Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 234: Spider-Man 2 with Jamie Fristrom

Episode Date: July 22, 2019

The Retronauts East crew looks back at the legacy of beloved superhero classic Spider-Man 2 for PlayStation 2. Then, Jeremy Parish talks to designer/tech lead Jamie Fristrom about the game's creation.

As we can returnauts, our spider sense isn't the only thing that's tingling. God dang it. Hi, everyone. It's Jerry Parrish. Yeah, my arm is asleep. I don't think there's enough oxygen in this room. I think that's the problem. Hi, everyone.

It's another one of those episodes we're doing where we're talking about a game very briefly, and then the person who made the game is going to say a lot of smart things about it that we couldn't possibly know because we didn't make the game ourselves. So before you get to those dazzling insights, you've got to sit through us, Jokers.

Who are these Jokers? Actually, that's the wrong comic universe. I'm Ben Elgin, and we're not going to talk about what's tingling anymore. I'm Chris Sims. Whip? Good evening. This is Benj. Bensmr radio.

Ben Edwards. Okay, great. So, yes, we have doffed our secret identities to record as retronauts once again. And we are talking about the game, Spider-Man 2. Now, there have been many Spider-Man 2s, you say. That is correct. we are talking about the one that everyone loves, which we have covered in another episode of Retronauts.

That was a Bob and Henry joint because they loved them some comic books and stuff like that. We also do too, but I tend not to play a lot of comic book games. Chris, on the other hand, you love you some comic books and some comic book games, and so you know a lot about this game. But the difference is, unlike the previous episode in which we covered Spider-Man 2 in passing as part of a larger discussion on Spider-Man games. This one does have commentary by co-creator Jamie Fristram, who was one of the,

he was like the lead engineer programmer on the game and also a major lead on design. He kind of had his fingers on everything with Spider-Man, and he has a lot to say about Spider-Man 2. But in the meantime, we're going to set up the context here and talk about what was cool about Spider-Man 2 and what kind of game it was in the first place. I'm going to be able to be.

What kind of game was this in the first place? A good one. I don't think it's easy to make a good Spider-Man game. No, apparently not, because there's a whole lot of crappy ones. Well, it seems like it's hard to screw up to me. Like, you have to almost actively work at it because it's not like Superman where it's impossible to sort of recreate the powers. It's not like Batman where you have to sort of take away the core premise of the character

to get a good action game out of it. Like, Spider-Man is in a very good suite. spot of he is a character who's strong, but not the strongest. And he can jump high, but he can't know. I've, I've been reading vintage Marvel comics. And as of 1965, he was only, the only people stronger than him in the Marvel universe were Hulk, the thing, and Thor. That was 1965. It was 1965. Those were the only characters in the Marvel universe. That's not true. No. But like, Sue Storm was not stronger than Spider-Man. But, you know, he can't, he's not Superman strong. Right. And he doesn't fly. But he doesn't fly. But he's,

can still swing through the air. And you get the greatest of ease without a trapeze in his BVDs. Using technology. So, like, it lends itself very well to all these aspects. So you're a proponent of the web shooter as opposed to organic web spinnerets. Well, yes, because I'm gross. I'm right. What about Spider-Man 299?

Tom Miguel O'Hara? Yeah. He's fine. He's great. Okay. All right. Anyway, so you would think that it would be easy to make. a Spider-Man game. But, you know, balancing all those things and getting the freedom of

mobility that the character requires, that's difficult. I mean, there's a lot of games that have tried to do swinging mechanics, and very few of them are good. I know because I love Bionic Commando, and there are not a lot of games that do the Bionic Commando thing as well as Bionic Commando. Yeah. And the move from, from 2D to 3D really help that out. Because if you go back to, like the super Nintendo game that was based on the Spider-Man animated series. There's, there is web-swinging, like there's a level where you have to

kind of web-swing your way under the George Washington Bridge. But it's not like fun, because it's just another way of moving left to right, and you generally are in these areas where you have to fight people, so you're always on the ground.

And you see that in maximum carnage, in other Spider-Man games, that it's a core aspect of the character that you can't really recreate until you move into a 3D environment. The original Spider-Man game for PlayStation Dreamcast, I thought, did an okay job, but it was very much like a, oh, you can, you can swing. It's another way to move forward. Was that the one where you just basically, like, you shoot Webb up into the air and just assumed

that it hits something? Yeah, and that's the way a game has got to be. Like, it's not fun if you, if you, I feel like it's not fun. if you take that away in a Spider-Man game and a 3D Spider-Man game. Like, it's a fun plot point in Spider-Man homecoming that you take Spider-Man out of the city and all of a sudden he's like,

this sucks, but like when you're playing a game, you want to be like, this sucks. Well, you want it to be fun and you want to have freedom of movement, but I feel like the... I just thought of something. Spider-Man out of the city. He's powerless. He can't swing anywhere.

There's no tall buildings. He's a character specifically designed for New York City. I mean, spiders live in urban areas. So what happens if he put Spider-Man in like a suburban town with one-story ranch houses? He does not do well historically. He runs a lot and jumps, but he does not swing. But I feel like this game was kind of the first one where the technology got to the point that you could do like semi-believable web swinging in 3D. So instead of just like shooting your web dress straight up and like assuming that it hits the sky or something, it's actually connecting to buildings.

But they didn't make it so you had to hit the right point. They just made it so you hit the button and it just finds something good and does it. Right. And it seems like it pretty much works, which is cool. And that was kind of the first time they had introduced that mechanic. And again, I think it works. If you watch playthroughs online, you'll see a lot of people, you'll see a lot of people doing it wrong because what they want to do is make a direct path towards their objective. And so you get a lot of running across the rooftop and jumping to the next rooftop and moving in a linear fashion. But that's not what you're supposed to do.

