- Hi my name's Paul Reiche. - My name's Fred Ford. - [Both] And we created the "Star Control" series. [chuckling] [techno music] - Well before "Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters" there was "Star Control I" and we began it in late '88, early '89. And the game industry back then was quite a bit different than it is now and the kind of games people played were quite different. So if you think back then, things like "Empire," I don't know if you've played that, but it's a great sort of expand and conquer game and it comes, I think, from an early school system game running probably on a teletype. What other kind of games were there? - Back when we made "Star Control I" or even earlier than that? - About that time, "Star Control I." - Uh well you yourself made some games. - Yes. [Chuckling] - "World Tour Golf," I was still in the corporate world, or back in the corporate world. I started making games in the early 80s. - Well PC games; we had made a golf game and that was because of the console and cartridge crash back in the mid-80s, so a lot of us shifted over to PC development thinking like IBM PC's are kind of formal and serious and this is gonna be around for a while and of course they had like four colors, if you were lucky. And so in terms of the other games that were available around that same time, part of what was exciting about that was the appearance of new computers like the Amiga which were just revolutionary in improvement in terms of the number of colors and the pixel size. - And the digital sound. - Yeah, and that was maybe one of the most big developments, because before then we'd been fiddling around with sound synthesizer cards like the AdLib, just really really primitive digital sound, but the Amiga had 8-bit sound that could run at sample rates that didn't sound like horrible monsters and that was part of why we got into digital music. Before "Star Control II, The Ur-Quan Masters," was "Star Control I: Famous Battles "of the Ur-Quan Alliance Conflict," I can't remember, it had a big long name. But we were playing games ourselves back then and so. What were you playing? - Well we played a lot of "Empire," it wasn't designed back then, but it was something that kept us occupied on the long lonely nights of between between takes of our game. - It was a transition from the days of computers like the Commodore 64 through the PC which was of course evolving in graphics up to the Amiga, which was the appearance of this great new computer with new kinds of capabilities. So we were inspired by some of the new computers that were coming out like the Amiga and we are playing games like "Lemmings," or "Blood Money" from DMA Designs. - And "Virus." - "Virus," I can't remember who made that. DMA Designs later went on to do the first "Grand Theft Auto" games. So there was this evolution of game developers working on PCs and very small games to slowly getting larger and larger. But I think perhaps the most influential games to us was "Space Wars," the standup arcade game which was implemented in Berkeley, although it was based on a game that ran on PDP-1s at MIT and I think it was made in 1962. But we were also influenced by games like "Starflight" by Greg Johnson in Binary Systems which had started expanding this idea of what a science fiction game could be. - We were asked to port "Star Control I" to the Amiga and so as part of that we looked at games that were on the Amiga and the first thing we noted almost immediately was the digital audio that it brought to it. And that really influenced some of the directions we went going forward with "Star Control II" and especially we played "Blood money," "Lemmings," "Virus." - Certainly thereafter "Faerytale Adventure." I think one of the things about the Amiga was it was made by a crew of guys and gals who were really dedicated to high-quality audiovisual capability. and they believed in the potential of developers then taking advantage of that. And some of the same people who worked on the chipset for the Atari 800 and the early Atari computers worked on the Amiga, a guy named Jay Miner and those systems really celebrated color in ways that the other computers didn't. They really celebrated processing power, or kind of the future of classical computing, but then on the Amiga the demos were all about, you know, the sound of a bouncing ball, or something that's just visually spectacular and that was so compelling and inspiring to us making games. So when we talk about starting "Star Control I," history before that's a little important. Both Fred and I had been making games for almost a decade before we started on "Star Control I." I'd been working with a variety of teams, mostly published through Electronic Arts. - And I'd been working for a company while I was attending college and they made games for the Japanese market. So I worked on a number of Japanese computers that weren't even sold over in the United States and produced games that were sold in Japan. - And I had been working under contract with Electronic Arts and they were publisher/developer contracts, very unlikely to be signed these days, but effectively they were a deal between you and the publisher. You would make a game for the publisher, they would sell it, you'd get a royalty back and then when you were done you'd sort of go your separate ways. Well I finished up a contract, a game for Electric Arts called "World Tour Golf" and decided that I wanted to make a science fiction "Archon" over the phone game. And "Archon" was an earlier game I'd made with Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall back in the early days of Electronic Arts. But I wanted to do a science fiction game that combined "Space Wars," you know, that high-speed action through your fingers and then also kind of the person versus person hybrid of strategy and action. So I drew up some drawings and eventually I decided the best way to pitch it to Electronic Arts was to mock up one of their ads, they had a very particular cool ad style back then. So I made this advertisement for a game called, "Star Control" and I showed, you know, a dreadnought and other ships fighting each other and it wasn't exactly what we ended up making for sure, but my producer at that time ended up moving to Accolade Games which was a spinoff of Activision from the old days, and she said, "Hey, I can get you a much better contract, "a three-game deal working with Accolade." So I signed up with them. At that point it was just me and just me doing three games seemed even unlikely for me, because I'm not really a programmer, so I was very fortunate that we had a common friend. - Before we get away from "Archon" though, I wanna mention that, and it was obvious to us, because we intended it that way, but "Starchon" is really "Archon" with an S-T in front of it. "Archon" being a strategy game on top of a one-on-one combat game and that's what "Star Control I" was. I was doing video games in the early 80s as I was going through college. And when I graduated with a degree in computer science, I decided that I needed to do something that was corporate and I went to the Silicon Valley and I worked for some graphics companies. I did that for a few years, I was in the wilderness and eventually I said, why am I not doing something I like versus something I think I should be doing? And so the company I worked that, there was a couple of mutual friends, two people who grew up with Paul, they knew I wanted to leave and they knew Paul needed a partner and so they introduced us to each other. - Yeah, we were going to a game night, board game night at Greg Johnson's house, and Greg's one of the designers of "Starflight" and "ToeJam & Earl" and "Orly Draw-Me-A-Story" and a ton of great games. Anyway, he had a regular game night at his house and so we sort of had a blind date there and decided, yeah, let's start working on this game. And very rapidly "Star Control" evolved into what it became from the earlier design. But one of the secrets of my success is having great friends, so in high school I stumbled into an artist friend, named Erol Otus and writer friend named Mat Genzer and to sort of make money at D&D conventions we wrote some books of monsters and treasurer and magic spells for use in role-playing games and ultimately that led to Erol and I getting jobs at TSR Hobbies and working "Dungeons & Dragons" and "AD&D" in the early days and he's quite a famous artist from that time. Then when I came back from cold Wisconsin to nice beautiful warm Bay Area in California, I had some familiarity with computers and computer games and I had run into a gent at a "D&D" convention who had founded one of the very first computer game companies called Automated Simulations and we founded "Freefall" games and did two of Electronic Arts first two games along with another friend, Robert Leyland, who ended up programming Electronic Arts contract number one and he'll come back later both as helping us on "Star Control I," particularly on the SEGA Genesis and then later on he comes back as the hardware inventor for "Skylanders" about 20 years later and so he's absolutely essential to the success of that. - He also has a technique in "Star Control I" and two of planetary gravity whip which is called the Leyland Gravity Whip after he was the one who pioneered that in our play testing. First, Paul had agreed to do three games with Accolade, so when I came on board he actually was trying to run two games at the same time. It took a little while for us to find our footing and our work rhythm, so "Star Control I" was kind of a honeymoon period where we were learning each other's work habits and what worked and what didn't work and it maybe wasn't as good as it would've been if we had had an ongoing relationship, but we still think we did a pretty good job with that. - Yeah, so we began the project in late 1988. Fred actually finished up his job and joined in early 1989. And we started with this premise of let's do the most atomic component of gameplay, which is flying a spaceship and shooting missiles. And so pretty much the first thing we made was a two-player version of "Asteroids" and Fred was able to get the controls right and get the collision between the missiles and the other ships and the asteroids and the collision is really beautiful by the way, it's like pixel perfect. You can shoot a laser across an enemy ship and you'll just see that collision dance right along the edge of it and that's really important I think for a PVP game to have crisp responsive controls. So from there we knew more or less the direction we were going, but we wanted to get the spaceship combat just right and so we began building other alien ships. And it was important to us that each alien ship was highly differentiated and it began this idea of asymmetric PVP gameplay that we've used over and over since then. And what it means is unlike say, "Street Fighter" where your characters are supposedly balanced with one another, our ships weren't balanced at all one-on-one. One could be very weak and one could be very strong, but the idea was your fleet of ships, your selection of ships in total was as strong as someone else's. And then it came down to which matchup did you find and one game reviewer called it rock, scissors, vapor, which I thought was a great expression. - There had to be two sides. There was the hierarchy in the alliance side and one was nominally bad, one was nominally good. And so that was the setting for the strategic part of the game where there was a globular cluster of stars that looked like it was rotating around in 3D. And the sides were positioned in different, typically opposite each other in this cluster and the cluster was connected via paths and whenever you met at the cluster at a single star, whenever opposite sides met, it would resolve in space combat where whichever ships met at that star would resolve in this one-on-one space combat where that was asymmetric and when one ship lost, you'd pick the next one until there were no more ships left and then whoever was left would win that star. There was also a separate mode which we called melee in "Star Control I" where you could fight the hierarchy which was composed of seven races and the alliance which was also composed of seven races. - And when we were coming up with the alien races, I mean if you look at the very first sketches I did for the game, you can see the archetypes. You know, there's a "Battlestar Galactica" like fighter ship. There is a sort of triangular "Space Wars" style ship and those end up being like our starting points and foundations for some of the ships. But then ultimately we start telling each other stories about, you know, well why are these guys launched in fighters? Well maybe someone's commanding them to and who's commanding them? And wow, this is the biggest ship, so these guys need to be leading. And then, well what do we wanna call them? You know, they're an old alien race, so let's use the word Ur which means old in some ancient language and quan 'cause it just sounds cool. So that's how the Ur-Quan came to be. And then Fred drew a sort of a croissant shape spaceship and that ended up becoming the Yehat and so then we said well it needs to have a shield. So it was a very iterative kind of layer at a time and each time you would make a new alien ship, we didn't wanna use the ideas we used before. And then we started figuring out that there were styles of play, there was distance, so like the human ship is largely about remaining away from the other opponent and shooting across the screen, whereas the Yehat is about getting in close, but having very high speed use of your shield. And we balanced all of these powers using energy consumption. So you had an energy meter and your different powers use different amounts of energy and your ship regenerated energy in different rates and in different ways. And so all of that controlled how you flew the ship and in particular how you used it against another enemy. - But it's not like we had