects through the years, and what comes next.

All right. So, hello, and welcome to another episode of Retronauts, as usual. I'm Jeremy Parrish. And with me this week at Portland RetroGaming Expo, we have another video game luminary, Rebecca Heinemann, who also is known as Burger Becky, and has been, she's had her hands on all kinds of video games that we've talked about here on the podcast. So Rebecca, please just introduce yourself. Well, hi. As you said, Rebecca Ann Heineman. And I've been in the industry since, I don't know, the beginning of the time when we wrote our ones and zeros with rocks and sticks or punch cards or, you know, hopes and dreams began with debugging was actually, you know, pulling little bugs out of our vacuum tubes. But the start off in the industry by accident only because I was very good at playing Atari 2,600 games.

A friend of mine convinced me to play in this contest called the Atari 2,600 Space Invaders Tournament. I thought I would never be able to win because I had such, I had no self-esteem. But he convinced me to go. I then won the national, sorry, I won the regionals in Los Angeles. Then I moved on to New York City in November of 1980, and I won the Nationals, which may be the very first video game champion ever. After that, I reverse engineered the Atari 2,600, because I was so poor, I couldn't afford to buy cartridges.

So the only way I could play the Atari catalog was to pirate them. Okay. And because I learned how to program the. Atari 2,600 through just curiosity, trial and error, and my own dev kit I put together, I was then hired pretty much on the spot to work for the Avalon Hill game company. Okay. They made a lot of board games, right? Yes.

Avalon Hill was at the time getting on the bandwagon where everybody, like Quaker Oates, CBS, Fox, etc., was making cartridges for the Atari 2600, and Avalon Hill said, I want a piece of that. But like most of the other companies, is that getting a programmer who knew the Atari 2,600 was effectively at that time, you need to pay them like $100,000 or more just to steal them away from the companies they're working for. Then they find out that this young girl had reverse engineered the thing, was making her own cartridges, and no one taught her how to do it, and she was available for cheap because she didn't know what she was worth. So they hired me, and I literally worked for a minimum wage. Okay. But I taught them how to program the Atari 2,600.

And from that, we did a game called, I worked on a game called London Blitz. I still keep thinking in my head, UXB, because that was this working title. And even to this day, it's been 40 years almost, and I still keep thinking of it as UXB. And then another one game called Out of Control. But I was then lured away to work for Time Warner for Play Cable System. And when I got canceled, I then moved back to California where I just said, hey, I want to get a job and a friend of mine then said, hey, this is going to be called Boone hiring, where I then did some games for Zonics, which are their VIC-20 and C-64 games that were ported from their Atari 2,600 games and since I knew Atari, I was pointing it was Robin Hood. And Chuck Norah Super Kicks. Okay.

I've heard of the last one. Yep. And I did those for the C-64 and the Vick-20. Okay. But then I started working on some other games there, but then the company kind of imploded overnight. And then that's where Brian Fargo, Jay Patel, Troy Worrell, and myself were all looking at you're going like, well, we're unemployed. What do we do now? And so it's like, hey, this is former own game company, and that's how Interplay was born.

Okay. I didn't realize you were one of the founding figures of Interplay. I was. I'd say with Jay Patel, Troy Wharrow. We had an investor, a guy named Chris Wells. So the Wells Fargo's jokes flowed quite a bit. But he never actually, Chris Wells never worked in interplay. He just simply gave us the seed money. But then shortly thereafter, I went to work on doing graphic adventure games because I was inspired by games like Wizard and the Princess and Mission Asteroid. And that's where Mind Shadow and Treasure Sanction was born. And I went ahead and created. two games. We then sold them to Activision, which then gave us the next amount of money to keep us afloat. And then that's when I did games like a port of racing destruction set. Something very few people know, but I then worked for under contract with Interplay to do printer drivers for CPM machines. Then again, through Interplay, I went and did disc protection schemes. There was a company that did

disdplication, and I was hired through Interplay to actually create the software that will run the disduplication machines and apply copy protection for Apple 2 games, which is why 4 a.m. on Twitter keeps saying, hey, did you do this copy protection?

I go, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a fan of their account. They find some absolutely fascinating copy protection schemes, and I guess you had your hand in some of those, too. Yeah, it was either myself and I didn't even Roland Gustafson were the ones that were really prolific in creating the systems. Roland got more famous later on because his name was more attached.

But I was in behind the scenes because I was actually through a contract through Interplay to work for, I think it was a control duplication. So some brand X company who in turn made and sold their just duplication machines and they bundled my software with it. And every few weeks I would go there and say, hey, I came over with a new copy protection. you could sell so that when you use their services or people who use their machines, they could say, oh, by the way, if you have an Apple II product, we have 20 different schemes with different prices, depending on how insane you want your protection. And I was behind a vast majority of them. So you're not just a games programmer, but kind of an all-rounder.

Yeah, I mean, I, even to stay, don't limit myself to games. I mean, I've done in my career, hard drive drivers. I've done hardware. I've done a thing called Focus Inner Drive for the Apple II. I did a thing called the Quicky Hand Scanner. I did a set of printer drivers for the Apple IIGS called Harmony where I had to learn how something like 20 different printers actually worked so I could send the information to print.