Yeah, that's not the way Spider-Man swing. Yeah, you're supposed to swing through the valleys and, like, much in the same way that you... You've got to kind of follow the streets, yeah. Yeah, you eventually get to the point of the PS4 Spider-Man game, which has the best web swinging, which is the same way. Like, you need to be able to latch on to something. Like, you have to be low enough to catch a building or be around buildings that are high enough that you can catch them. And I think it works. And I think it makes the world feel more open than it is on virtually...

Virtually every Spider-Man game feels bigger than it is because of that. Whether it's the PS-1 Spider-Man game, the PS4 Spider-Man game, what was? Web of Shadows, which I think is great, which is basically the Walking Dead with Venoms. That game rules. But you get that feeling. And I think what Amazing Spider-Man 2 does really well for its era is the same thing that the best Spider-Man games do,

which is they capture the feeling. And in this case, it's not necessarily the feeling of, you know, being Spider-Man. It's the feeling of experiencing that very distinct 2000s era, Spider-Man. Like, this game has a lot of Samaramy humor in it. You know, it has Bruce Campbell as the tutorial voice. There's a lot of, like, there's a bit where you have to deliver pizzas, and it's playing the, like, the song.

As Spider-Man, you know, you. You know, you have, there's random events where you have to, like, catch a little girl's balloon. It's very much in the mold of what those Sam Ramey Spider-Man movies were at the time, which, well, people have cooled on them since because we've gotten 30 comic book movies that are better. I thought you were going to say we've gotten so many better Spider-Man movies, which is actually not true. We've gotten at least two. We've gotten two. A couple of, yeah. But, like...

It captures that feeling of those, which people loved at the time. Those were huge, huge hits, particularly for Marvel, particularly after years of Spider-Man rights being in a weird legal limbo. Is that due to Marvel's bankruptcy? Yes. For those of you don't know, in 96, 97, Marvel went bankrupt. And one of the ways that they came up with a bunch of cash real quick was that they sold off the film rights to Spider- man to basically all the characters anyone cared about they were stuck with bozos like captain america and iron man and you know who cares yeah the avengers who were not popular

yeah uh like the x-men were the big one and those obviously went to fox which has continued up to the point of corporate consolidation that threatens to destroy our society but at least we're going to get wolverine as an avenger out of it eventually they are well it's all disney is that a spoiler? No. Yes. That's actually how in-game. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to spoil for you guys. I'm watching it tonight. Okay. But yeah, like, I think these movies had that aesthetic, and I think the idea of putting you in a relatively free-roaming environment, again, it feels more free than it is because you're given this other tool to navigate. Spider-Man had never really had before. Yeah. And I think, I think this game, so for context, so I had, I had,

hadn't played this game at the time. I was thinking it recently. So for me it helps, because I'm old, like all of us here. So everything kind of passed 2000 blurs together. So I had to kind of put this in context. So this was 2004. It was the same year as GTS San Andreas and

Metal Gear Solid 3. Like we were coming up on God of War and things like that. So the whole free roaming thing had been going for a little while, but it was sort of still figuring itself out. This is an extremely post-GTA? It's definitely. Oh, it's very post-GAT. It's taking that formula.

But getting this swing to feel good means you end up moving really fast. And on a system like the PS2, that's a challenge because you're going through this huge environment and you've got a lot of stuff to render. Are you saying the emotion engine wasn't up to it? Well, so you see, so looking at this game, you see a lot of pop-in. Because you have the only way to pull this off is to do a lot of level of detail stuff. So everything that's farther out is rendering in really low-resolution textures, and you can see that, but as it gets close, you know, it comes into more detail. And it's really obvious, and sort of from a modern perspective, that's sort of distracting because we're used to now having much more powerful systems that can render high detail out to forever.

But I think they did what they had to to really pull this off, and it ended up working well. And you get this really great sense of motion that you can navigate through this huge space, you know, at your pleasure, you know, a really fast speed. And so I think they did a lot of good work to pull that off. Yeah, this is one of those games that I think would be nitpicked today by tech pedants who are like, well, you know, it's so, you know, the, the pixel rendering resolution isn't, isn't true 4K or whatever. And, you know, people get, people have a tendency now to get really caught up in extremely fine technical details and tend to overlook in the process. the feel of the game, the experience. And I mean, okay, if your experience is about counting lines on your television, that's fine. I'm not going to judge. That's okay, but that's not what I want. I want a game that just feels fun and energetic to play. It makes me feel like, wow, I'm,

you know, I'm doing something I can't do in real life. I can count lines in real life anytime I want. I have to manage our finances here at home. So yeah, let me tell you, that's counting happens a lot. But me swinging from buildings and clobbering criminals with my webbed feet or whatever. I don't do a lot of that. My web feet are very... Do Spider-Man not have web feet? You have been reading Spider-Man comics, you said. I got a little confused with Howard the Duck, I think.

They're very similar in a lot of ways. Lots of wise cracking. Lots of sex with Leah Thompson. The other thing I really like about this game, is something I found out actually relatively recently. It was before they settled on the story that ended up happening, which was kind of bad. There was going to be, like, when it was more

focused on the black costume and Venom, there was going to be a sequence in Spider-Man 3. It wasn't going to be a dance sequence, was it? The dance sequence is good, but we will talk about that later. But there was going to be a sequence where, like, Spider-Man was just going to, like, there was going to be a montage of Spider-Man fighting a bunch of different

villains. Like, Mysterio was going to be included is one of the reasons it's come up recently because Mysterio is going to be in the like Spider-Man movie. And I feel like that necessitates a world-first Spider-Man for the Toby McGuire Spider-Man that has more than three supervillains. And I feel like the games complement that really well. They're weird.

Mysterio is weird in this game. Like, he creates a weird gladiatorial arena. But out of what? Like, out of pure allusions. Gas and illusions, yeah. He's Mysterio. That's what he does. But I like that this is a game where it's like, hey, this is what the rhino would be like if the rhino showed up in a Sam Remy Spider-Man movie. This is what Mysterio would be like. This is what the shocker would be like.