all of that defined up front and we were just following a recipe. It was really important for us to test our designs immediately. So we would make a ship and we'd throw it in there and give it some powers and we'd say, this is no fun let's change it, or this needs a better sound, or it was all very iterative with play testing, not so much a formal design that we were trying to follow. - And then as we were going through, we knew that the humans were on the good guy side, 'cause of course humans are good guys. And then we wanted to add in some more humanoid characters. So I think we added the Syreen on the hierarchy side and they just started off as these sort of beautiful, attractive, powerful women. They end up being much more significant in "Star Control II." In a way, what we did was tell very short summary sentences about each of our alien races; the Shofixti, the Yehat, the Melnorme, oh sorry, that's "Star Control II," the Mmrnmhrm. And then in "Star Control II" we sort of had to figure out why it was all of these races behaved like this in a way that kind of makes sense and is interesting. So why is it that you have an alien race named the Ur-Quan that wanna go around enslaving people? That's a bizarre thing to do. It's very energy consumptive. You could be at home watching TV, why are you doing that? So there was a certain amount of sorting out the psychology. So whereas "Star Control I" is tight type strategy action game, but fairly superficial in terms of story, I think we really wanted to go in and investigate those aliens and that's what pretty much led to "Star Control II." In terms of thinking back before "Star Control II" and what happened with "Star Control I," we were really excited about releasing "Star Control I". I mean we love the game. I played it every day with Greg Johnson. We had these grudge matches and we still kind of have a grudge about it. And I wrote an article on strategy, this very detailed article for "Computer Gaming World" on strategy and it felt like we had created something that mattered in terms of fun. And so we wanted to follow it up, so I started thinking about a sequel and at this point Fred actually led the creation of the Amiga and a lot of the SEGA Genesis version and that was a maturation of technique and technology for the digital sound. - Yeah, that's where we learned about MOD music which was an Amiga phenomenon. Which is all of the music in "Star Control II" are MOD files which were pioneered on the Amiga and digital sound is what prompted me to actually implement digital sound on a PC speaker which I don't think has ever been done before or since on a released game for the PC. - Yeah nowadays your PC box, kinda goes beep, maybe makes two beeps if something's wrong, but back in those days there was speaker in there that people did all their sound through, unless you had like tons of money and you could buy an AdLib sound border, or really rich and could get a Roland MT-32 sound kit. So making that speaker assumed enough different positions to simulate some kind of waveform was a real remarkable thing to do and also at the same time reading the keyboard and doing graphics. Doing all these things simultaneously, we take that for granted now, but it was kinda hard to do that back then. - So after we shipped "Star Control I" on the PC, we were asked to do ports to not only the SEGA Genesis, but also the Amiga. And the Amiga especially opened our eyes, because it supported digital audio and "Star Control I" was all synthesized sound. We shipped "Star Control I" in 1990 and so this was at the end of 1990, beginning of 1991, when we're doing the ports. When we're doing ports, Paul was getting ahead on the design of "Star Control II" and he was able to hear the digital audio and in fact converted some of the audio samples for "Star Control I" into digital audio for the Amiga and then we incorporated that into the SEGA set, the SEGA Genesis. - When we began porting "Star Control" to the Amiga and to the SEGA Genesis it was 1990, maybe 1991 and we wanted to find a new digital sound format, but that required searching it out. There were no books. There was no internet exactly the way we think of it, so we ended up going to bulletin board sites, BBS sites, where you could upload and download files hunting for things named dot MOD, which told us it was a digital sound module. And there was one from the first "Dune" game that was awesome called "Wormsign," I can remember the name of it, I can still hear it in my head. And we ended up looking for how do we playback these files? And I think, where did you end up finding? - I dunno where we ended up finding it, but we ended up finding software somebody had written in Finland and the reason we know it was written in Finland is because all the comments were in Finnish, so we had to re-reverse engineer the Finnish language to determine what exactly was happening in the software. But we did make use of the software which was sort of the base for our MOD player on the PC. - What that told us was that the artists who were making this sound, this music, weren't the same musicians that we are used to using for games. They were somewhere out there and so that leads to "Star Control II," because we embraced digital audio completely. So we had to find a collection of artists whom we didn't know, we'd never met and that led to our famous infamous MOD music competition. - We also didn't have very much money to spend on music so we had to get creative about how the contest would operate where there would be a fairly substantial first prize and then a million second prizes that were not very substantial. [chuckling] - "Star Control II" from my side started with taking this idea of alien races, those we wanted to work with, person versus person combat with spaceships and then saying, how do we expand out into the other aspects of sort of "Starfaring Fantasy," whether it's "Star Trek," or "Battlestar Galactica," or even books from the ancient past, Larry Niven and Jack Vance, we have built into us a sense of what people do when they go out to have an adventure in space. They're in the planetary orbit. They take off from a planet, they're in planetary orbit. They send landing parties down to the surface. They go into hyperspace. They meet aliens, they talk with them, they fight with them, they trade with them and ultimately they discover some grand conflict that you as the hero play this absolutely crucial role, very unlikely hero story and you save the day. And so it was figuring out, how do we pull all of that together in a way that we can actually implement and then what are the parts that turned out really boring and how do we throw them away and replace them, 'cause there's quite a bit of that too. So the controls in "Star Control" are based on "Space Wars" and anyone who's tried to play "Star Control" or "Star Control II" knows that there's an adjustment phase when you start playing, because they're really unlike any other game. Based on sort of the standup arcade version, you have buttons that are sort of rotate left, rotate right, thrust forward, fire and special. And so you have these inertial controls, that I just loved to pieces, some people maybe not so much. But they come from those games. However, they introduced a very specific problem when we translated them to the PC. - The reason it was the problem is because we really wanted to support two people playing on the same keyboard using their keys in quick succession and sometimes thrusting for a long time or turning for a long time, that multiple keys would be pressed simultaneously. On PCs that's in theory allowed on their keyboard, but what we discovered fairly quickly was that each keyboard could be different and different keys could be locked out so if somebody might be turning left, but couldn't thrust at the same time, or the person he was playing against couldn't fire when this person was pressing his thrust key. So we solved it in the easiest way we knew how, which was to supply an additional program along with the game that allowed them to probe their keyboard and see which keys could all be pressed simultaneously without locking somebody out and so they were able to configure their keyboard hopefully in ways that worked for them so that they weren't playing twister on the keyboard. That allowed them to then play without interfering with each other. - And it exposed this truth about hardware which is it wasn't consistent at all. The surface that the players interact with, typing, that worked, but what's happening underneath is totally different seemingly from keyboard to keyboard. And of course our development keyboards were the best we ever found, 'cause we didn't run into this problem when we were making the game, it was our publishers, our producers at Accolade are like, this isn't working. And we tried to figure it out and like, nope, everyone's different so we have to let everybody custom craft it. And we've talked to people who would play "Melee" like several times every day and they and their friend would like be cramped really close to one another trying to fight and one person was saying that his hands were almost injured by the postures you had to create. - And that brings up a more general problem of PC development which was that each PC was its own beast. It's not like a console where every console is exactly the same. So besides keyboards and keyboard lockout there were sound card issues and graphics card issues and just operating system issues that had to be QA'd, so whatever system you were testing on wasn't necessarily representative of the general public, or even a significant segment of the population. - We didn't experience this keyboard problem for months, maybe almost a year and we would play every day and it wasn't until we actually started sending versions of our game out to be played elsewhere that we started hearing these reports of problems that we'd never seen. And at first you just go, you don't know what you're doing, you're not pressing your key hard enough. And then they would say, no, I swear to God it's not working. And so we would actually have them bring their keyboard over and that's when we discovered the problem. Back when we were developing "Star Control I," we would actually hand-deliver floppy disk versions of our game to our publisher and they were down to San Jose immediately adjacent to the Winchester Mystery House. So sometimes our producer would meet us just at this like truck stop or rest stop halfway between it and we would hand off disks and sometimes she would hand us a check for a milestone payment, very physically oriented and-- - Looked like a drug deal maybe. - So that is when we would start, you know, exchanging like keyboards, or they would give us a box of discs, because we would run out of floppy disks. For each player, and there's two, you need left, right, forward, fire, special. So that's five and usually it's pretty easy to hit three at once on each side, so you're talking six and if you know how to block your opponent, they're dead, there's no way they're gonna be able to beat you. So it was very critical that we solve this for any sense of competitive fairness. - What else besides keyboards would have worked as a control mechanism? Maybe a joystick. I guess we did have joystick controls, but we really wanted people to experience the "Space Wars" style control and a lot of joysticks for single button, so weren't even supportable. - Then when we got to the SEGA Genesis there was no keyboard to work with so we did have to switch to controllers controls and we found a system that was okay. When you think about what you could have installed on your computer now, it's software. Back then it was almost all specialized hardware that really differentiated machines. So you might have a joystick, you might have a keyboard, you might have a numeric pad, you might have a very custom soundboard that needed all kinds of specialized settings; DMA channels and IRQ and in addition you might have something, might have more memory than somebody else, but there was memory that was directly accessible and then there was paged memory that you could bring in RAM disks and so it was this complete flea circus of possibilities. - There was Windows back then, it was early Windows, but almost nobody made games for Windows back then it was all DOS-based and so you were much closer to the metal even though Windows wasn't very good at abstracting from the metal at that point. We knew the core was gonna be the same, which was one-on-one two player space combat, but we also knew that we wanted to use digital sound in that space combat and we wanted to add more ships in that space combat and we actually planned for expansion for that. We never did expand it, but instead of being built into the game each ship was separate and was its own chunk of code and art and sound that would be loaded dynamically as called for by the one-on-one space combat. But we also wanted to take a different direction from the strategy game that was on top of that in "Star Control I" and that's where Paul comes in. - Actually there is a bunch of tools that got created in the making of "Star Control I" that greatly sped me up in working on "Star Control II." So shifting way back to like the early 80s when we made games, I did art on graph paper and I would convert the graph paper to hex numbers and then I would type those hex numbers in and hand them off to the programmers. Then something called "Deluxe Paint" came from Electronic Arts, a guy named Dan Silva who had been at Xerox PARC and knew all about graphics programs, built us a custom illustration program initially called "Prism" for Electronic Arts artists, developers, and it was a mouse-based program that just let you draw in a way that was so fluid and so fast, anyway it revolutionized game development and I still know all those controls in my hands to this day. So for us to draw all of our spaceships in "Deluxe Paint" was great, but then we started learning how we could