Then I did things like I made a development kit called a sluggo for doing Super Nintendo Nintendo, Nintendo, 8-bit and Atari development, you know, using a ROM emulator. And, of course, you know, I did a stent recently with a company that does self-driving cars. And I was doing a lot of the problem-solving work behind that. So, and in addition to the more games than I can actually count. I mean, I still keep, I've actually, I think I've more forgot more games than I've written than I still remember. Yeah, your list on Moby games is quite impressive.

It's just all over the place. Tons of different genres, different systems, platforms. It's really impressive. Yeah, I think the only person even comes close to my number is John Romero. So, you know, kind of going back a little bit, you said you kind of got your starting games by reverse engineering the Atari 2,600. But that's not really like a beginner level problem. You don't start out by saying, I think I'm going to reverse engineer this hardware. So how did you get to that point?

Like, did you, you said you didn't have a lot of money, so I'm guessing your family didn't have a computer in the 70s because that was extremely expensive. Yeah, what had happened was that I was already estranged for my family back then. And I was living, well, to be blunt, I was living in a dumpster behind Market Basket in, uh, telegraph road. But it's, it's, the market basket stores long gone. But the, I used to live there and I was homeless for a little while because I couldn't stand being beaten by my, my parents. I mean, it was a horrible time. But eventually, I reconciled with my mother, moved in with her, which then gave me a place to stay. I got a job. My first job was actually at J.C. Penny. And I already dropped out of high school. I was like maybe 15, 16 at the time.

And I lied about my age and got a job at a gas station at J.C. Penny. And later on, I worked in the Toys Department because I knew Atari Games, which allowed me to, now I can talk about it. Borrow games at the store at JCPenney. I took them home, plugged them into a device I put together that I learned from BBSs on my Apple 2 that download the ROMs and I put the cartridges back in their

boxes and put it back in the store. So it was kind of a matter of not necessity, but it was a way for me to have a video game habit when I barely had enough money to eat. But the initial design of the ROM

emulator and ROM readers, I got them off a BBSs because I had I bought an Apple 2 used off of penny saver some guy near the LA airport I'm trying to remember everything about it but I know that he sold it to me for like half the price so either it was stolen

or his story was true in which he bought the computer found he really didn't need it and just wanted to get rid of it I don't know the story I know is that I bought a $300 computer for some like $600 bucks got took it home and it was just the computer

There's nothing else there, so I had to hook it up to a TV, but then once I was able to then eventually save enough money to buy a haze micromotum, I use it to get on the phone to BBSs. And then that's where I found things such as like, here's schematics on how to build this. This is how the ROM card works. So for them with that, RadioShack at the time had cards and boards and things so you can wire wrap your own pieces, and I started doing that. either through books I grabbed at the library or mostly text files I downloaded from BBSs to tell me this is what a 7404 chip did. This is what a 7400 chip did, et cetera. And then from that, I designed a card that allowed me to read cartridges for the Atari 2,600, so I can save them off the floppy disk. At first, there were cassettes.

I saved them all everything in cassette, but then later on it moved up to a floppy disk. But then I made another card, which allowed me to move the data into the card. and then I had this fake cartridge I plug into my Atari-2600 and then I could play the games. And with that, I pretty much got every single game imaginable. And one day, I realized that when I was looking at the ROM, I was just dumping the ROM in the Apple II,

the disassembled in the Apple II, disassembled 6502 code, which coincidentally is the same processor in the Atari 2600. From that, I then taught myself how 6502 assembly worked, And then later on, just by saying, okay, here's a cartridge of combat. What if I change this one byte, upload the cards, and see what happens? Made meticulous notes until eventually I realized this is how the machine worked. So literally self-taught with all this programming. And from there, you branched out to, I assume, lots of different systems.

You said VIC-20 and Apple 2. Apple 2, C-64, a PC, Apple 2-GS. I've literally programmed on over 30 platforms to date. I know a lot of those were also 6502 systems, but clearly not all of them. So you basically just continued learning assembly for different systems. Yes. In fact, I programmed exclusively to assembly until the early 90s. Every single game, like one of my Coup de Gras is a game called Dragon Wars.

Dragon Wars for the PC was written on a cross-assembler. I wrote on the Apple 2, and I taught myself Intel, assembly just to write that game. Okay. And that's why if you ever look at the PC version of Dragon Wars, it's a Dragon.com instead of an Exe file. It's because I didn't have a linker for the Apple 2 because I was writing it. So I wrote it as a com file. It's just raw binary.

And as proof, if you take the Dragon.com file, look into it in like a hex editor, the very first line on it, in Aski, you can read saying, created on an Apple 2 G.S. Apple 2 forever. It sounds like, you know, from what I understand, from what I understand, you know, from what I understand, you haven't always been just a programmer, you've also gotten involved to some degree with game design. So what are some of the projects you've worked on that you're really proud of the way the design went up? Well, I've always been game designer. I just happen to more focus as a programmer, but like story beats with Mind Shadow,

with Tracer Sanctuary, with task times, and tonedown, and so forth, I design parts of those games, you know, and anywhere from the user interface to the game mechanics, to many puzzles, especially when it came to like a good example is with Dragon Wars is that the story it was given to me by Paul Connor was pretty robust but when you actually start implementing the story you will then find but what if the player does this

and there's no story for that I had to write that and I changed the thing and it was also parts of the story which I changed myself because it was either it just worked better with the engine and what was trying to be presented so that it was a good compromise from what was originally presented to what can be done. Same goes with like for Bart's Tale 3.