Yeah, actually, that's a good point. And I feel like that helps, even though it's essentially following the plot line of Spider-Man 2 with, you know, Dr. Octopus, Alfred Molina, who's great. you get more that that bridges the gap between the movie and the comic in a way that I don't know if that had been done I don't know if that had been done

in any superhero game up to that point like certainly there was no like Batman for NES has KG Beast and Firefly in it but you wouldn't know it from looking at those sprites KG Beast KG Beast yeah

and it's like a pop singer There was some that just got really really wasn't there a 2D Spider-Man game where he ended up fighting Batman? Like, and all sorts of... That's Shinobi, Return of Shinobi, has Spider-Man and Batman as enemies. Oh, that's probably what I'm thinking of. Yeah.

That was from the Sega episode, Ben. That's right. That's right. Focus. Yeah, I like the idea of what you're saying as an extension of the Sam Ramey Spider-Man universe. You can play more of it in this game and see it sort of. Yeah.

Is that what you're saying? And it doesn't hurt that like, you know, Bruce Campbell's doing the narration until you do tutorial stuff and like dunking on you. Being very snarky about it, yeah. And Toby McGrath, Whyer does the voice of Spider-Man, so it feels... When are we going to get the Boba-Hotep movie? The Bo-Hot-Hot-Movie?

Yeah. Video-game? Yeah. Soon, I hope. Yeah, that's about all I have to say about Spider-Man, too. I really like it. I think it does... It sets out to do a lot of things that appear to be very simple, but are complicated to

pull off well, and I think it does them very well, especially given the time. Like, I think there was a real reason this game was a huge hit. I mean, like, the kind of... Combat seems fairly simplistic, but it seems like that's not usually the main point. Like, you know, like beating up people is something Spider-Man can do, but it's not like his raison d'et. Right. Yeah, it's all about putting him in weird situations.

Yeah. Taking them, hanging them up in their underwear or something, and taking photos of them to be in the daily bugle. Spider-Man's kind of into humiliation, actually. There's something wrong with that guy. I guess it's, you know, we see it online with people who got picked on when they were kids. He was a nerd. He got picked on by Flash Thompson, and now he's taking it out on other people who are weaker than him, just like you see on Reddit and so forth. Man.

How dare you? Sorry? I mean, you're not wrong. I'm just saying, like, there's a direct line. Okay, no, I'm really not. You just got into dark social commentary. Yeah, I'm sorry. There's, like, going back and rereading some of the early Spider-Man comics, it's really hard to empathize with Peter Parker as he was written by.

by Stanley and Steve Dicko. Dicko Peter's a jerk. Yeah, like he's actually like, yeah. It's really hard to like early Peter Parker. He softens up as he goes. But maybe people like jerks back then. I don't know. I don't know.

Like a culture change. He was definitely a different kind of character for sure. Yeah, I think it was certainly a new thing to see a superhero who was like that flawed as a person. And, and again, like, you know, Peter does. He was bitter. Like, he was, he's bitter. He's like, in the very earliest comics, he is one, one shade away from being, like, the villain who cackles and says, they'll be sorry. They'll regret the day they made fun of me.

But he misses that. This is actually what makes him an interesting character, I think, because he realizes, like, oh, you know, when I was just out for myself, my uncle died. That sucks. So there's, there is a, there is a bitterness to Peter Parker, especially in the early days that I think is a really. interesting part of his character. But once John Rameda shows up, 30 issues in, he chills out considerably once he graduates high school, which I think happened to a lot of us. He's relatable that way. You're like, oh, yeah, I understand why you were such a jerk, Peter. Anyway, this went off in weird directions, but Spider-Man, too, is a very cool game, and I regret

that I missed it at the time, because I feel like it's one that I would have enjoyed, even though my immediate instinct when I saw superhero games, and continues to be to this day to say, oh, that's probably going to be bad. This one wasn't. And the closest thing I really got to it at the time was a few years later with Crackdown, which was kind of the same thing except without the webs and also with more fascism. Anyway, I think that's about it for Spider-Man. We're going to let Jamie Fristram talk now and tell us about the cool process of making

this cool game. Actually, it might not have been cool. I think it was probably really tiring and difficult. But, you know, the results paid off. It's cool for us. It's cool for us. There's a cool game. And cool anecdotes about its creation materials.

The damage is done Give it up there Give it up there There's nothing left To take the rest Yeah You're training me I said a lot

I'm so bright Stop it out Yeah Stop it out in Yeah We're going to be able to go. All right. So my second interview for this game developers conference is Jamie Freestrum, who is probably most famous as the designer and technical lead and programmer of Spider-Man 2. You were like the all-around guy for that game, huh? I did a bunch of stuff on that game, yeah.

I feel like that's pretty unusual in this day and age. I mean, of course, you know, this was like 15 years ago. But still, like, that's a lot of hats to wear on one project. You don't really see that a lot. Yeah, I mean, it was still, it was like an 80-person team altogether. So having as big a thumbprint as I did was, I think, pretty rare at that time. That said, I kind of, and I kind of have been selling myself as the Spider-Man to you guys since then, but it is important to remember that, like, my work would have sucked if it wasn't for the rest of the team. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I don't think anyone thinks you're trying to diminish the rest of the team,

but, you know, you did play a lot of roles in that game. And so I'm interested in talking to you about kind of how it led to that point. Because you, you know, back in like the 8-bit days, yeah, you had one guy who did everything. But as games became more involved and more complex, I feel like, you know, you started to see much more of a division of labor between the creative direction and the technical direction. and it's so again it's it's kind of unusual to see someone straddle that divide yeah i think that's true so where did you get your start in gaming them like how how do you go from you know being a kid who presumably loves spider-man to a guy making a spider-man game and having his his thumbprint all over

the game yeah a lot of its luck um i went to college with peter acmen and don coleslu who, and Doan got me my first gig ever in the games industry. He worked for, he worked summers for a little company called Mindcraft, not Minecraft, not Minecraft, Software. They did some fancy role-playing games along the veins of Ultimate 2 and 3, called the Magic Handel series. And so I worked for them for a good stint. Later on in life, Dawn and Peter got together and formed Traiark.