take their animation format files and pull all of the images from those and what that allowed me to do was greatly accelerate the rate at which I could create lots and lots of pieces of art. So as you fly around your ship rotates and so we were able to create those much more swiftly as we built the representation of interstellar space. We had lots and lots of planet rotations and there's no 3D "Star Control" it's all bitmap tricks and in some cases synthesized imagery that Fred came up with, but it was the development of taking art that was easy to make, relatively easy to make and then automatically translating the data that Fred could use so that more and more we isolated code and data tasks and Fred became the hungry data monster. [Paul chuckling] - Yeah, so besides the off-the-shelf tools that he is talking about, "Deluxe Paint," I would create tools that would take the "Deluxe Paint" format that he could work in exclusively and translate them into data for the game. So instead of him telling me, hey could you move that over a pixel, programmer, I would say, move it yourself, you have the tools. That wasn't just because I'm a mean guy, but it was so that we could each do our work independent from each other, because if either of us is a gate for the other, then we're a gate and the more that can be done without the other person being a filter or a gate, the better. - And that philosophy ended up influencing the development of Toys for Bob. We were dedicated to the idea that each participant could work independently and have an extremely tight iterative loop introducing new kinds of art, new kinds of sound, new kinds of gameplay without having to run through the gauntlet of everybody else on the team and that philosophy led actually all the way up until today. - It's not just that they don't didn't have to expose their work to other people, but some people have different working hours and style than somebody who wants to be working at 2:00 a.m. in the morning and hits something that stops him because he has to pass it by somebody else is no longer working in the way they wanna work. - And there's a different philosophy which is the, if there's a problem assert and fail. So that means that throughout the entire team if anyone makes an error, everybody goes down. And that actually is a philosophy you can choose, because it means that you will fix the problems really fast, because an increasingly large number of people will run over to your desk and yell at you. But that isn't what we wanted to do. When we originally pitched "Star Control II" to Accolade, we very modestly said, well we're just gonna take the excellent things in "Star Control I," we're gonna add some new alien races, this very light role-playing game, it won't be an epic story at all, don't worry, it's not gonna take that long and then once we got approved pretty much ignored all of that. And we went off to make this giant space science fiction game using the tools that Fred had created and tools that we were finding. Finding talent to help us was one of the biggest challenges, particularly in music. - It's not like it all rose at the same rate. We knew that the core of our game was still "Melee" which became "Super Melee" and so we worked initially to upgrade that and then we knew we wanted to land on planets, so we investigated how would that work, how could that fit into our game and we knew there was gonna be travel through a large galaxy, we knew there was gonna be conversations with aliens and so we were gonna have to be able to go through dialogues with them. And each of those systems kind of came online over time and not at the same time, so the chain of dependencies was such that most of the writing happened right at the very end. We knew the basic skeleton of the story that we wanted to do, but the actual real meat of the data came way at the very end. - One of the first things we defined and started changing the game from being a very narrow focus to this more galaxywide was the star map and I knew I wanted to lay out constellations because, you know, constellations sort of tell a story, they have names, they have shapes and I decided that I needed a tool to do this and that I would go ahead and program it, which again, if you ever hear me say that, any of you, don't let me do it. So I spent weeks and weeks and weeks on the star map editor. - Kept him outta my hair, that's all right. [chuckling] - Then I got it ready and I used it for about, I dunno, a day and I was done. Never used that tool again. So that was the star map, but that defined, set the table essentially. So we had these alien races from the first game and we asked the question, well what happened to them? What happened to the Androsynth? What happened to the Syreen? And it was literally like they got wiped out by something. Okay, well that's interesting. What wiped them out? Well, there's actually a new alien race where the Androsynth, for example, should be. And so initially that was sort of the simple description and you know, the Syreen are trying to sort out what happened to their homeworld. I wanted to sort of describe why are these women flying around through space, you know, warlike, capable, but seemingly kind humans. Why are they like that? And so we set this whole star map up with the races and their essentially basic intentions, then we defined what they look like, their personalities and then I structured over time and actually in the last third of the game all of the conversation structures for how you communicated with them, how that changed game states and that ultimately turned into this immense number of handwritten flowcharts. "Star Control II" celebrates paper more than anything else. It's the last hurrah of paper designs for me. Everything else largely becomes digital thereafter, but what that means is, although tons of the digital stuff is evaporated, all the paper remains. All of those flowcharts, handwritten text, you know, descriptions of aliens, all of that survives in a way that is wonderful and miraculous to go back through. - We were trying to develop the whole framework of the game which the player would interact with over and over again. Some of that was easy, we had "Super Melee" as an example of something that worked from the previous games, so we knew we were gonna do that. We knew how to iterate on that, that was easy. Developing planets was something. The graphical part I think worked pretty well and pretty quickly where we would procedurally generate planets. But then we had other notions like you would come into a solar system and you would have your main ship and you'd have support ships and we thought well gee, it would be fun to send your support ships around to the planets which is probably what you would think you would wanna do to investigate what's there, to clear out any enemies. And so we had this whole make up a task force as you come into the solar system of your escort ships. Do you send these three over here and these four over here and maybe this one here and to do various things? And it just became a lot of bookkeeping, rather than, you were passive at that point. You'd sent out these ships that operated on their own, granted they tried to follow some minimal instructions that you'd given them, but you weren't participating in the action. It was a lot of setting up orders and bookkeeping and not a lot of fun. - And we sorta kept, well I kept convincing myself, just one more thing and this'll be fun. So what if you can name your teams? What if we have alien officers and so alien officers can give your individual task force little buff for something. And it all worked and we just sat there and went [groaning] and there was just this moment of like, this ain't fun. I think we spent two months on it I think. And if you think about a game it's 2 1/2 years, two months is a big chunk. So we had to throw it away and we went back to, well there's a rule or a lesson that I have to relearn periodically which is, don't let the computer do something that's fun for a human to do. And over and over I keep making the same mistake. But when we said, okay, what's the fun thing about going down to the planet surface? And it's like driving around shooting stuff and picking stuff up. Okay and I started to go down to my lowest reptile brain gamer and okay let's do that. And then sure enough, shooting stuff was fun and like dodging earthquakes and lightning bolts and stuff like that. Okay, that's fun, that's the basic stuff. How do we add color to it? You know, you gotta make different alien creatures. Now we have to have some sort of storytelling interaction where you find something that we wanna give you, some dialogue about how do we do that. - And also kind of related, we learned in kind of a related way that realism is only as fun as you can make it and sometimes you can't make it very fun. And so when we were designing the planets and the characteristics of the planets, we initially went for a very scientific algorithm to determine what was on the planet, what it was composed of and that just tended to give us very homogenized planets and it just wasn't very fun. It may have been closer to the real science of how things worked. - Well, to give Fred credit he didn't go down this rabbit hole, I did. Because I was fascinated by the idea of real alien worlds and he often will give me a lot of rope here. So I said let's figure it out. You know, the world of alien planets was just coming into sort of scientific truth. At the time that we started "Star Control II," there was zero alien worlds or exoplanets that had been scientifically verified. In late 1992 the first one was and now there's thousands. So we were right on the cusp of knowing what it was like, but we kind of had a sense of what they could be made of, you know: Rock, lithium, hydrogen, helium, carbon dioxide. The chemicals that we already had seen through spectroscopy, we knew the planets would be made of them if they were there. So that we sort of started with well we know that the brightness of the star, the color of the star, that gives us the energy flowing off of it. I have this "Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology" that I go look for equations in and I said, okay, so we'll create this theoretical ball of chemicals and elements and then we'll start shining light on it and that light will volatilize the lighter elements and chemicals, so like helium will go and it'll enter the atmosphere. The hydrogen and then the carbon dioxide will volatilize and at that point as it's warming up when the carbon dioxide goes, all of a sudden the planet becomes a greenhouse and it starts heating up very fast and as it heats up other things start volatilizing and eventually the mercury volatilizes and the lead volatilizes and you've got Venus, this incredibly hot planet. And if the sun, if the solar radiation falling on the surface of the planet fell below a certain level it would maybe volatile hydrogen, but then that was it. It was an ice ball and as much as we tried, I tried to program and calculate a cool world where you'd have some liquid water and some vaporous water, nope, we got ice balls and Venuses and nothing in between. And you know, it all looked right. In retrospective what I was trying to do is re-create the most difficult problem in the world which is like weather simulation or like global warming simulation. Those are incredibly complicated things and I am not a scientist, I like to read about it. So what we decided was-- - You might notice a common theme here which is when I give Paul his head, is when I don't believe in what's happening. So I let him program the star map 'cause I knew that was a one-off thing, no matter how badly it turned out it would it was okay, because it was a one-off. And this I was pretty certain wasn't gonna be what we ended up with, because well, did the description just now sound interesting? Maybe to some people, but even if we went through all that work to accurately recreate what it was to make an atmosphere and to have rocky planets and gas giants and totally accurately modeled, the user would not appreciate any of that. - Well Fred had been letting me pursue this as an extra credit project and I had pages and pages of handwritten calculations and I was seeing the writing on the wall. And I think I-- - On the page. - So I probably had been working on this, again, maybe two months on and off with doing art and writing, but there just came a point where I had to say: Fred, this ain't working, can you help me fix it? Maybe you can fix it by yourself? And so I think he even said, well what is a cool planet? When you say these aren't cool, what is cool? Hey we've got like eight months left, maybe we can figure this out. And they said, well I want like a cracked world with like lava coming out of these crevasses on a dark alien surface, or I want a treasure planet which is like liquid gold shooting up. And so we just cut to the chase. You've got treasure world. You've got the ruby world. You've got the cracked planet. And all of a sudden they become stories. I went to the cracked planet and I dodged the magma chasm. Or I went to the ruby world and was blinded by the glittering light of the star off the surface of the planet. That sounds good, hey I'll go there, fight some blood monkeys on the surface. So it was realizing that we had to define the templates for a set of specific worlds that was rich enough and interesting enough that they inspired your imagination, but not so many of them that they all just became variations on a theme. And a lot of the material of like the elements and the chemicals that do occur in space we ended up using those as generated pickups on the surface of the planet. So there was enough of this reality-ish material to make you feel like you could suspend your disbelief, but yes, there's a ruby planet and yes, there's zirconium down there, but you know it's enough real to make you enjoy it and not think like this is nonsense. But still, we didn't let reality