Mike Stackpole gave me the storylines that he wanted there, but I changed quite a bit of it in order to make it fit like things are less wordy. Again, lots of scenarios, what if scenarios which I had to create like, well, what if a thief solved this puzzle? How do I deal with this? How do I deal with that? And all those things that are right, I basically had to write about. 30 to 40% of the text in that game because it was filling in blanks that just weren't there initially.

So when you were at Interplay, you worked on a lot of games. Were you involved with Wasteland? Yes. I did tools, the art tools. The game itself was designed by Mike Stackpole, Liz Danforth, and Ken St. Andre. It was a couple other designers as well, mostly level editors. But at the time at Interplay, when we first founded the company, I was responsible for doing a lot of tools, such as like when we did mind shadow tracer sanction, I'm the one who wrote the

art tool that actually used the graphics tablet to be able to draw all those images and that tool just kept morphing and morphing and morphing and it's what we used to do the art for Bardstale, Wasteland, pretty every Apple 2 game that we did. It eventually became its own product.

We called it QuickDraw for all things. It was released in 84 by Mastertronics, I think it was. But that art tool, which I wrote, so if you ever get QuickTrow, draw from Astrotronics for the Apple 2 art editor. That's my program. And it was based on the art tool I made for Interply. Is that different than Quick Draw that was in Apple Mac systems? Just same name. I just happened. We just happened to use the name before Apple locked it down

with trademark patents, whatever. Right. So by creating tools, you basically made it possible for other people to do creative work without necessarily knowing assembly language and the ins and out to the computers. Yeah, I was very focused on making it so that the artists who used the tools didn't have to know a line of programming whatsoever. And I even did things like in the art tool for the original Mindshadow. The way the art tool worked was it recorded your keystrokes and you recorded your line motions.

So that instead of saving the bitmap of the entire piece of art you drew, I saved the lines that you drew saying, okay, point to point to point, then color fill here, color fill here, so that therefore, like the original Wizard and Princess, you could save easily twice to four times as many pieces of art because I'm redrawing it. It even had inside of it that before it saved the file, it went through your strokes and removed duplicate strokes and things like that so that it actually did compression to the actual line files so that it was even, even, smaller than that. It's what allowed me to have so many

pieces of art on a single floppy. And you were using a graphics tablet? Originally, it was a graphics tablet. Later on, I did a mouse interface for it. But it was mostly a graphics tablet. We used an Apple graphics tablet. It's remember having one of those on my desk, but also Todd Kamasta. And David Lowry, David Lowry is our first

artist, and later on it was Todd Kamasta. And, yeah, so they were doing all their art on the graphics tablet, but the tools was the ones I wrote. Okay. So it sounds like you've worked on a lot of ports and to me that that's really interesting because I feel like

that's sort of treated us as an unglamorous job in games. People always talk about who's the creator, who's the person who came up with this idea. But, you know, without people making ports, then you're kind of limited to whatever platform the game originally came out on.

I'm curious. I'm curious. What's your philosophy on creating ports of other people's work? The trouble is that when doing the ports, there's several skills that you have to have that you normally don't have when you are creating a game from scratch. For one, is you have to have the ability to look at somebody else's code and be productive with it in it within hours. Most people can't do that.

They look at a code base and they get like, I have no idea what I'm doing here. Whereas I have to go in there and say, all right, this is how they're doing the drawing. This is how they're doing the file system. It's how they're doing this. that's a talent number two is that

there are technical challenges like one of my things I had to deal with especially when it's doing all those Mac games because I did like 30, 35 Mac games back in the early 90s was that most games are done on the PC using a technique called Little Indian

where the bytes are the lower bytes than the higher bytes for a long number on the power PC or the 68,000 they're reversed. So even though the code I could just compile the code as is on the Macintosh. It will not run because it's loading in data from the disk.

And when it's trying to read a number that's bigger than 8 bits, the numbers are wrong. I had to go through all the code and find every single place where it loaded in data and put in a little patch piece of code saying, if I'm on a Mac, flip the bytes around. And that's a very unglamorous and tedious job. But that was something that had to be done to get anything to run on a Mac. And then secondly, the games would be using APIs, they'd be using the operating system with functions that don't have an equivalent on the Mac. So either I have to create that or an example, a PC program we were using DirectX5, DirectX7, which draws the graphics in one way. But on the Mac, you used either a thing called Rage, which was their Quick Draw 3D, then later on it was OpenGL.

both of those techniques are they have similarities but they're totally not the same so I would have to say okay

on the original game I want to draw a cube here's how they did in DirectX5 I have to write that exact same function accepts the same

parameters so the game thinks it's calling direct X5 but I have to translate it to whatever is the same equivalent on the

Mac using OpenGL and that again it requires a lot of memorization of what the difference are between the two systems, the ability for you to mimic somebody else's expectations when they call a function. And at the last moment is that many of these games,

they expect me to get these things done in like weeks. I rarely got more than three months to do on these ports. And because they expect, oh, we're only going to sell 20% of the game on the Macintosh, and we want to make the money from the Mac version, but we just don't want to pay for actual development because we already pay for the game. Why do we want to pay for it again?