And I was the second employee they hired. So I was in the right place at the right time when we got the Spider-Man contract later. And they needed a technical lead for the project. So when you were doing, you know, working on the Magic Candle games, how old were you? It was like college age? That was just at college. So started when I was 21, yeah. What kind of computer programming and development background did you have?

So I was a psych major. But computers had always been a bit of a hobby for me ever since I was in fourth grade, something like that. So not much. Like, definitely my peers were graduating, you know, from computer science degrees with a whole bunch more knowledge than I had. And if it wasn't for Don talking to the head of Minecraft and saying, you really got to hire Jamie.

You were making a big mistake if you don't hire Jamie. I don't know what I would be doing now. So what were you hired on the strength, though? What was it that made him say, like, this is the guy we got to get? Well, Donan and I, you know, as college students do, we talked together. We talked about programming together. He'd seen, I had made a hobbyist game on the Mac during my college years that some of the guys like to play. in our apartment in San Diego.

But really, I'm not totally sure what gave him so much faith in me. Like, I didn't have that much faith in myself, I don't think. Well, I mean, the fact that you were making games on a Mac is pretty unusual in itself. Like, that wasn't really known, even back in the 80s as a gaming platform. So, yeah, I'd love to know more about the game that you made because, you know, I've got a Mac. here and have always been fascinated, especially by, was this like a, like a pre-System 7 kind of game, like black and white? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. This was, uh, yeah, that's always really fascinating. This was back, this was back when, uh, my, my Mac mouse got destroyed by, I think it was called, what was it called? Shufflepuck Cafe. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Wrecked, wrecked the cord on my mouse. That was like the hot Mac game at that time. And the game, the game I made for the Mac was, uh, a clone of a strategy game, like I'm kind of a, uh, a game. d and d nerd and i played a lot of the fantasy trip by steve jackson uh and it was it was it was the the fighting combat of the fantasy trip basically stolen completely stolen like very little of my own creative uh stuff in there but it it played quickly it had a lot of the same things had to implement pathfinding uh it was a it was a good introduction to creating uh creating a

so i mean it sounds like actually kind of a natural transition to working on a game like the Magic Candle. I looked that up before this, and it's, you know, very much in that sort of classic PC-R-P-G style, for sure. Yeah. So what role did you play on, if you don't mind the pun, in the Magic Candle games? Oh, so I was the second full-time engineer. I mean, these were back in the days of the small teams, right? Just half a dozen people around there.

small dev cycles, too, like nine-month death cycles. So I came on, it was like, we need some, you know, cosmetic 8-bit pixel effects. That's a lot of what I started doing, just little special effects. Programmer art sort of deals, flashing bits and stuff like that. then a little, and then gradually more and more responsibilities, making gameplay happen, giving certain monsters special behaviors.

So you were programming and doing some of the art? I wouldn't call it art. It was procedural art, right? It was like flashing random pixels and stuff like that. Sure, but that's still, you know, there's still... Or the, or artists would give me sprites that I'd be, you know, cycling through and making movies out of or something like that. Okay, okay.

That makes sense. You said it was a while before, you know, between Magic Candle, I guess, three and the formation of Traiark, were you making games in between there? Or did you kind of think, well, that was fun, but I need to do something real with my life? Mostly making games. After Minecraft, I moved down in San Diego. I worked for Game Tech for a while. Worked for a park place. So did a Wheel of Fortune game.

did a casino game. Which Wheel of Fortune game was that? Deluxe Wheel of Fortune for DOS and Windows featuring Van der Waite, I think, was the full title. Yeah, actually, just on a personal level, I'm kind of curious to know more about park-place productions, because I've been doing a lot of retrospectives on, like, early Super Nintendo and Genesis games, and, you know, occasionally I'll find these games where Park Place Productions pops up, and I'm like, what is this? Was it tied to EA somehow, or was it a...

It was its own independent studio. Okay. And I came there for the very end of the story. And I don't know the full end of the story, but there was a point where they were working on a game, and I forget what game it was, and one of their employees left, took a bunch of employees with them, went to Sony. And that was new... And that was the death knell for Parkplace for a little bit, but then they rose from the ashes

and got the contracts to do a couple more things, a racing game and the casino, the casino game that I worked on. But then I left the company, and I'm not really sure what happened to it after that. Okay, yeah, it's just one of those, like, kind of little-known developers that I feel like probably a lot of people my age have played games by them

and not realize, like, oh, that was workplace production. Yeah, they did some sports games. I forget which ones, but they did, I know they did Madden on Super Nias. That's a thing. You know, I think it was just the port job, but still, like, you know, they had their hands and a lot of stuff. So, yeah, it's always interesting to talk to people who had kind of, you know, a connection with these sort of obscure corners of history that you don't hear about so much, but, you know,

we're kind of present in everyone's life. Yeah. So you said you were also with Game Tech. Yeah. Okay. That was the Wheel of Fortune one, yeah. All right, so you were, you know, kind of working on these projects and about where in the timeline did Treyarch start up? So after that, took a break to work on a novel, which I never finished or published.

It's one of those years in there. Treyarch was getting going. And I remember at first I wasn't into the idea. It's like, oh, you know, I don't know if. Pete and Don't know what they're doing. I'm not sure if I want to get involved. But there was this one day where the first guy they're hired, also a friend from my college days,

was hanging out in my apartment, and he unfolded this roll of paper with a map of what was going to be one of the arenas for Die by the Sword. And I saw it, and I was like, Pete and Dohen were actually planning something. they're thinking ahead. This is the real deal. And then I wanted to join in and be a part of it.