get in the way of fun on that topic anymore. This will keep coming up though. The whole battle fleets thing, like watching your little dots go off to planets, it wasn't fun. - That was probably the worst one, because that derailed both of us. The planet thing pretty much only derailed him. I had other work that I could do that I knew was gonna be in the game. So it was okay for him to derail himself there, because I was still being productive. - And on some of the alien planets another thing is, so we had these world types and some of them I mentioned, like ruby treasure. Some of them I'd just be pawing through the "Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology" and I would hit like a kind of rock like eulite. I'm like, yeah, let's have an eulite planet and that turned me on because Erol Otus, a friend of ours who was doing art and who I'd worked with since high school, when he was working at TSR Hobbies in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin was one of the first artists to illustrate the Drow, the Drow, however you wanna pronounce it. And they were these sort of evil elves that appear in Gary Gygax's work and become very popular characters. So one of the person's writing a module an adventure created a Drow artist named Ool Eurts which was Erol Otus rearranged and Erol would do these illustrations as Ool Eurts. And so we sort of have a nickname Ool for some people. And so when I saw an Ool item, I'm like yep, that's Erol's planet. So I wrote that down and other one was Vinylogous. V-I-N-Y-L-O-G-O-U-S I think. And it turns out that Vinylogous just means the chemical that is vinyl, but I thought, ah that's a cool sounding word. So a lot of these, just honestly, I would see words that turned me on and figure out how to retrofit those into our planet system. Well gosh, um-- - Halide. - Oh yeah, Halide, halide and then Sumerian, that was a good one. So most people know Sumerian from Conan the Barbarian who was a Sumerian warrior. Sumerian, I believe, relates to sunset, that time of darkness in sunset and it also relates to a particular old civilization. But I just loved the idea of a world where Conan could be, or something that brought to mind that primitive powerful sense of an adventure. We also had rainbow worlds. So Fred built a really cool system for synthesizing planets, because it would generate them in a way that looked cool, but unique and it gave me a bunch of control over how the color and elevation related to one another. - Effectively how it worked was there is a flat plane of pixels that all started at zero height and I would make fractures. I would draw lines on this flat plane and the pixels in the middle would be pushed down or up and I would just do that over and over and over again with different orientations of lines and that would create a height map and then based on the height and the template, the planet template we would use would tell us how the pixels should be colored. - I could create a little chart or a little list of numbers that would say well between zero and 16 height, let's use this colored sphere behind the rotating planet. So for example, if you put white at the very top and then gray slightly below it and then brown below it, you would get something that looked like ice-capped mountains. But you could have liked green water and yellow land. And then on the the rainbow worlds, I remember just saying I'm gonna go nuts, so I just typed in crazy numbers and we got this really cool rainbow planet that didn't look like anything sensible, so we're like, what is that? Like maybe that's like an alien waste dump where they put crazy alien waste that's rainbow colored. And eventually we said this is actually the best world to go to. We'll use these as some sort of precursor sign pointing to where they went. So you would discover them and they would not only be valuable to discover, because they had great elements on it, but one of the alien races, the Melnorme, really wanted to know where they were located. And the reason is when you actually went to the star map and looked at their position, it was an arrow pointing towards the galactic core I believe and that was to give a sense of where the precursors went, because they vanished 250,000 years ago. Where did they go? And this was leading to the sequel, which would be where the precursors went. So when we say it was pointing towards the precursors, there is an earlier version of where it was pointing. - Well, nobody's ever seen a precursor, so we can-- - So there were these alien gods, maybe fake alien gods; Dogar and Kazon who were worshiped by the Ilwrath and they were just absurdly evil, over-the-top crazy funny evil. If you followed the arrows you found a conversation with Dogar and Kazon who looked remarkably like just our floating heads. And we had this whole system laid out. It was sort of a hint system. It was sort of this immense ego trip we were gonna be on, people having to say how much they loved Dogar and Kazon in order to get those hints. But we were getting really late in delivering "Star Control." Like the very first press release that Accolade put out, you know, the creators of "Star Control I" have made "Star Control II" and it's gonna be out in March and I have this this printout of it where I've circled, I was proofing it and like, um, that seems a little optimistic, March. - It came out in November. - Yeah, so that the later press release describes it accurately as November. So Accolade stopped paying us. You know, they wanted it in March or earlier. They kinda didn't care how finished it was, which shows up also in the SEGA Genesis version of "Star Control I." And so we just, Fred funded the project entirely by himself for those last six months and that's when we decided, yeah, but you know, that conversation with our floating heads, maybe that's the little too far. - 'Cause it would have had to been QA'd. In fact there was a furor in QA at one point, Because everything was procedurally generated. We changed our random seed kind of late in the project and so all of a sudden, although the stars were in the same place, 'cause they were laid out by Paul, all of the planets changed, not only their types, but their locations and-- - Most importantly the elements that were on it. - Yeah, and so QA had to start all over again QAing the product. But it didn't set us back at all. QA was mad at us for making them retest stuff that they had already tested. - I suspect QA was set back a week at least, because they had established like the fastest way to go through this immense body of space, to collect enough money, to test all of the features and then we just scrambled that. And then ultimately when it came time to writing a hint book, they just kind of threw up their hands and said, "Can you guys write this? So I just had Fred export all the data from every star and then sort through it and you know that's the-- - There's 3,000 or so of them too. So that's where we discovered that we had neglected some stars, so some of the constellations have like Perseus A, Perseus B, Perseus C and then Perseus E and we forgot D. - Perseus D exploded roughly 3,000 hours. - So in the hint book we would just make up a story for why one of the solar systems was missing. - And then also, the clue book was a lot of fun. I think it's called "The Resource Guide," because it did let us fill in the cracks of some of the stories and provide a little bit of depth and also frankly there were chances that people would miss some of the cool stuff that was optional. We wanted to make sure they knew about it and how to get to it. The problem was we didn't think it was a big deal. I mean, for us we knew that the overall populations would work and we weren't really testing that aspect of the game at that point, we were throwing in data so fast. Our disbelief hadn't been suspended. We knew it was all just numbers and stuff underneath it, but the test department, for them it was the universe of the game and we had just casually discarded it and started over. [chuckling] - Some development decisions that led to dead ends set us back worse than others. Paul's attempts at generating realistic planets wasn't so bad, because it was only Paul that was occupied with that. And I was able to make progress on other things while he was working on that, but the task forces in the solar system where you could order ships to do various tasks for you in the solar systems set us both back because we worked on it together and he would come up with the design and I would work on the implementation and so that occupied both of us for a couple of months until we came to Jesus. - Yeah, I think nowadays you simply couldn't do that. You'd have to figure out in advance whether or not you were gonna do that or not, because you couldn't throw away two months of a full development team. So that makes modern design, I think, a little bit more careful. And that results probably in better budgets, but it definitely doesn't result in trying crazy ass solutions, several of which didn't work. - I think also it reinforced to us as we've continued with the design of the game that the player really has to be the agency behind the progress in the game so that he feels empowered rather than just a passive witness. - One of the core tenets at the beginning of "Star Control II" was that the player started off as the hero, that they just had to live up to that through the course of the game. And that's, I think, in part because we hate this idea of you starting out as a grunt and that everyone says, all right scum prove to me that you're worthwhile. And that isn't what we wanted. We wanted the sense that this is you. This is your destiny. People acknowledge you as the hero and they wanna help you write off and so it's all up to you. And so I think to us that is a core part of what makes "Star Control II" work is that you're a great hero and that everything in the game is about you proving that. - I think that the player being the hero was our intent early on, but sometimes we would get sidetracked by being interested in the chemical composition of planets, or thinking that I'm really a master of all of these ships and I can make them do my will. But we always came back to that's not nearly as fun as imposing your will yourself on other aliens and creatures and planets. - And when I think about the science fiction that I most love, it has to do with an individual confronting a crazy situation and overcoming it. And whether it's Larry Niven in "Ringworld" or Jack Vance in "The Demon Princes," it's all about this individual that you can relate to. And then once you get to something like "Ender's Game" where yeah, it's about a human being commanding this immense star force to defeat these aliens. It's still about Ender and his friends and how they work together to do it. - And we tried really hard for the longest time to make the gender of the character ambiguous, such that you could be a woman or a girl playing the game and the character is still you. You're are not a specific male character which was the dominant thing at the time. - And one of our key artists, George Barr, he really took that to heart. So if you look at the illustrations that the game begins with, the main character is shown typically from the back and this figure is somewhat androgynous, so that people could project on this character whatever they wanted to be. That got shut out of the water however, when Accolade did their cover art sort of not caring about what we were saying and it was very masculine. And so you see the illustrations at the end of the game do reflect a masculine protagonist, though it's still somewhat androgynous. - How do you make procedural generation have meaning to the player? One of the things we did, we've discussed already was we went away from completely scientifically accurate planet generation and came up with some templates that we could send data through that would generate variations of planets that were kind of exciting and differentiated. But we still needed to tell a story and that meant that some of the planets had to be special in some ways beyond just procedural generation. They had to contain items that you could pick up. They had to contain plot elements where if you went to say one of the Androsynths old homeworld and touched one of the ruins on the planet it would give you some information about the Orz. What we did is we would procedurally generate the entire solar system and the entire galaxy and we would then visit the various stars that were supposed to have interesting non-generated stuff on them and we would say, okay this looks like a good planet to have this device that the Thraddash are interested in placed on it. And so then we would override the procedural generation in just that one area to place that device on that planet. - I think if you think about it as dressing a set, say for a play, you can dress the periphery of your stage and it can be light or it can be whatever, but the items that are around the actors they're essential and so you'll see this density of props and focus on color around where the players are gonna be. So we can think about procedural generation like that. I think the problem with games that focus purely on procedural generation is that it's impressive at first and you're sort of awed by what they've done, but then the differentiation and kind of the meaning just declines. And even if you go out into the wilderness and you start walking around, you're interested in the landmarks quite often. Like is there a particularly awesome rock or a valley that you wanna check out, or a river. Those things exist as destinations within this beautiful world of ours, but you want those destinations. And so I think ultimately it was using procedural generation to give this sense that if they go off the beaten track, there's a world out there and they can just kinda keep going, but ultimately they're gonna run out of steam on that. They're gonna wanna come back and get back onto the path that