And I'm sitting here in a room going like, oh, kill me now. Yeah, I've read some of your anecdotes about porting games, especially I think the doom to 3DO is probably the most famous of those. It certainly has been spread far and wide. But these stories are always fascinating because it seems like there's a lot of factors you have to deal with beyond just the technical factors,

the human factors seem equally stressful when dealing with ports. Yeah, because unfortunately, a lot of managers or company owners don't really grasp what it takes to get something done. They just think that, oh, since the game runs on the PC, you should be able to get this done on the Mac in an afternoon, which is the furthest from the truth. I mean, the Doom 3DO port was a perfect case of somebody who thought that all you do is put the disk in the 3DO and automatically run. And it's like, no, that's not how it works. Other ports were born because I took it as a challenge to prove it could be done. Most notable was a game called Out of This World. That was originally done by Eric Chahy on the Amiga.

And it was using the Amiga's capabilities full bore. So it was like saying, okay, this game can only be done on an Amiga because it's the only machine capable of doing it. But when I looked at the game, I said, oh, I could do that on my Apple 2GS. Yes, and they thought, of course, I was bragging or something. But I just happened to know the differences in hardware and says, you know what, there are techniques and shortcuts I could use to get the speed to duplicate what they had there. So they just said, no, this game cannot be done on an Apple 2GS, let alone a Super Nintendo. So I grabbed the source code, lock myself in my office.

Two weeks later, I had a functional prototype of the opening scene of out of the this world running on my Apple 2GS is right about half the speed in the Amiga but that was something I just threw together in two weeks and that is how I got the green light to do the Super Nintendo version of out of this world otherwise had I not done that demo that game would not exist okay well that's how I discovered the game myself so I'm glad that you managed to get that made yeah that was a that was a revelatory experience playing that game on a console because it seemed you know it had that kind of high-tech polygonal style similar to star fox but without all the hardware inside of it. It wasn't

super hyped up the way Star Fox was. So it was a really impressive game to play. Yeah, and the thing was that most people when they first see the game without knowing its history, the first thing they think is I have a super effects chip in there. There isn't. That is just a standard

512K ROM. There was no chip in there and it was all because when I did the first version on the Super Nintendo, I was planning on using the Super Effects chip, but then I was told, I can't use it because it's too expensive. I tried fast ROM. I was told it's too expensive.

I tried to use a DMA into a RAM chip. I was told too expensive until finally they then told me flat out. No, we want to use the cheapest cartridge possible. Can you make this game run at the speed that it can? And I had to use every single trick in my magic book of tricks to get that game to run at the speed it does on a Super Nintendo without hardware assist. You know, I'm very proud of what I did. But as a programmer, I look at it's like, this game could have been so much better had they let me use some of these extra hardware assists. Right. And I know that was that was kind of a big problem, especially in the Super EniS era, because you had these advanced maver chips and, you know, special capability chips, but they cost a lot.

And publishers were like, well, we'd like to sell our game for $50 or $60. Nintendo can, you know, cram this stuff in there and sell it for that price because they're making it. But everyone else, you know, you had companies like Squarespaceoff publishing games that were 80, And most publishers looked at that and were like, oh, no. So, yeah, so I think there were a lot of games that were not what they could have been because just the costs were prohibitive. Yeah, and it was also something that wasn't really well known, but anybody who was a publisher knew this quite well.

Nintendo had a business model that made it very difficult for a third-party developer to actually put games on the platform. And this was because we would spend X number of dollars to develop a game. once that's done we have the game completely finished ready to ship we still had to send this ROM to Nintendo with a very very large check and buy all of our cartridges in advance we then had to wait anywhere from three months to six months before our cargo container would show up on our doorstep with the cartridges

for us to sell but during that entire time we have a very large amount of money tied up you know waiting for these cartridges so a lot of companies, what it is. They took short-term loans or things like that. And sadly, if the game bombed, Nintendo is no backsees. You can't return anything to Nintendo. You're stuck with it. And, of course, if your game sold really well, like what happened with Out of this World, when we found that the game was selling like hotcakes, we couldn't reorder it quick enough. So we actually lost a bunch of sales only because we couldn't get, we couldn't restock the shelves because we had to wait for the cartridges.

I mean, they eventually all sold out and so forth. We did quite well with the cartridge, but we could have done more sales and more money if we could actually have had a local cartridge manufacturer with a one to two-week turnaround time manufacture cartridges as we needed them. Right, but they demanded everything be done at their plants in Japan. Yeah, their plants in Japan,

and giving them all the money up front. Like we ordered 30,000 cartridges. They said, great, pay for all 30, 30,000 today. Otherwise, you will not go into the factory order queue. Yeah, that's a story that I don't think, you know, people really realized at the time that the Super Nias was on the market, you know, not the, not in the public, but a lot of people have come out and have said, yeah, this is how it was.

And, you know, from what I understand, a lot of developers, a lot of publishers, you know, lost their shirts on kind of these basically taking a bad gamble and even, even really close Nintendo partners like Capcom and Acclaim were like just lost buckets of money on their Super Eniast cartridges at the end. And I think that really, really hurt Nintendo going into that following generation. Yeah. I mean, they tried it again with the GameCube because they had a proprietary format of their CDs, so you had to press their discs with Nintendo. Whereas other companies were more lenient. Like Sony, while they had that wacky red-colored CD. They had something like about five or six different companies that were licensed to manufacture the discs so that you had much quicker turnaround times. And 3DO, at least they did it right. What they did was that we would send them a CD of the finished game. Then we sent it off to them with a small check, very small, relatively speaking. But what they did is they mastered the disc and they gave us what they called.

the encrypted master. We can then take that disk to any CD duplication house. Now, of course, if you try to read the disc, it's all gobbledy cook. But what means is that you just say any CD house, can you press me a couple hundred copies of this? And it's a sure thing, and here's a couple of hundred copies. And at that point, if the game sold really, really well, at any time, we'd go to any pressing house and just press some more.