So tell me about Die by the Sword. It's a game that I've heard of, but because I wasn't really much of a PC gamer at the time, it's one that I haven't had any personal experience with. What was that game and what part did you play in it? So Die of the Sword was inspired a bit. Do you remember an old Apple II game called Bile Stode? I have heard of it.

it, and I have never played it. There was another old, there was another old Apple II game called Swashbuckler, and both of these were fighting games, sword fighting games. Well, Biostov's axes. Biostob was top-down, swashbuckler was side by side. And we were, and this was, 3D was not a thing yet. Like, Virtua Fighter had not come out. Sure, sure, sure.

I mean, we're talking Apple II, so, yeah. Right. Well, I mean, even when we, this is, at the point where we first start talking about die by the sword. before Trierk has even formed or has funding. Pete and I were very interested in the idea of a game like Bilestode or like Swashbuckler but 3D and like Bilestode where Bilestode is crazy. You press the 7 on the number pad, your axe starts moving left.

About, about, you know, it takes a while to get to the other side. And so you're moving these very slow nights and jockey in the other. And axes are very slow. And moving the vert-d-d-do-do-do and do-do-do back. And so we wanted to do a 3-D version of that. And kind of like Bile Stode, you control your sword and die by the sword with the keypad. Like that's probably the most precise way to control it. Like all the people who got good at it would, would see.

just would use the number pad. We made it work with the joystick and with a mouse, but the number pad was the way to really play with that game. So it was almost like being a marionette for your character. And it's very different from all the other fighting games that started popping out the time

like Virtua Fighter came out before we were done. Other 3D fighting games came out before they're done. You know, you press a button code a combo code to make a move happen. Very different from us sort of you sort of sculpting your own nives.

Right, it's almost like quaff or something. Yeah, very much like quap, yes. Less like they did like, you know, fall on a crumpled heap. Right, right. Not so much about comedy, more about, you know, bludgeoning and chopping. Yeah, so, and, yeah, Tomb Raider came out a little before then. We retooled the idea of Dive of the Sword to be more of a brawler where you're going through a dungeon, fighting mobs as you go.

And that's by the story. Okay. It was successful. It wasn't a huge hit, but it was profitable. No, I mean, I definitely remember, you know, reading about it back in the day, for sure. Yeah, well, a lot of the games we read about don't make a profit. Fair enough. Some surprisingly big ones, you're like, wow, that came so huge.

And they spent so much money developing it. You do hear a lot about that, especially these days. So, yeah, so after Dye by the sword, you know, had established itself. So, yeah, so after Dyeby the Sword, you know, I guess at that point, Traiark, you know, had established itself. Yeah, definitely gave us a name. It definitely made it clear we can ship a game and we know tech, right? Not too many 3D games were out back then. Right.

So that was a PC game, right? That was like DOS, I guess, at that point, or Windows? That was DOS, yes. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, I think most people associate Trey Arc with more games on the console side. So what was the evolution there from, you know, Die by the Sword on PC and DOS to, you know, Spider-Man 2 for PlayStation 2? Die by the Sword

led us into getting a contract for a Dreamcast game called Draconus. Okay. And our relationship with the Draconus publisher got us. They became the middleman on the Tony Hawk Dreamcast port. I was the lead on the Tony Hawk Dreamcast. Then we wrote the middleman out of it and worked directly with Activision on Tony Hawk, too. and we did a really good job on Tony Hawk 1 and 2 for the Dreamcast. I'd like to take credit for that, but Dreamcast was a beautiful machine to work with.

It just, this stuff that looked crappy on the PlayStation suddenly looked beautiful when we brought it over to the Dreamcast, ran 30 frames a second. It was great. Yeah, Dreamcast was a good system. DRIGHT before its time. Right. And so Activision was very happy with us at that point and gave us the Spider-Man contract. Yeah, it was always, you know, kind of surprising to see, like, oh, the people who made this skateboarding game are now making a Spider-Man game. It seems like kind of a leap. But I guess it's not as big a leap as, you know, die by the sword to Tony Hawk. So, you know, I can see sort of the evolution there. But, yeah, like, you said you brought over Tony Hawk to Dreamcast. So you were working off of the existing content. With Tony Hawk, too, though, that was more like.

It was also port. What was the lead platform on that one? PlayStation again. An interesting thing about that one was it was a simultaneous port. Neversoft would give us code updates every week or so. We'd integrate their new code with what we'd been doing to port it. And that was something that hadn't really been done much before. So Activision was pretty, people at Activision were pretty impressed

that we were able to stay in lockstep with NeverSoft so well. Yeah, you see that a lot. more these days, but at the time it was not that common. You get the superior Dreamcast port of, like, Tomb Raider Chronicles or, you know, Soul Reaver or something, but it would be a year later. Right. And so you were like, well, I already spent 40 bucks on this on PlayStation. Why, it's prettier, but do I really want to spend another 40 bucks on it, 50 bucks on

for Dreamcast? Right. So, yeah, I can see where that would be kind of a big, you know, a big selling point, for sure. So moving over to Spider-Man 2. Yeah, I'm just kind of curious to hear, like, how that came about. Were you personally a fan of Spider-Man? Was that something you grew up with, or was it?

I tried to invent my own web fluid in the shed at my house when I was, like, seven. You know, I mixed some glue and some various plant fibers together, stirred it up. Didn't work, no? Just, spoiler alert, was not able to. In fairness, Peter Parker was at least 15 when he had been to his. Fair. Fair. So don't be too hard on yourself.