leads to the next story bead. So we had laid out all of our plot in terms of a high-level flowchart. You know, find the old Shofixti, get him to stop attacking you, get some information from him and eventually restore the Shofixti race. but we didn't exactly know where those had to be in space, so their placements influenced pacing and oftentimes there would be a long gap between events of interest and so we might add, for example, an optional item. Like you can go off and pick this thing up. You can go off and make a deal with the Druuge and sell some of your crew and it would accelerate your way through this game, but there would be some negative consequences later on. So there was pacing adjustment and finding where there were blank spots and adding detail. And sometimes it was within a conversation. Oftentimes lulls would occur as a consequence of having exhausted the layout of a conversation and then we would go ad just some trivia and some fun color in there. The design of the conversations themselves is a fascinating creative problem to solve. - So we had self-imposed hurdles where we had designed a game that we couldn't finish personally. And some of that was the design called for a number of music pieces, each alien had its own musical theme, there were music pieces when you went into orbit around a planet, when you were traveling in hyperspace and QuasiSpace and we were incapable of doing any of that ourselves. And then there was the hurdle of we needed, almost two dozen alien conversations, trees, and we didn't have enough bandwidth to write them all. - So when we created this awesome layout for a world and then realized we didn't have time to deal with it, we had to call upon friends to help. So I defined all of the conversations in the game and all of the plot flow and sort of what the aliens were like personally and frequently we had art for them already. And so with this mountain of control charts, I would sit down with a friend and Mat Genzer or Erol Otus or Robert Leyland, or a few other friends of mine and say, okay, we desperately need your help and we'd work together. So we sort of had a shorthand established and like, okay here's what the Pkunker like, Greg Johnson, you know they're these crazy kind of new age offshoot bird Yehats and they seem to be supernatural, maybe it's all ridiculous, but every now and then they pull off something amazing and here's everything that they have to say, everything they have do functionally and Greg, please oh Greg, write as fast as you can. And so I would get back, in Greg's case, handwritten sheets of paper. Mat Genzer on the other hand who I'd worked with in high school on games he actually wrote in computers like a sane person. So he was working on I think it was the Ilwrath dialogue and for a milestone that was coming up, maybe the Alpha, we needed to have that dialogue in place in order to get it paid, in order to have the publisher continue with us and it was a real serious milestone. And so we said, Mat you've gotta get the writing over to us. And he's like, "Well I'm not gonna get it done "till late tonight, but I'll come over from Berkeley, "like 45 minute drive to where your office is "and I'll just shove it under your door." So the next morning we get there early, 'cause we know we have to get it and integrate it into the game and it's not there. So we call Mat and I say, where's your disk Mat? He's like, "Well I got nervous about shoving it "under the door, so I left it on the window, "the outside window and I tilted it up against the window, "it's in an envelope, everything's fine." And I'm like looking at the window and there is no envelope there and so we're like, oh no, what happened? Then we stuck our heads out the window and looked down and there was the dumpster for the whole building and so we're like racing down the stairs to find it in the dumpster and like flipped it open and the dumpster is just clean empty. Just clearly been emptied. And we're like, oh God no. So then we think, maybe it's hidden somewhere, so we start looking and sure enough we found this envelope just glued-- - Paul got in the dumpster. - Yeah I did, garbage juice had adhered this envelope to the side of the dumpster. So we peel it off, crawl back out smelling of dumpster juice, go back upstairs and with tissue paper very carefully dry off the disk hoping it will work and thank God it did. So that was how we passed that milestone. but the key there was recognizing that we do need this much content, that yes, I can do a lot of it and I can help structure all of it, but ultimately reaching out to talented friends and individuals to bring them in to the game. And nowadays with teams of 100 this isn't even thought of as an issue, but back then where we had made a game, just the two of us, and in the past some people made games just by themselves, we were figuring out how to integrate talent meaningfully into our team. - Back then it was pretty much just us two in the office even though we had all the people listed in the manual, they didn't work in our office. Our office was only big enough to hold two or three people and so we really had to farm everything out and get it back through whatever means necessary, sometimes written paper, sometimes going onto the nascent internet, sometimes envelopes in dumpsters. At that point I was probably funding, because the writing came in very late. - So we realized we could define this great thing, but we needed some help from our friends and we were fortunate to have people like Erol Otus, Mat Genzer, Greg Johnson of course, but we had friends who are artists and there's a famous one, Iain McCaig, he's most famous for designing Darth Maul, how that character looks and he's worked on almost all of the post trilogy "Star Wars" movies. However, he didn't wanna do art for our game, he wanted to do creative writing. So he wrote some of the VUX dialogue and when I would get it back from Iain, it would be handwritten in this elegant calligraphy and I've got some of the sheets that hopefully people can see, but what we were willing to embrace; people's involvement in our work and we had enough control over it to make sure it was what we needed. But when people are motivated and just are powerfully creative people, you can often get fantastic work from them outside of their normal specialty. - Even though our office only contained two or three people, we had neighboring offices which were our friends who helped us, Robert Leyland and his partner Greg Hammond were in that office and "ToeJam & Earl," Mark Voorsanger and Greg Johnson. So when it started to get real and fun was when those people were actually testing the full game, not just playing "Super Melee" with us, but and digging it. - I remember this designer, Mike Ebert who worked with us on "Skylanders" and many games, he sort of came to me and says, "Hey I've figured out something pretty funny. "I'm selling my crew like crazy to the Druuge." And he said, "And they don't, no one seems to care." And so that was at the point when, yeah, we probably should put something in there where if you sell too many of your crew to the Druuge something bad happens. And so I think Mike was ultimately not pleased that we changed that, but it was his belief that there was actually this interaction with an alien that he was sort of participating in that gave him delight, that made us realize we needed to modify the game. - Yeah, the ending, I'd say the last two months probably, leading up to November we were working seven days a week, probably 18 hours a day. So we weren't having too much fun, [Paul laughing] but we knew that it was working. - Yeah, my mom was a play tester on the game and she was the person who got me into science fiction originally and I had given her the disk and she checked in. It was kind of a complicated game, I didn't know if she'd like it. And then I discovered that she was taking days off work and I was like, uh-oh what have I done? So she was one of the first fans, she was also one of the first people who ran into the Kohr-Ah death march clock issue where the game had a very specific time at which if you hadn't succeeded by this point you were gonna lose. And we've gotten a certain amount of grief on that over the years, but also I think a lot of people it was a very pungent memory. One sign that we were achieving the sense of a world and the sense of the story was we had a friend and a developer named Akila Redmer, AJ Redmer, and he went silent and played our game for several weeks and then he showed up at our office with a binder. Every single bit of text he had hand typed back in and he had laid our game back out to us through his experience and he was really into it. And we sort of looked at that and looked at him and said, wow, maybe-- - No, no, I didn't say that. [laughing] - - And oh, also, we were on top of an office supply store which was convenient if you needed office supplies, but there was this guy downstairs who at some point we were faxing something, because we didn't have a fax. And he's like, "Are you guys a game company?" We said, yeah, we're making this science fiction game. He said, "I love games!" We said, well okay, do you wanna test our game? So he tested our game and he came back and he said, "I've tested your game and I really enjoyed it. "About the Arilou, do you believe "in aliens coming to earth?" And I said, well it's complex. 'Cause we sort of figured out, he did. He said, "I have personally, I've gone there. "I've gone to Roswell and I have interviewed people myself." And I remember just sort of slowly backing up and thinking, what did we run into here. Very nice fellow, very thankful for his play testing. So these experiences that we are having with friends, with family, with guys from the office supply store downstairs gave us this sense that it was working. That what we created was actually reaching out to people and touching them and hopefully they were gonna buy it. - 'Cause back then maybe other companies did it, but focus testing a game is pretty common now, especially with the big budgets, but back then nobody knew what we were doing. Accolade didn't really understand what we were doing, and we didn't understand what we were doing all the time, but-- - We were trying to please ourselves in a large sense. I mean we loved science fiction adventure. It was a particular kind of it. It wasn't hard-bitten. It was a little bit more pulpy, a little bit more Buck Rogers and it wasn't entirely clear to us as we were making it how large of an audience there was, or if that audience would react to it and they really did. Pretty dang fast after we released it we started looking in the pretty primitive online forums and finding out that people were having fun. And they were starting to imagine beyond what we'd put in there, asking questions that we hadn't answered and that's super inspiring. - Although we intentionally asked questions in the game that we didn't answer, which created a sense of, what happened, this wasn't on the main path, but something happened here. And to this day people speculate about what we didn't answer. - And one of the biggest mistakes we see when people have tried to make sequels of our work is the sequel is all about answering the questions we set up from the first game and that is not a good idea. I mean, a little smattering of that is fun, but the whole point is to extend that mystery and keep you going, keep people hungry for the adventure. So if you're ever making a sequel, don't answer all the questions. One of the questions we're asked about is the Melnorme, as you're talking with them, for some particular reason their color in their bridge shifts to purple and one of the questions that the player, you can ask, 'cause I think some player asked us: Well why did that turn purple? so we decided to reflect that into the game and now you as the player in the game can ask the Melnorme: Why did your bridge turn purple? And he just says, well that's a really good question with a very interesting answer and it will cost you only 32,000 credits. Now 32,000 credits was more than any player would ever get, except one of our play testers, maybe Mike Ebert did in fact earn that much money and was very disappointed that we haven't recognized that and he couldn't actually get the answer. And while I would like to answer that here and now, I feel that that is best answered in our sequel, "Ghosts of the Precursors." - Good pivot. - Thanks. So what's success for you? - Well it wasn't a huge money success, at least at that immediate moment. Fairly soon after we shipped our game, I think "Wing Commander" came out, which was a pretty seminal game in 3D space combat and captured a lot of short attention span people. [Paul laughing] Well, I don't mean that as a, I just meant that that story wasn't as deep as our story. Our story has legs and especially as we released it to open source it exposed more and more people to the "Ur-Quan Masters." So what does success mean? It's one of the last games. It's the last game Paul and I have done where it was pretty much completely our game. Designed completely by us. Engineered completely by us. Yes, we had people helping us fill in the skeleton, but the publisher left us alone and pretty much all they did was publish the game. We miss that part of our careers. - I think success for me has to do with two things: One, do I feel like I had some integrity in what I was doing, that I lived up to what I said at the beginning to myself about what this experience is gonna be like? And then also, frankly, do people reflect that back? There's them buying it and that's great and if you did play my game and you didn't actually buy it, you can always buy us pizza. That is the deal, pizza or beer, feel free. But really, success is about moving people, about having what you do affect their lives in a way that's positive, at least that's the way I regard it. And so when we would get letters back from people talking about how, for example, a hurricane hit their house and