Now, granted, the companies we could use had to sign some sort of agreement that any number of copies they printed, they would tell 3-D-O so then they would know how much to bill us for their royalties. But at least the turnaround time from a golden master to the game hitting the store shelves

is like a couple of weeks. Whereas, you know, a six-month time from finish the game to store shelves hurt. Yeah. Yeah, the Nintendo cartridge shortages were quite a frustration for us kids back in the 80s and 90s,

just because, you know, there was that gap. A game sold out, and the next bat would be along, maybe in a couple of seasons. Yep, whereas Nintendo, because they own the factory, if a game sold really well, they got precedence over... Guess who gets pumped at the front of the line. Yeah, I guess who gets pumped at the front of the line. And that happened a few times, too. Going back to out of this world, I feel like, you know, there weren't a lot of people who probably could have pulled that off.

And it makes sense to know that you were behind that because you were one of the very first developers in the West for Super NES. It's not. Actually, I think RPM Racing was the first Western developed game published for the system. And that was all because I went out and learned Japanese specifically to read the manuals. Really? What had happened was is that... When you say manuals, you mean like the dev kit manuals? Yeah, what happens at that Nintendo at the time was very xenophobic. And even though the 8-bit Nintendo was already established and everybody in America was doing games for it, the Super Nintendo, they were kind of holding it to themselves.

Now, as a concession, they gave us manuals to the Super Nintendo almost around the time they launched. But all the manuals were in Japanese. And they then said, well, we will be able to translate them for you. However, it's going to take six months to a year before we get around to it, which was, in my opinion, it was a tactic for them just to delay American developers from competing with them in Japan. Well, I was already in anime and already had a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese. So I went to a Japanese instructor and in like two or three weeks of intense training on how to read katakana, hiragana, and mastered completely with some kanji. I mean, I didn't have to know fluent Japanese at the time, but I needed to know enough that in the manuals, most of the words are English anyways.

They were just written in Japanese script. So once I had that, I said, okay, here's the instructions, here's the register sets, here's what they do, and occasionally I took a page to my teacher and says, can you help me translate this? And with that, I then said, this is how the Super Nintendo programs made modify my Sluggo dev kit to work for the Super Nintendo, wrote some sample code, and then gave that to the guys at Silicon and Synapsis, i.e. Blizzard, which then used that to start developing code for it. Funny story was the documentation we were given was a very early draft. It had on it a mention that there was only 32K of memory inside of the Super Nintendo for Scratchpad RAM. We didn't find out until later, when we did get a more updated version of the manual, that there was actually 128K. So when we wrote RPM Racing, the game was designed to only run in 32K. So it could have been a much more...

It could have been a better game. had we known, but it's just one of a little fun facts that, because I did pull up the documentation, no, it says right there, 32K, it translated it properly. But they then said, no, you had an early draft. Nice of them to tell you. Nice than tell us. But later on, we

got the final drafts, and then eventually they gave us the stuff in English, and then it eliminated the guesswork. And one of the other fun facts about RPM racing was that the managers at Interplay were convinced that since

the game was going to look it's going to be unique because it has a track editor and so forth but they also wanted to have a different mode because the Super Nintendo had all these different modes so they were saying we got to have this game in 640 by 240 interlaced because we want to have the first high res game

because everybody was doing it 320 by 240 and even then I was telling him this is a really really bad idea but nope I was outvoted and that's what we had our marching orders so of course when the game shipped, everyone was complaining about how it was all blurry because of the interlace mode and also because of that mode, we had to spend so much more memory on graphics because they

were really high definition, which caused the game to not look as good as it could have. Now, we took our lessons and when we did later on rock and roll racing, we then went back to 320 by 240 and updated. Because Rocker Racing was what RPM racing should have been, had we not been shot in these. It's one of the most revered racing games on the Super NES, but RPM racing is a really fascinating game because I think it is the only game on the system, at least released in the U.S., that runs entirely in the mode-5, high-resolution mode. Like, no one else did that. Yeah, and for good reason. Yeah, I mean, you can definitely see that it has an impact on the graphical quality.

The colors are really, like, low, you know, there's a, like, the color palettes are really limited. And that's a function of the actual mode itself, right? By bumping up the resolution, it basically got some colors, like four colors at a time. Yeah, it was only four colors per pixel, so have 16. We had to, the images were really high res. And unfortunately, because of the way TVs worked at the time, 320 was really the color resolution that TVs ran. So you had this artifacting and blurring that made the game really hard to look at because it was so blurred. And this was all, again, because of a management decision that was like,

you know, that's again, back to my history. It's like I've always had to have deal with managers that just didn't get it. But since they were writing the checks, I had to do as I was told. But it was a split-screen game, too. Did that cause extra headaches? Oh, yeah. It caused headaches. But in this particular case, the headache of split-screen because it was a vertical split-screen actually worked with the way the Super Nintendo worked.