Okay. But, yeah, so clearly you were a fan of Spider-Man. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, when you heard you were going to be working on the Spider-Man license, like, I assume that was kind of a big deal for you. That was, that was pretty awesome. Yes, that was, yeah, thank you. Thank you, Pete and Dawn, for landing this, landing this for us.

like negotiating this deal. This is great. What was the, you know, you were kind of the design lead on Spider-Man, too. So what was, what was the creative vision there? I mean, obviously, it was tied to the movie, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Both were tied very closely to the movies.

So that immediately puts a lot of limitations on what you can do. Yeah, it absolutely does. At the same time, you know, you are a creator. You want to create and put your own stamp on. things. So, yeah, what was kind of the creative process there, the thinking on how you're going to make a distinct take on Spider-Man? So Spider-Man 1 sort of adhered very closely to the sort of existing formula for how to convert a movie into a game, right? You have most of the same action scenes from the movie. You have some pretty similar game mechanics to what every other

game has, you know, fighting moves and platforming moves. And it almost writes itself in that sense. And Spider-Man 1 sold a lot of units. You know, it didn't maybe get as good reviews as Spider-Man 2 would later get. But I wasn't happy personally. And I'm lead coder on this project. So I'm really just responding to what the designers and creator directors are doing. I wasn't happy with the web swinging. It was basically flying and the webs were cosmetic. And so after failing to

sort of talk my friends and coworkers into doing something different, I would go in late at night and work on the side on this idea where the webs wouldn't attach to this guy. They would attach to the corners of buildings, and then physics would take over and you'd swing like a pendulum, you'd go flying into the air again, you'd attach to a different corner and repeat, that felt to me like it would be both more dynamic and exciting and dangerous than the sort of slower

gliding, web swinging that we had in the current game, and also just feel more like Spider-Man, like what I imagine in my head it would be like to be Spider-Man if such a thing were actually physically possible. And that, and although during Spider-Man 1, people looked at that prototype and said, no, you know, it's too late. We're too far along the process, and this prototype is not, you know, demonstrating enough potential. That did become the seed for when Spider-Man 2 rolled around. We managed to, you know, budget ourselves some time to really explore that and take it further and make it into what Spider-Man-2 became swinging-wise, swinging system-wise. Right. Well, I think it's really...

Oh, sorry, go ahead. That's... I'm done. Okay. You go ahead. I think it's really significant and important that, you know, the swinging mechanic was the sort of pivot point for this entire game. Because, I don't know, like one of my all-time favorite games is Bionic Commando for NES. Uh-huh. Which, like, once you get a hang on the grappling in that game,

you can just go flying around. It's so good. And it's so hard to find games that pull that off. Even, you know, like a masterpiece, like Super Metroid, you get the grappling beam and you're like, this feels terrible. You're just kind of like swinging very slowly, very like a linear curve to your movement. Right. It's very constrained too.

It's like, you can attach to almost anything, right? Just about, yeah. There's like special points that are not accessible, but it's always kind of clearly marked. But otherwise, yeah, it's just like grab onto the side of things, grab onto the bottom of things, grab onto like light poles and swing and you know make connections in midair and kind of like chain these swings together and it's so hard to find you know games that do that and uh like you know knowing that uh that that was kind of the the starting point for you for spider man too i think explains a lot about why the game works because yeah you get the swinging right and all of a sudden

you're like oh it's it's so fun to move i feel so liberate right Kind of in that sense, once you got that up and running, was there, once you got that up and running, was there pushback on it? where people like, let's go back to, you know, grappling from the sky. There was a hint. We did our darndest to keep management, higher management than our team, away from the prototype. We were like, you know, if you see this while it's half baked, you're going to red light it.

We're going to get the stentia failure. Please give us, you know, as much time as you can before, before, before you make a decision. But even with that, there were times when, you know, Peter Donne or whoever would sneak in and then say, let's see what these guys are doing. Right. And there was a dicey moment where I was talking to Dawn. And we had been gotten, you know, with Dive of the Sword being a sort of creative,

remarkable physical, physics-based game mechanic in itself. And we had experimented with some physical snowboarding and other physics-related experiments. that failed. Don and Peter were kind of afraid of physics at that point as being something you wanted in your games, like a little too uncontrollable, two variable. And, you know, who can blame them? It was a really hard game mechanic that we were trying to pull off. There's kind of nothing like it in games.

Yeah, because this was before, like, habit physics and stuff, right? This was before Half-Life II. Yeah, it was. It was around the time, the same time as Half-Life 2. And, yeah, the kind of gamey physics and Spider-Man, too, are very different from the sort of physics simulation you see from Havoc where you can blow out a tire and watch the car send and stuff like that. But I feel like Havik was, you know, Half-Life 2 was the point at which people were like,

oh, physics and games, this is important. Before that, it was just kind of like, you know, video games behave the way they behave. Yeah, now guys are telling me that the physics in Spider-Man isn't actually physics because it's not this like complex havoc-like or physics-like simulation of a whole bunch of primitives, you know, jostling together. It's just, you know, this one, this one object. Right. We're doing some Newtonian mechanics on at a mere, you know, 60 frames a second or whatever. It's, you know, it's not real physics, right?

But is it fun? Yes. It is fun. Often more fun than watching a complex physical system. and juggle a whole bunch of, like, different shape primitives. Oh, yeah, or, you know, to the Half-Life II example of, like, stacking things up so that you can lower a platform side and raise up to the other side. Like, yeah, there were, there were parts of that game that just slowed down and you were like,

this is so tedious, what am I doing? I should be more than just, like, the brick-carrying guy. This is not how I save the world. Anyways, we went off on a tangent. You were asking me about pushback. And so, yeah, so Don is like, you know, Jamie, be prepared to, you know, have this go away, right? Like, because, and I was like, but, you know, what are we going to do if we don't do something else? What are we going to do that's like remarkable, but it's going to make this game interesting.