they had to go live with their friend and it was miserable, but the thing that got them through it was playing "Star Control" with their friend. That's worth its weight in gold to how you feel in your life. And also seeing it influence other people. There's plenty of games that were influenced by "Star Control" and we were influenced by other games as well, but feeling like you've added to the medium a little bit, just a little bit and then also feeling like there's a world waiting for you to go back to. Part of my imagination has never left that world, I still have little conversations with those guys in my head. That creates a compulsion to move forward, whether or not you're going to get to it the next year or 10 years from now it's sort of like not answering all the questions in the game itself. Leaving something open for you to do creatively not only helps you eventually get to that sequel, but as you move through all your other games you're gonna kinda be solving those same problems in different variations. So Fred, what was the main lesson you learned in making "Star Control I" and two, besides not letting me program? - I'll think about that for a second. If you've got something, go ahead. - Well for me, I would say the biggest lesson is: Live up to the promise you make to yourself and your partners about what it is you're creating. Don't let reality intrude any more than it absolutely has to, because, and I'm not the first person to say this: Success lasts, mistakes you'll also remember, you'll never be able to fix them, but ultimately you'll have to live with them forever. If you have to go through pain, if you have to go through some short-term disappointment with folks in order to achieve something great, something that matters and that you believe in, do that. People will forget that pain. People will forgive you for not showing up at their parties, You will have that for the rest of your life and so will everybody else who's played your game. So make those sacrifices. - Yeah, I think if you work on what you love and we truly do love "Star Control," you are much happier with your life in general. And so we've always tried, even as our decision trees have gotten narrowed by what the publisher wants, over time as games have become more and more expensive the publisher once more and more direction over what you're doing, is to still try to find that of path of love through whatever you're making so that it's meaningful to you. Well so we implemented being able to play MOD music back on the PC, which was an Amiga format originally and we had maybe three or four MODs that we had been able to collect online and we were so excited by how different they sounded from the synthesized music that we had done in "Star Control I," but then we realized we actually needed people who knew how to make these things. So as far as we knew, nobody in the United States was making these MOD music files, at least in any sort of volume and we needed a lot of them to fill out our game. - Early on, Erol Otus, who is an artist/writer, awesome DM, he also is a musician and he created the "Ur-Quan Theme" which you hear both at the end of "Star Control I" and whenever you meet the Ur-Quan of "Star Control II." And he created on an E-mu Systems Emulator II, which is a dedicated piece of hardware, but it could download samples and play back those samples, so it was very much like the MOD format. So we had him create this piece of music and then he gave us the samples and sort of by ear we re-created a MOD using an open-source editor and then that's when we realized, oh my God, we need professionals to do this. Funny thing was, there really weren't professionals. This format had evolved as part of the demo scene over in Europe and so the people who made MODs were young people, people who were interested in music, but necessarily weren't professionals. So tracking these people down proved to be a real problem. - And so what was our technique? - Okay, again, the internet didn't exist as it does today, but there was a text-based kind of user group, was called? - The Wells? - The Well. So in order to contact people all over the world we went onto a text-based form for sending messages and we ended up accidentally breaking protocol, because we just sort of advertised, there's a music competition MOD format, hey everybody in the world who's listening and you know first prize is $500, second prize is $50 and here are the themes we need and we roughly described flying through interstellar space, flying through hyperspace, in orbit around a planet. And then we started getting envelopes in the mail. No one sent anything electronically for us at this point. So we just started getting envelopes in the mail from Finland and England and the middle of the United States it turns out. And we collected all of these and we ended up, I dunno, getting probably 15, 20 entries and of those we had 12 winners. And in some cases, people had sent in multiple entries and one guy won second, first and several second places. Because we had a budget of a little over $2,000 and we needed a lot of music, so we had a $500 prize and a bunch of $50 second prizes. So then we sent out releases for rights to them and got those back. And then two of the people that we worked with, Dan Nicholson and Riku Nuottajarvi in Finland were so great that we actually then started contracting them for specific pieces of additional music. - And to this day we have never met them face-to-face. [Paul laughing] - So one great thing about getting things in the pieces of mail is we would get handwritten letters along with them and some of them typically were about like, I'm not sure if this is okay, I'm not a professional, I really hope you like this. But some of them were really funny like, can you please send back the floppy disk when you're done, I don't have many of these. And that's when we started realizing, I wonder how old some of these people are in the entries. It was just a different era back then. We were dealing with people who were on very tight budgets and in some cases living with mom and dad. But the sound that they made was so unique and so memorable that to this day people still talk about the music of "Star Control II" and there've been remixes, in some cases by the actual musicians a decade or two later. But it remains this turning point, I think, in the use of music in some kinds of games to be much richer and much more inspiring in terms of the feeling you're trying to achieve in the moment as compared to just a background that you're existing within. - And we also, besides the money reward for winning parts of the contest, we'd promised them all copies of the game and I'll tell you we were no Amazon Prime in that respect. I think some people may have gotten their games like a year after release, but we eventually got them to everybody. Well "Star Control II," well and "Star Control I" have always been near and dear to our hearts. It's the first things we worked on, the first things we poured our passion in together. We have some diehard fans as a result of those two games and we wanted to service them and lay the groundwork for a return and keep the games in the fronts of their minds as much as possible so that when we were finally able to return to it we would still have a living audience. - There was a confluence of events that helped this. One was Accolade stopped selling the game and we stopped earning royalties right around your 2000 and that triggered the termination of their exclusive right to sell our game. So we got our game back. What we didn't have was the name "Star Control." That was a trademark that the publisher owned and we negotiated back and forth with them, but ultimately we weren't able to come to terms for the name. So we decided, well we can't use that name, let's give it a new name, so we used the "Ur-Quan Masters" And we had our very first summer intern, Chris Nelson, a guy from Boston University and he was out here and he was a diehard open-source fan and he wanted to port our game to open source and then release it and sort of talked us through the ramifications and the choices we had to make. And he and largely Fred then ended up porting the game to a form that people could launch, but it was by no means beautiful, fast and elegant and then just re-released it. I'm trying to remember how we got the initial fans involved. - Uh, Chris was responsible for setting up all those connections and he knew dedicated fans who were interested in working on it. - And so from 2002 until today we have had like the "Ur-Quan Masters" site, UQM I think, and they've been maintaining it and porting it to new machines and revising the audio and really keeping it alive in the doldrums between 2001 and then 2011 when our games went back on sale at GOG. So the "Ur-Quan Masters" project, the open-source release of the game we created as "Star Control II," that really kept our game alive in the doldrums between say 2001 or 2002 and then 2011 when our games began to be sold again through Good Old Games, known as GOG, which is an electronic distributor of classic games. - So we just had finished "Star Control II," taking 2 1/2 years and not getting paid for the last six months, we had a three-game deal with Accolade, or at least one where they got the right of first refusal for a game proposal. And we came to them and said, okay, we're ready to work on our third game and they said, "Okay, how about "Star Control 3" "getting paid exactly what you just got paid "for "Star Control II?" which wasn't quite sufficient and also we had just finished doing two science fiction games for them and we were ready for a cleansing of the palate. - And I'd been thinking about this game design involving competitive monstrous gardening and that turned into this game in which a sort of whimsical fantasy hero had to defend this kingdom by himself pretty much from a horde of rampaging red monsters. The original version of "The Horde," the use of that word comes from "Mail Order Monsters," it was one of the scenarios were a bunch of little red dots come to attack your somewhat larger white dot, which is your monster. And so that idea of fending off a horde had been sticking with me. So we decided to pitch that and we pitched it to SEGA and they really loved it and they very much wanted to do it, but than the people at SEGA left, who we'd been negotiating with and founded Crystal Dynamics, so we ended up going to Crystal Dynamics very shortly after they were founded and creating "The Horde" for them both on the PC and on the 3DO under contract and later on we became employees and we were with them for seven or eight more years. - The 3DO version of "Star Control II" which is the fairly successful important version was an accident. We had a contract to do "The Horde" on the SEGA CD and we actually convinced a couple of people to quit their jobs to work on that. And literally the day before they showed up that project was canceled and so we were in the position where they were gonna come into work the next day having quit their safe jobs and we would have to tell them we didn't have any work for them and so we quickly scrambled and said to Crystal Dynamics: How about we do a port of "Star Control II" to the 3DO? - And to their credit they said yes. The founders of Crystal Dynamics, Madeline Canepa and Judy Lang were awesome and they had a lot of faith in us, but one of the funny things we had to do is we had to go back to Accolade and literally license our own game back from them, because of the trademark. They had the trademark, so we ended up paying royalties on our own game to somebody else. So I think that may have been the only instance of that in gaming history. But what we were able to do that the guys we hired sort of began the process of porting it and we began revising the interface. And then we decided, you know what, there's like a novel's worth of text in this, why don't we do it all in alien voices? Like all of our other solutions, we called upon our friends, some of whom were actors, some of whom had nice voices, some of whom were just willing to give it a shot and we began recording the dialogue that was written for "Star Control II." What you write to be read and what you write to be spoken turn out to be entirely different things. So I remember watching Alex Bennett who is a DJ, a morning DJ on a popular San Francisco radio station, we hired him to be the Starbase Commander and I think we've got the outtake recordings of him basically saying Chenjesu And he's like Chenjesu. - He could not say Chenjesu. God damn it's hard! [laughing] And it was really awesome stuff. But it was very hard to speak, but thankfully they did it and I got to do some voices and Greg got to do some voices and so it was a ton of fun and then we went into the studio and overlaid some effects on them and ultimately some people had their own vision of what the voices were like. Other people had never played "Star Control" before, so these were their first impressions and so that's for them the Melnorme sounds like my daughter's first grade teacher, because that's who it was. [laughing] - Some people say: Why didn't you have the credits on the PC on the 3DO? And that's because we neglected to voice record them. - When we were creating "The Horde" one of the premises was that we had this story to tell about a young boy who had been raised by a herd of wild cows and he had grown up kind of an oddball. And this king who had been Bran the Barbarian, and who had won a kingdom through his wits and his strength and his magic sword, Grimtwacker. He's old and fat now. And in fact, Chauncey is serving I think turkey legs to this fat old King and the King starts to choke and somehow Chauncey knows the Heimlich maneuver and saves the King's life. So the King says, "You're great, here's my magic sword. "I'm gonna let you be the defender of the kingdom." And that's when these hoardling monsters start showing up. Now that was so much storytelling we couldn't do it in animation, but