So it really wasn't that big of a deal. What really was the problem was just the mode itself. I mean, you saw rock and roll racing, you know, it had the same mode. It's just that, you know, it's much easier on the eyes. Right. And that's because of mode, I don't remember the number of the mode, but it wasn't mode five. Right. Yeah, the Super NES is a pretty weird little piece of hardware.

So it's especially impressive that you managed to figure it out based on just like pulling things from Japanese. But could you explain what the sluggo system was? You've mentioned that earlier. And I think you've mentioned it. in the YouTube exchange we had, but you haven't actually said what that is here on the podcast. I think a lot of listeners have never heard of it. It was a ROM emulator.

That's all it was. You hooked it up. It was a box that I designed and built. And I had a friend of mine. We had a company called Parsons Engineering. And we built something like about 70 of them and sold them to numerous companies as a side project. Interplay bought like about 10 of them from me. And all you did is you hooked it one into your parallel port on your PC.

your Apple 2, the other end goes into the sluggo, and out of the sluggo comes two sets of cables. They're supposed to emulate two different ROMs, and we had these things called ROM personality modules, and what you do is you plug the cables into the module, and one plugs into a Super Nintendo, another one plugs into a 8-bit Nintendo, another plugs into Atari, I had an television, there was something like eight or nine different cartridge-based systems, because the whole idea was you only needed this one ROM emulator, and it emulism, like up to 512K of memory. And with this one device, you can pretty much use as a dev kit for just about every single

ROM-based console that was available at the time. So that seems like something that would have been in high demand if more people that could have gotten their hands on it. Yeah, but at the time it was released, though, the consoles that used cartridges only lasted another couple more years. I think the only cartridge that came out later was the N64, but then, After that, the demand for a sluggo was just gone because everybody was going to see these. Right.

So even, like, for handheld systems, which did stick with cartridges and little mini-cards. Yeah, I used the sluggo to develop the Z-80 game, sorry, the Game Boy Game, Trackmeat. Yeah, that's my one-and-only game I did. Oh, okay. Other than more recently, there was a game called Minecraft or worked on with, but that's, like, last year. But that was for the DS, the Game Boy DS. Okay. I didn't realize, the 3DS?

Yeah, 3DS. I didn't realize you had worked on Minecraft, that port. Yeah. Well, there's another person in this room also worked on it, too. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, I do remember that now because it was with other ocean. Yeah, other ocean. Okay, okay.

Okay, that's great. Yeah, my name's in the credit. So if you want a proof, there you go. Well, I had moved on to the switch version by that point. But, you know, it's great that it's out there. I have a nephew who is in love with Minecraft and with a 3DS. So, yeah, so I gave him a code for that, and he loves it. Yep.

But before many, many years ago, I did a game called TrackMeet, which in and of itself, I have a video on YouTube about the horrors of that particular game. We'll begin back to managers who don't get it. Thank you. So, did you have any particular systems that were your favorite to develop for? Oh, yes. My favorites, absolute favorites, are the Macintosh, the early MacOS 9, Macintosh, the early macOS 9 Macintosh and the Super Nintendo. Really, the Super NES, despite all the headaches that you experienced. Mostly because my absolute favorite machine to develop for was the Apple 2GS.

Okay. That was the machine that had Apple not killed it off, and was still in existence today. I would probably be still programming on it, but that's not what's going on. But I made something like about 30 to 40 Apple 2GS games. I did Ultima 1. I did Wolfenstein 3D. Task times in Tone Town Town, Borrowed Time, Mind Shadow, a Sim City prototype, Space Ace, just a whole slew of games on that platform. And I just was churning them out because that was both my development system and the machine I just really fell in love with its architecture, which was why the Super Nintendo, because it used the exact same CPU, it was just, you know,

a little bit more hardware assist was why I just jumped into that platform so well because it really was the closest thing to an Apple 2GS without actually having to do anything with Apple. Well, you know, I've always felt like there was this kind of simpatico between Nintendo and Apple, not maybe deliberate and definitely not, you know, anything formal, but I always feel like Nintendo's always kind of

walking a few steps behind Apple. One word, Pippin. Yeah, well. So that was one place where Nintendo's, was ahead of Apple, but, yeah, I feel like just their kind of design aesthetic and a lot of their general philosophy, even down to, like, they really like closed boxes. Yeah. Like, it's, it's very similar.

So it's interesting that there is that kind of material connection between those two systems. Well, it's also, they have, Apple and Nintendo has a similar in philosophies in the sense that Apple wasn't really planning, especially in the McIntosh years, the early Macintosh years, they weren't really focusing on saying that they were a computer company. They were trying to say that they were making It's a computer to help you do things But it's really the doing things that focus Whether or not you're using it to do a desktop publishing

Whether or not you're using it for video processing They were just focusing that Oh, you want to do desktop publishing Well, we have a computer does it But you're really focusing on buying the software And hardware necessary to do desktop publishing Nintendo was saying We're not making video games

We're making toys They just happen to be in the form of a video game like when they were releasing things like the Wii and so forth you know, sorry, not the Wii, the original Wii. The whole thing was how can we make a cute little toy where you just

move around this baton to play simple games? And when it was first introduced, people were laughing at saying, you can't play Call of Duty, the machine is underpowered, but they're saying but we're not making a video game, we're making a toy. And that's the base philosophy

that they had, which even to this day is that when you see the things that Nintendo comes out with, when you look at it from the point of view of they're making a toy, then it makes sense. Yeah. No other company in the world would make Labo. That's just like such a Nintendo kind of thing to do. For better or for worse. For better for worse.