And he said, and he didn't really have an answer to that. He was like, well, we'll do something else fun. And, you know, finding something fun is really hard to do. and we were at a point where most of the team, then we were at a point where most of the team thought it was a really cool mechanic and most of us, most of us really wanted to keep it. So

it was very fortunate that when we finally did unveil it to upper management that they the chain of like, okay, our executive producers looking at it, oh, he's making Gamerface, he loves it,

that's great. Oh, and now, and now we're showing demos to his boss and his boss and his boss going all the way up to the chief operating officer of the company of Activision, right? All of them going like, yeah, when they see you swing, and then go into the wall run and swing some more, it's like, yes, this is this looks great. Can't wait to ship this. Yeah, so it feels like the game was very much kind of of the zeitguest. It was, as far as I can remember, one of the first superhero, you know, license games that attempted to kind of incorporate the more open world style that was becoming prevalent. with Grand Theft Auto.

Yeah. It's not like a... Grand Theft Auto was pretty new then. Yeah, I mean, very few, very few games had tried to do a big open city. And especially one where you had such freedom of movement. I mean, GTA 3, like, you know, it was very groundbreaking. Right. And speaking of ground, you're confined to the ground.

You can't really go up to a tall building and look around at the horizon, which was a technical challenge we had to solve. So, yeah, what were the challenges you had to overcome in order to combine both sort of, you know, an open dynamic model of New York City with Spider-Man being able to, like, go anywhere in the city effectively because he can do it a Spider-McCamp? Right. I mean, we did have to cap his velocity, not necessarily because that was the most fun speed he could possibly go, but because the thing that's loading in more city information from the disc can't keep up. he's going too fast. Sort of a hard technical limit rather than a design limit on that. Yeah, this was the era where

the PS2 was huge and Sony had promised basically the moon with this system. Did you find that working on it as an insider? Did you find that their promises necessarily lived up? From what I understand it was a pretty complicated system to program for it. It was very complicated

to program. The Xbox at the time had a much cleaner, more PC-like API and but it was a challenge all the developers had to face all the console developers had to face

and it was old school and low tech and you know reminded me a lot of assembly language programming a type of stuff that I hadn't done since my magic candle days. I didn't work that closely on it. And, you know, the smart engineers who did, you know, mastered it. There was a, and you kind of saw, I think, with the PlayStation 2,

the games on the PlayStation 2, you saw that the earliest games were not using it, and even close to its full potential yet. But there was too much stuff to get by if you wanted to sort of ship on time. So we were sort of a mid, I think, early mid-life cycle title for it. So people had saw some stuff at that point. Things were starting to look better. Yeah, like you said, it was old school. You saw that a lot in like 8 bits and 16-bit systems where the early games would be kind of clumsy and primitive.

and then by the end of the console's lifespan, you were like, how is this actually, you know, like, with the NES, you're like playing a game in 1993 and you're like, how is this the same system? I was playing in 1986, 87. Like, these games are a world apart. I don't think you really see that so much with modern consoles, but, yeah, there definitely was that with PS2, even, you know, PS1 also.

And PS3, like, that's true. PlayStation 3 is like, oh, we're going to do this totally new weird multi-core architecture and you engineer types, you are totally going to geek out over this. It's going to be so awesome, but most of us were actually like, actually you're just making our jobs really harder. We just really want to make games. So it's this new, the PS4, Xbox

one generation, where they're basically just PCs, right? You program the same way, you program a PC. Suddenly everything's unified and the programmer's lives are a lot easier. And people who want to go to the extra distance can get more out of them.

But at least you can get stuff up and running without having to solve these problems. You may or may not want to solve. Yeah, I mean, you look at Xbox 360 and you didn't see as big a leap from beginning to end, like, you know, the stuff 343 was doing at the very end

of Xbox 360's life was amazing, but I don't think really a lot of other people were working at that level. It's just I guess you have that like more straightforward architecture. It's easier to do that. But yeah, it's always interesting to look back at games that really kind of pushed hardware to its limits

and the kind of workarounds that had to be done. So I don't know, like, how do you feel that being on kind of both sides of the development cycle on that game affected its outcome for you? Both sides and, you know, like the technical and creative. You were kind of, you know, like again, going back to the beginning of this conversation, sort of straddling a divide that a lot of people don't necessarily do these days. is. I think that being a programmer, by being a generalist, by being interested in design, I wasn't even a designer at that point, right? I didn't have a design credit to my name. I mean,

I'd made some little games and just having this weird idea and pursuing it on kind of a gutsy move, if I look back on it. It's like one of my friends from Trager used to have an expression. Like, not everybody thinks they can program and not everybody thinks they can draw, but everybody thinks they can design. And so maybe I was just sort of one of those people who think, I got a good idea for a game. So my point being is like having that programming ability, let me do things that I could not have done if I was a designer on the project.

couldn't have said. I couldn't have gathered the resources and said, hey, can I have some programmer time to try out this crazy idea? But by doing it myself, being able to go in at night and just do it, a lot of power. So as a designer, I mean, you know, you talked about how like the swinging mechanic, you know, was kind of the germ that you added to the game. But did you have a bigger role in the design of Spider-Man too than just that? Um, A little bit. So as the project went along, I gradually divested myself of technical director roles and started taking on some design. I actually started working on some of the levels and doing scripting for some of the levels.

The much reviled Doc-Ock fight at the very end of the game, a lot of that's my fault. And there are a couple other levels I worked on as well. there's a helicopter mission which randomly occurs in the city where the bad guys instead of getting in a car and drive away they get in a helicopter and fly away and you have to chase the helicopter and just because of the nature of the randoms

and because it can only show up in certain spaces very few players have ever experienced this little submission that I pour so much love into for overarching stuff though matching the movie choosing which bosses were in the game and things like that

that was a little bit more Tomos and Matt Rhodes the screenwriter that was a little more their area of what the macro game was and how much you know back and forth did you have with

Sony in terms of Sony pictures in terms of and Marvel I guess for that matter in terms of what was acceptable video game content like what liberties you could take with the movie, or you know, the movie material, did they say like, no, you can't use Sandman?