the universe are starting to change with CD-ROM data how much data we can store. And the fact that Strauss Zelnick, who had been the worldwide head of Fox Entertainment had become our company President, a company of about 40 people. So he brought with him Hollywood connections and talent galore and we began trying to cast Chauncey. And oh man, who did we cast? It was-- - Also he-- - Jim Carrey was the first person we tried to get. - We tried Michael Richards. - Michael Richards from Seinfeld. - Met him on one of his power walks to his Porsche out in the parking lot and we said, how about Martin Short? And without breaking stride, he said, "Box office poison." Sorry Martin. - We love Martin Short, sorry Strauss. But here we ended up with was he had had a personal relationship with a certain actor, not from "Family Ties" as it turned out. [laughing] Which I did make that mistake, but Kirk Cameron had been a very popular actor on a sitcom, so he showed up at the office and played the game and he thought it was awesome. And his wife was really excited about it. And at that time we never really worked with a popular actor before, so we were sort of like, oh wow, this is a real actor and this is gonna be great and so we set up down in Hollywood and over the course of two or three days we recorded dialogue, some of which I wrote, some of which other people wrote, and it was a blast. And we really didn't know how it was gonna work out, but ultimately, I think, it fulfilled exactly what we wanted to do was this sort of, kind of wry, fairly bizarre fantasy story and-- - And we got kicked off the set once. - Right. - Because this was all fun and exuberant for us and we were too noisy and they finally made us leave. - Right, yeah, and I have to make an explanation, there is a morph, there's a point at which Kronus Maelor this evil high chancellor is revealed to be the secret King of the Horde and he transforms from Kronus Maelor into a hoardling. We didn't have budget to do that special effect transition, but I really thought we wanted it and I had a technique that I often used with artists, which is when they say, we don't have the budget to do that and we don't have the time, I go, no problem, I'll do it. And then they just get this look of horror. - They don't like when he programs. - Right, and this works with Fred best, but it didn't work in this case. This artist kind of knew what I was up to and is like, okay, go ahead do that morph. So Fred's brother Ken and I were up late one night doing this morph and oh it is so horrible. So if you ever look at the video on YouTube, there's this like, kind of really nice animated hoardling King and this good, well-acted and then about two or three seconds of the worst morph in video history ever, so apologies for that. So that was like it. We didn't hear from Kirk Cameron again. And part of why we wanted to do this video also was MPEG was becoming a popular format at this time and MPEG cards for PCs were coming out and we struck deals with some of the people bringing out MPEG cards so it all sort of dovetailed. Now later on Kirk Cameron showed up in a different form, somewhat less tolerant, somewhat more specific in what he hated and subsequently we don't agree with an awful lot of what he represents, in fact, I think we perhaps are diametrically opposed to him in many ways, nonetheless what we created on "The Hoard" stands on its own and I'm proud of it. - All right, so The Horde comes "Pandemonium!" that was our first 3D game. So we'd been doing-- - First PlayStation game. - Oh and I'll say yeah, just doing a game that's represented in three dimensions. Then "The Unholy War" and-- - We were technically suzerains on "Pandemonium 2," - "Pandemonium 2." - Which meant that we were just there to sort of help with problems. - And then an odd Japanese game, "Little Witching Mischiefs." - So real quick, we were working with Crystal Dynamics and Rob Dyer, the President of the company, said, "Look, I wanna strike a deal with Bandai. "Let's do a game from Bandai licenses." And we said, oh my God, we love Gundam! We wanna do like a super deformed Gundam in which you've got the turn-taking combat, but then when you get together you fight it out in real time 3D. This is gonna be so great. He's like, "We're gonna go talk to Bandai." And then he came back and he said, "Bandai has an even better idea. "They have a much bigger property." And we're like, huh, not SD Gundam? And he said, "No, no." And we said, well what is it? He said, "Well I don't really know. "But they're really excited about it. "They're doing this big thing next year, "it's gonna be their biggest thing." And so we just waited by the fax machine and they started to roll out these images of young magical witches with very tight little dresses. And they just kept coming and coming in different variations of them. And we just said, what is this? And it turns out that in Japan there's been this long history from the 60s, probably all the way up today of magical witch girl shows in which a girl in our world discovers that she is secretly a princess in another magical realm and that she has powers in our world typically employed through like purses or makeup or jewelry which are conveniently sold at a nearby store, for reals. So Cutie Honey, which some of you may know as a superhero who's clothes fly off between her transformation from normal human to superhero, she was sort of the end of the line of that magical witch girl and they provided us a game design and so we were using our "Unholy War" engine and we just said, okay, this is the task at hand, let's do it. And so we created a game, "Little Witching Mischiefs" that's only been released and seen in Japan and is really weird in part because all of the design docs we got were in Japanese and none of us knew Japanese, so we did our best to translate them. - For example, we translated something as Japan's 70 years ago and so we started making a city that was like 1920s Japan. - Which was an odd thing to find. - Yeah and then we sent back some early concepts and they said, "What is this? "This is not what we asked you to do." And it turned out they wanted 1970s Japan. - And then towards the end of game development, when you're through all of the logic bugs, you start getting into what are called TRC's, just that the technical requirements that a company like Nintendo or Sony will impose on you. So if you eject the disc and you disconnect the controller and something else crazy happens, the game crashes. And you just have to go through and you fix all of these and they're quirky and difficult and that's how all games wrap up. However these came to us in Japanese faxes arriving in the middle of the night and we fixed a lot of them and then the one translator we had on our end and the one person who spoke English on Bandai's end, both vanished from the scene and so we just turned off the fax machine when we were done. - Problemo solved. - And it did come out and I think it did okay. - Okay, so then after that we did "102 Dalmatians." - Yup, that was our first kids game and it was a lot of fun because what we realized in that is that our job is to entertain people and it doesn't matter to us whether they're adults, or kids. We don't care, as long as we make people happy. And kids are awesome people to entertain, because they don't hop on the internet and call you horrible names. They're just delighted to play your game. They're the best fans in the world. So we did that. We had a connection with Disney and then things changed at Crystal dynamics and one Christmas party I got a phone call saying, "Hey guys, this is Crystal, yeah you're all fired. "Now on can you please call the rest "of your team and tell them that." And so I was like, okay. But this is one of those situations where from the worst days come the best days. So we formed a corporation of Toys For Bob. Again, we rebuilt Toys For Bob, now it's a corporation. And our friends who we had brought into the industry to help us on "Pandemonium!" these were level designers who showed up at our door, in some cases barely having graduated high school, they had formed their own company, Shava, a successful game company that was now part of Activision. So they sort of shepherded us into our first contract with Activision doing "Disney's Extreme Skate Adventure," which was using the Tony Hawk engine and making a skateboard game for kids using three licenses from Activision; "Lion King," "Toy Story" and "Tarzan." So we did that. And then after that we did "Madagascar One" and then our studio was acquired. We did "Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam," a fun game, that was a multi-player racing game on skateboards. I still give that, that game's a sleeper. Then the sequel to "Madagascar," "Madagascar 2." - [Both] And then, - "Skylanders." - Yeah so when "Madagascar 2" wrapped up, actually the license market for games was really dying down. They just weren't selling as well as they had been. So we sort of got this idea from Activision, hey, why don't you make a game for the Wii? Why don't you make a game for kids? Why don't you make a game that's more successful than any other kids game of all time? Because kids games aren't really doing well, and hey, we've got the "Spyro" license now, would you like to use that? So we said, yes, because the alternative was sort of going out of business. So we said, yes we can do this. We love "Spyro," the Wii's awesome and we can make the greatest thing ever. And then we worked like crazy and we had some horrible ideas, horrible ideas. But the good idea that we had was bringing "Toys-to-life" and that turned into "Skylanders" which we couldn't have done without Activision, because it required factories and thousands of people and skills in making plastic and the ability to risk tens of millions of dollars on inventory, but ultimately it all paid off. When I was working with Electronic Arts and they were publishing my software, they had these artist symposiums where game developers would come together and talk about their craft and learn about what was going on in the industry. These eventually evolved into the Game Developers Conference. But at one of these I met this guy, Greg Johnson, and we were definitely kindred spirits. He's wacky. He loves to design games and he had been hired to work on "Starflight." And I had worked on a game called "Murder on the Zinderneuf" that had a communication system where you would solve a mystery by asking people, investigating a mystery and accusing someone of the murder. And he was creating a system to communicate with aliens in space and so I talked him through how we did communications and then spending time with him and hanging out and looking at his game, it was like, this is really fun, I wanna work on this. Now I had been working on "Mail Order Monsters" with my partners with my partners, Evan and Nicky Robinson, but I just sorta dropped off the radar, 'cause I just started doing whatever I could on "Starflight." And ultimately I got the phone call from the producer, leave and go back and work on your own game. But Greg and I stayed friends and then when we got together with Fred then he moved up to an adjacent office of ours. And Greg is a really amazing designer and a very unusual figure in gaming. He is one of the most courageously creative people you'll meet. So he'll work on a science-fiction aliens game and write a delightful story and create a great space adventure and the next minute he'll work on "Caveman Ugh-lympics" which is this funny sort of California games style game except it's with cavemen. So you're in like fire-starting contests and running away from saber-tooth tiger contests and then he'll do a TV show about kids and hip-hop and trains and then he'll invent a digital phone alternative ringer system which he'll get prototyped and go patent and then discover that there's a duck phone that beat him to it, so that one didn't work out. But he is always pushing his creative foundation. And he's always friendly. - And while we were working on "Star Control II" he was next-door working on "ToeJam & Earl." So we would go next door to help him with "ToeJam & Earl" or play test and he would come next door to help us with "Star Control II" and play test. - And when we needed extra art created, Greg was one of the people we'd go to. So Greg and Avril Harrison and I did a lot of art for "Deluxe Paint" for the Amiga for Electronic Arts. and so we had a sort of a small crew of contract artists and we would help each other on our projects and people would come and we'd help them on theirs. I did some work in advertising which was a nightmare. So ultimately we would get Greg, or we would get others to come to the office and help illustrate specific pieces of art. - So we finished "Star Control I" in sort of the summer of '90 and so we ported, it would be late '90, early '91 getting both of those ports done probably. - So we worked in offices adjacent to other developers; Greg Johnson and Mark Voorsanger did "ToeJam and Earl" and then Robert Leyland who was working on the Game Genie. So he had been hired to write software for Game Genie for the SEGA Genesis. And what the Game Genie was was a cartridge that you would plug-in and then that attached to a system that let you enter codes which would actually modify how the game ran. So after the fact, you could reverse engineer just small tweaks to a game to give yourself invulnerability or extra lives. When Robert wrapped up that project, maybe he was even in the middle of it, he began helping us port "Star Control" to the SEGA Genesis. One of the things that let us do was create some of the most amazing Game Genie codes, because we knew exactly what the Game Genie needed, "ToeJam & Earl" did this as well. So, for example, in "Melee" in the combat mode of the SEGA Genesis you could have multiple planets, you can do all kinds of modifications and so our codes were some of the best. And again, same with "ToeJam & Earl," because they were able to come