But the thing was that they're laughing all the way to the banks. So obviously they're doing something right. Right. So do you have any particular systems that you really hated working on that you would never ever want to have to go back to again? The Jaguar. the hardware was so buggy I did prototypes on it

and never shipped a game on it but it was just the underpowered and overpowered at the same time it was essentially every single design decision you could possibly imagine that was wrong

was done in the hardware of the Jaguar the other one would be the Sega 32X Sega Saturn with the additional hardware the cartridge is like what the hell were you coming up with when you designed this machine with the SH two processors and 68?

It was all these different pieces of hardware just kept on adding and adding. And it's like, what is wrong with you people? It's just so hard to work on. And, of course, then Sega overnight redeemed themselves by releasing the Dreamcast, which to me was like, they heard us. The angels call from on high. This is the machine that I have been waiting for. And then they cancel it.

Right. And then I crawled and sobbed. Well, I think the 32X and the Saturn kind of did them in and Dreamcast was too little too late. Yeah. But it is interesting because, you know, I do feel like Jaguar and Saturn both kind of were built around the same design philosophy. If you can even call it a philosophy, just like slap a bunch of things together and hope it makes a really powerful system. Exactly. But I've never heard happy stories about developing for either of those systems.

For good reason. and I'm on board with the same philosophy of what were you, you've been smoking some good Ganges when you came up with this design because no sane person would design a machine this way. So I feel like, you know, these days there's been a lot of convergence in hardware. Like most things seem to run on, you know, kind of a similar family of processors. Is there any particular current, like, you know, system that is currently on the market that stands out to you as being

especially interesting to program for? What's the most interesting to program for? Right now, it's like, you're correct in the convergence because, like, programming on a PS4 versus Xbox 1 is like you're almost programming the same machine. But then you can even say that again with the previous generation, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, where the PlayStation 3 had the cell engine,

the main CPU, the PowerPC, was from the same die. So they were, again, very similar things between them, whereas today, and even cell phones these days, is that while one's running under iOS and the other running Android, the actual hardware, they're both running ARM CPUs, they're both running very similar architectures that there really isn't much to differentiate at the level level of the operating system level. I'm actually more excited about working again on some of the newer, more lower-end platforms like the Nintendo Switch. I really enjoyed programming a game on that one, which hopefully will ship after a certain licensing gets ironed out. But it was going back to, okay, we got a single CPU, we got a single GPU, and just program the game. It really reminds me of when I was doing my macOS 9 programming because the operating system and stuff was just simpler. They really wasn't having to deal with, like today, when you're running code on the Xbox 1 or the PS4, in order for you to maximize performance, you have to write your code on 8 CPU simultaneously, which requires a mindset, which may or may not even be necessary for the game, whereas when you're doing stuff on the switch or even for many cell phones, it's just going back to a simpler time.

It really reminds me of programming in the retro years, except now I have modern tools so that I have less frustration when things crash and don't work. I can at least with modern tools find out what's wrong quickly. We're back then, I'm like, okay, a needle in haystack, very large haystack. Right. Yeah. So I kind of feel like that sort of leads into what brings you here to Portland, the Intellivision Project, or at least that's one of the reasons you're here.

Yes, that is one of the reason. And it seems to be, to me, like, that kind of brings together a lot of the things we've sort of touched on, like the general expanded audience of we and the more simplified programming approach and hardware approach. Can you talk a little bit about the, it's the amico, amico? Amico. Well, first, I'm going to say right out, I don't speak for them. Okay. Okay, I'm only speaking for myself. So anything I say is totally my opinion and my conjecture has, and it cannot be taken as.

anything official by AMICO. I am working with them, helping them with the design decisions and stuff, but mostly in the sense of making it easy for third-party developers such as myself to pick games on their platform. But I do like the idea, their base idea is that they're designing,

much like the original Nintendo philosophy, they're making a toy. They're not going to even attempt to compete against the big boys like Microsoft and Sony because that has never been their plan. Their plan is to go to the market of the Wii, which is, what kind of game console would you like to get Grandma? And I can say right now that if my grandmother was still alive, I would not buy her a PlayStation 4 or an Xbox 1.

I mean, the closest thing I would probably get her is an Nvidia Shield or an Apple TV. Even the Switch is out of her league. I would probably buy her a Wii, even though it's been out for 12 years. It's one where they're like, okay, this is the closest thing that she can do. And now finally, somebody's coming out with a console that is trying to say, hey, here's a console you can give a little Timmy or to grandma. And while it may not play Call of Duty, that was never its intent. Its intent is to play some simple little like Astro Smash or some simple games,

like simple bowling games, tennis games, that are just, hey, I want to pick up a game, play for 10, 15 minutes. and put the machine away. Yeah, I think it's interesting that they're approaching, you know, the same philosophy that Nintendo had with Wii and DS. But they're using sort of the Intellivision brand and the intellectual properties associated with that system for it. It's, yeah, it kind of brings everything back to sort of classic gaming.

It's an interesting, to me, an interesting future for the whole television brand because it's been kind of dormant for a long time. But I think there's still a lot of people who remember it. Oh, yeah. A lot of people remember to have, let's be blunt, we're at a convention where everybody remembers it. There's a lot going on right now about retro in general. I mean, look at the excitement of the film, Ready Player 1.