He's going to be in the next movie. Right. Right. Yeah, we definitely had to get all the villains greenlit. This was back, this was, you know, back before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel had, Marvel would sell

a superhero to a movie studio and a set of villains that go with that superhero. No silver surfer in your Spider-Man. No silver-surf in your Spider-Man game. But particularly the one person we kind of wanted in our Spider-Man game was Kingpin. But I assume he was tied to Daredevil?

But he's tied to Daredevil. Yeah, he's Daredevil's bad guy. Right. You see jokes about it in Brian Michael Bendis' Marvel Comics sometimes. They'll meet a supervillain, and one of the superheroes will say, oh, yeah, that's one of Spider-Man's. Yeah, you know, every character has their rogues gallery. Right. But, you know, you still manage to get a lot of additional villains in.

You just had to work kind of, like, paint with that palette, I guess. But within that, were there, you know, boundaries placed on what you can and can't do with these characters? Sam Ramey was really upset after Spider-Man 1 that we had to play as Green Goblin mode. Yeah, it's like, you know, sort of like, my kids are going to play this game. I don't want them, you know, playing the bad guy at the end. It was a cheat. It was something I had to unlock. He didn't like it.

And so that was, like, play as a bad guy modes were off the table for Spider-Man 2. Interesting. That's just one example. I was mostly insulated from that by Tomo. Sure, sure, sure. And by Greg, the producer. Right. That's what producers are there for is to soak up the shit.

So, but that was one story, one story I remember. Okay. You know, looking back at the game, are there things you wish you could? have done? Are there things you're particularly proud of? And you're like, wow, that was a stroke of genius. Yeah. Now, the game was far from perfect. I would have liked to make it sort of easier in general.

Like we, like a lot of games of that era, you know, we didn't make it hard because we hated the player. We didn't make it hard because it was sort of like a, we wanted to provide that much of a challenge. We made it hard because we got really good at it, and we didn't have kinds of levels of analytic focus testing and stuff that you have today where metric tons of data are coming in about where players are getting shut off at certain points. So that's one thing. I appreciate certain things about it now that I appreciate certain things about it now that I didn't back then like, and I said this in my talk earlier, the I was so worried about how hard it was to control and how hard it was to sort of like I, you know, I want to go down there and I swung from the wrong point and ended up over here and I'm going to say players are going to hate it. that, but it turned out, you know, players didn't hate that. They were just too busy having

fun, going wherever the webs happened to take them, that it didn't seem to actually matter. And in hindsight, like, yeah, that's something that a lot of games didn't really offer, and it's almost a zen in a way. Yeah, I mean, you said that, you know, the game was far from perfect, but when I hear people talk about Spider-Man, too, I don't hear people talk about how much this one part sucked and how much they hated it. They talk about, oh, it was such a great game. It was such a great expression of the superhero, you know, people, the general consensus is, like, no one has, has made a Spider-Man game that good until the PS4 Spider-Man.

Like, it's, you know, it's 15 years and it took for someone to... Hard to think of a game that's sort of been considered best in its genre for that long, huh? Yeah, so, I mean, so I think there was something to it. Do you think it was the controls? Do you think it was, like, your treatment of the character? Like, what do you think was the special sauce there? Well, I mean, could be a combination of factors.

I mean, one is, okay, we've never seen this before, right? So it sort of becomes renowned in the same way Quake is renowned, the first W-A-S-D mouse thing. It's like, we're never going to forget that one title that sort of introduced us to this whole new way of playing a game. And then along with that goes a little bit of lock-in, right? Like people got used to Quakek, people get used to cordy keyboards, people got used to Spider-Man, too. And so when a new game came along and, like, didn't quite perform the way they remembered or were used to, it feels off, even though it's not necessarily better or worse. It's just different. And some people don't, don't dig that. And so, yeah, so I think, yes. And I think

sort of going game by game it's like Ultimate Spider-Man maybe the character's too bouncy even though that's interesting in its own right and sort of fits the comic bookiness of it

web of shadows they bring back their webs attaching to the sky and it's like okay I can see why you wanted to make the game easier but it's just wrong and then

the amazing Spider-Man where right after Batman got big and it's like okay let's have you pick a point in the world and then play a movie of how to get I think there was a lot going on at Activision and just like, let's try to make this more accessible.

Let's try to bring in more players, but doing it in sort of the wrong ways, doing it by maybe dumbing down the system. And I think the PS4, the Insomniac game, I think they did a great job of making it accessible using maybe new modern technology, special magic stuff that they can do so players aren't bouncing against walls. as much as they were in the sort of previous iterations, making it, making it so they have a good experience with just, with, with just being able to press the trigger and the joystick. And it's like, oh, yeah, I'm ending up where I want to go and I'm not banging into stuff.

I feel like Spider-Man. So just to wrap, what are you working on these days and where can people find you online and follow your work? I'm happy on Labs on Twitter, H-A-P-I-O-N-L-A-B-S. I've been working with Roblox for the past few years And I'm kind of I'm kind of

I'm kind of Putting that on the side a bit now I have my last game is called Dungeon Life It's an action RPG Where you take turns playing the heroes and the monsters So those monsters aren't just boring AI mobs That you're farming They're really trying to kill you

And and that's it's kind of just at this point it's kind of a just for fun project still I recommend I recommend checking it out

yeah where can people find that so if you go to roblocks.com you can search for dungeon life and it'll it'll be the first thing that comes up in your search or you can go to my Twitter account

and click on click on my profile okay all right well Jamie thank you for taking the time to join this podcast and for waiting around for me while I worked through my meeting obligations that delayed me. I'm not going to

include that. Anyway, yeah, it was great talking to you. And yeah, thanks again for your time. Thanks for having me. It was fun. Thank you.