The film itself, the story in itself, was just another Willy Wonka retold. But it was all just a huge homage to 80s nostalgia, which includes things like a Kalikovision, because in the end scene, the young characters were playing a KalikoVision. One of the puzzles was playing Atari Adventure. And especially the older generations, we remember that stuff. And we kind of lost a lot of what made those games fun with games of today.

Because today, the games are either e-sports, which is really just one step away from professional basketball. It's not really a video game. It's a sport. Or mobile games, which is constantly trying to say, hey, for real money, you can move ahead forward. And it's like neither of those are experiences that have anything to do with what we did in the 80s. So making a console, which was essentially trying to make games, a play mechanic, and also a business model, very much like in the 80s. is something I personally applaud. Yeah, I, like I said before the podcast,

I've seen some skepticism about the amico from sort of the hardcore forums and quarters of the internet. But, you know, those are the same people who said we was going to be stupid and pointless and would never do anything. So I think they have a hard time imagining that people who don't have their gaming mindset can enjoy video games. But I'm all in favor of things that expand. gaming's audience, because it makes more gamers out there, people who will continue to

pursue video games and take interest in the things that are more kind of core to the, to the video gaming markets. To me, it can only be good. Yeah. See, the thing that this is not understood is the Amico is not meant for them. They just want everything to be made for them, not understanding that it's not all about them. these games from the ground up from the very conception of this console it was not to sell to people playing call of duty because if you like call of duty activism is sitting there right now waiting for the next version of call of duty to drop on your PlayStation 4 so there's already large companies right now waiting ready to take your money to give you the latest um player underground battle player underground battlegrounds player unknown battleground yeah that

That's it. So there's already companies serving their market. This is serving people who are not them. And the very idea of, I go with the idea akin of if I'm on a diet, it's not my right to make all donuts legal because some people want to eat donuts. And I am, this is not for me. So therefore, I shouldn't care about who buys donuts and who creates donuts. donuts. Because if I go to a store and I say, hey, where's my salads? And it's like, oh, no, we sell the donuts. Like, oh, you guys suck because you guys are selling donuts. That's how I look

at the way they're complaining about this platform. It's that, you know what? You really shouldn't be in a donut shop. If you want your salads, go to a salad bar because the people who want the donuts are going to get donuts. And that's what's going on here. I want to buy a video game for my very young children, or in my case grandchildren, and I would very much like to buy one of these for my six-year-old grandson because at least I know by their very philosophy that I don't have to worry about him seeing organs and body parts flying in space as they're going around shooting people out in a vacuum because those games don't exist on this platform. Now granted, when he becomes 12 or 13 and asks me for a PlayStation 5, I'm going to say, okay, but I'm going to tell

his father, you do understand there's going to be organs, and more than likely, he's probably going to say, bring it on. And I said, all right, here you go. Here's your PlayStation 5. And, you know, tell me what slang you've invented this time. But at least for the market I'm looking at today for what I would buy my six-year-old grandson, to be honest, the only real console I could see to buy him is the original we. All right. So I guess we'll wrap up here. I guess my final question for you is, are there any, like, dream projects you've had in mind that you've never been able to tackle? Or do you feel like your, your career has pretty much given you the latitude to do whatever you want? No. The biggest problem always to do my dream projects,

money. Because if I had, let's say some benefactor out there listed as podcast says, hey, I want to invest a million dollars into a video game with a person who has a dream. Talk to me. Because I have at least five different game concepts. One of them is the one I focus on the most. But the only reason I can't do the game is because I need to pay rent. And unfortunately, I have to take full-time work here and there in order for me to pay the rent. Because if I don't pay the rent, then I'm homeless again. And I've experienced that once in my youth, and I don't want to do that again.

But if for some reason I was able to say, hey, I could pay, all they want is to pay the rent, pay my bills. And in that case, I can then focus on doing this dream game that I've always wanted to do, which I'm doing in my spare time, but when you can only devote like one or two hours a day at most, it's progressing really slowly. But if I was able to do it, then I could have the game

done in six months to a year. And then, of course, pay for all the artists and musicians and stuff like that to get the game done. Because like, while I may be able to write the stories and maybe able to do design and code up the engine, I can't draw. And

artists, they too need to pay for the rent and the food and so forth. And unless I can pay them, that's what's really stopping me. I mean, if I had the money, and unfortunately, I don't. So there you go. All right. Well, hopefully you'll have the opportunity to develop some of those ideas that have been rattling around for a while.

I'm here's hoping. All right. Well, Rebecca, thank you very much for taking time out of your Portland Retro Gaming Expo to come and be on the podcast. Thank you. Where can people find you in your work? on the internet. I'm found on Twitter. Please follow me on Twitter as Burger Becky, which is like Hamburger, B-U-R-G-E-E-C-K-Y. My personal web page is Burgerbecky.com. Funny that.

I'm also on Xbox Live, et cetera, and Discord is Burger Becky. It's really original. And lastly, is my game company, Old School, which is spelled O-L-D-E-S-K-U-U-L.com. And that's where you'll find the latest happenings. And when we can announce things, both the old school Twitter page as well as the website will we make your announcements there. Okay, great. And as for myself, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me at GameSpite on Twitter and Retronauts, of course, at Retronauts on Twitter at Retronauts.com on iTunes and on the podcast, One Network. So thanks everyone for listening.

And thanks again, Rebecca, for your time. Thank you, too. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.