sit with Robert and say: What do you need? What would be awesome? So after we were done with the Amiga version of "Star Control I" Accolade came to us and said, "Hey we wanna get into the SEGA Genesis market, "but we don't wanna pay all those fees that SEGA wants. "I mean, after all, when we make a game for the PC, "or for the Amiga we don't pay any fees. "So we don't really wanna do that per se "for the SEGA Genesis. "So we have a reverse engineer that we put some "of our best engineers in a room "and they reverse engineered the machine "and we'll give you the documentation "from their reverse engineering "and we'll give you a very primitive development system "and you can make your game exclusively using these." And this was not optimal, but we said, well okay, fine, that sounds good, we'll give that a shot. And so we-- - We did this fairly straightforward port, just straight port not doing any sort of optimization, so the game didn't run particularly well and was-- - [Paul] With no compression. - A lot larger, a lot larger than it needed to be, but Accolade was so hot to get it out, maybe 'cause they knew what was coming, that they said, "Let's just put it out and let's make this a marketing win "by saying it's the biggest product ever released "for the Genesis." - And it was and I can't remember if it was 12 or 16 megabits, but it was dramatically larger than any cartridge that had come out at that time. And it was also, they decided to make it physically large to sort of communicate that as well, so it was much larger. - Super size. - Genesis cartridges were that big and it was like that big. And it was really beefy. And there's a funny story in this about the cover. So they wanted to have a new brand associated with their console games, so they created Ballistic, which was just a separate wing of Accolade. And they said, "But we wanna re-illustrate all our covers "to be slick and smooth and have this unified style, "so we're gonna redo the cover "for "Star Control." "What would you like done?" And I really liked the cover for "Star Control" and I said well, how about we just take that we do a smoother more professional rendering of it? So they said, "Oh okay, we'll do that." And then later on they brought back the image and they opened it and it was just exactly what I'd requested, this incredibly well-rendered version of it. And they said, "Yeah, Boris Vallejo did this "and he said okay he would do it that way." And at this point Boris Vallejo was one of the most popular, if not the most popular fantasy artist in the world. What I didn't know was they had offered me the opportunity to just tell one of the best fantasy artists in the world what I wanted and he would have painted it, but they forgot to mention that it was Boris who was doing it. So I just, ah just have them redo that old cover and he happily did it. The next step in making the SEGA Genesis version of "Star Control" was to go through all the documentation and try to figure out how to achieve sounds and graphics. Ultimately we did go through that process, get it done, big honking cartridge and then it went out for sale. And again, we hadn't done a console game before, so like the idea that they weren't gonna license it was like, oh okay, we'll see how that goes. It did not go well, let me just put it very clearly. There was a very large lawsuit, our game was pulled off the shelf very quickly. It sold well by the way, we earned nice royalties off that, but ultimately it was like the Valhalla fighting Olympus above us. Thankfully the publishers all managed that fight. And I think ultimately Accolade won, but they negotiated a license deal ultimately and I think forever after people did not try to create unlicensed cartridges. - That kinda reminds me of the 3DO story, "The Horde." The 3DO had memory inside the 3DO for your saved games, but it wasn't very large and could only store a few saved games. And so if you would buy, say, "Madden" and play "Madden" and save your progress and then you would buy another game there would be no room for you to save your games there. And when we made "The Horde" we said, well, and there was no mechanism for deleting your games, we said, well there's no mechanism for deleting your games, you're now playing our game, we'll just, we can internally remove whenever games you have sitting in this memory. We'll just do that so that you can save versions of "The Horde" because that's what you wanna do right? - That is a no, yes, no statement. Yeah, this is why TRCs came into existence. - Yeah, I think-- - To prevent [laughing]. - It might be because of us. - Yeah and I think with "The Hoard" there were like these monstrous creatures, all emotion, all hunger and I think we just sort of internalized that. What same game? No erase it. We put our game there. [laughing] Yeah that did not go well, that was a recall actually. Our game was recalled. We fixed that problem and then it went back. - And then they started making standards for how do you deal with memory on consoles and stuff I think because of us. - I think one of what things you see here is that paper wins. I have a lot of games which are all digital and those files have all evaporated as floppy disks died, or the formats that we saved on went away. But "Star Control II" was the last game we did were all of the design I did was on paper. So it lived. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how we organized storytelling. So it starts with this diagram here, I'll hold this up for you. This is the plot structure of the game and it all ends down here with destroy the trophy ship. And every single one of these little paragraphs or sentences is an event in the course of the game. You don't have to do all of them, but you have to do most of them. And ultimately to destroy the trophy ship you have to walk through all of these logical chains. Now each of these little moments is often a conversation. So while this is the master, the conversations actually have their own flow charts. I'll let Fred unfold a few of these as well. So each of these represents a conversation you might have with an alien or the Starbase Commander and they're all hand-drawn flowcharts. So there's a madness to this. Every circle represents a statement that the aliens will make. Every square represents a statement that the player makes. And all of these almost like a maze of conversation, you'll walk through these as you talk with the aliens. And in some cases when you make a phrase say something it'll change a game state and that's what I've sort of got listed down the sides here. And so I spent a long time and cramped my hand a lot with a mechanical pencil to get all of these set up. But all of these were necessary for us to believe that we could implement the entire complex path and story of "Star Control II." So this was actually the first step where we laid out the logic of everything. And then once that was done and once we had defined all of the different alien race personalities and appearances and sort of hallmark ways of speaking, that's when I and some friends wrote dialogue for every single little circle or square here in all of these and then that all ends up in here, which is, again, that plus all of this logic turns into the gameplay. Now I would hand one of these to Fred and then he would executed it in C, I think it was mostly C? - [Fred] Uh-huh. - And then we would debug them. And for a long time each of these little circles or squares, it's probably too small see, has a little title to it and the titles like friendly alien hello number two, or die I hate you forever number five, we would enter those in as labels within the code, but then as placeholders early on, that was the text we used. And so there was a version of this game running with just these cryptic statements like, die number five. And at one point actually, Accolade thought that was the actual game and they didn't say it was awful. They were ready to actually ship the game at one point with just that sort of weird dialogue in there. - So this was the actual critical path of the game. This big flowchart had to get done before any of these individual flowcharts could get done, before any of this writing. - This is just like half of them Fred. So there's more. This is an example of the Starbase Commander's conversation. And these just took days and days and days to draw by hand and they took quite a bit less time for Fred to implement in code, so Fred was always the hungry monster running ahead of me ready for my data. - But it was good in some ways because I would encounter problems as he was laboriously creating one of these, I would be implementing one of them and we would encounter problems with our assumptions, or I would say, hey I can do this technique, for example, in the middle of a Syreen conversation where the screen turns black and something happens in the conversation. And so even though he was taking longer to create them, I still had plenty of work and exploration to do. But they all had to be done in sequence. - And so we actually then had handwritten sections that were delivered by some of my friends who were working on the writing. So these, for example, are how I think Leonard delivered all of his phrases in these index cards and so you'd pick a response and then it would have like a choose your own adventure, go to card C. So he thought of the conversation and followed this diagram as these various cards. So you could sort of interactively play through it. - So each one of those cards would represent one of these boxes here. - And then Greg Johnson wrote all of his material by hand. So I've got pages and pages and pages and pages of Greg's handwriting. I like this headline, serious spiritual problems. I'm not sure, probably the Pkunk. - [Fred] Could have been him. - Yeah, could have been Greg. I think there's even some stuff written on napkins back in here somewhere. My horrendously bad handwriting. I think this was for the Syreen and the Starbase Commander. And then this, some of the writers, Mat Genzer for example actually used a word processor and he has some Ilwrath phrases here. So Mat or Greg would get one of these diagrams, an explanation of how the alien should talk, what the whole purpose of this dialogue was and what the events were and then they would write each paragraph one at a time. - [Man] Was that the most efficient way to do it? [laughing] - It was what we had at the time. - Necessity is the mother of invention. - Ultimately, I think if this had been purely digital, it probably would've been more efficient, but you know, the medium affected the message. I think the manner in which these are organized, literally in some cases, how much stuff I could fit on a single piece of paper influenced the size of the conversations. So sometimes I would have crammed things in the corner and that would just mean to me, well that part of the conversation is done. And so in that way if it had all been digital who knows how that would have gone. And when we think about conversations, they're really like mazes where the individual rooms can be thought of topics of conversation. So you might be in the, the first time I've met you room, and you might be chatting back and forth with him about subjects. Then you'll make a statement and that might move you onto, hey we're ready to trade with you, and there'll be a series of back-and-forth phrases about that. But you might insult them and that will take you to the I'm almost ready to kill you part of the conversation. So you could organize conversations hierarchically in terms of these big blobs of purpose and the big major flows of events in the conversation and then within those you could lay in additional details. - I dunno how the effect of having everybody physically separated and not really knowing what anybody else was doing, but it definitely created distinct characters in the actual writing that was done, besides just the different writers, the fact that they didn't know what the other person was writing. - And I thought not only were we trying to entertain this theoretical player, but we're actually trying to kind of entertain each other. Early on I did almost all of my design in these hardbound books and so as you'd pour through them, it looks sort of like the ravings of a madman. And they all begin with, I tend to lose things, if you find this please give it back to me. So here you have designed for games. These were three games we proposed, one of which was "Star Control: The Adventure" which became "Star Control II," some thoughts about a way to construct ground surfaces. And then as we moved forward you'll find that sometimes it's images or screen diagrams or this is, for example, a cutaway of the precursor superframe starship, a mining mole down here and more screen layouts, lists of powers and alien races. This was sort of my first sketch for the Melnorme. This actually relates to doing the SEGA Genesis, so it talks about disassembly and PC-relative addressing, that was part of getting the reverse engineered documentation. Here are story gates from start, very early on I thought about story gates. So you need to ally with the Syreen, you do that by giving them their homeworld story. You need to ally with the Yehat. And back here it was, get them an excellent hunting creature, which we ended up changing. Ally with Spathi, convince them that they are safer in concordance with you. Ally with the VUX, apologize with conviction. So I sort of work in a very freeform, write in any direction orientation. This has to do with, I believe probably patterns, oh this is MOD information. This is how we were looking at four-channel sound. Sorry, in some cases I barely remember. And these are how you could edit sound. I had a listing of a safe Harbor bulletin board where they had actually a bunch of my games pirated, but they also happen to have a lot of MOD code related. These were ways of looking at, for example, the Starbase Commander, he ended up just looking like Fred standing in front of a window. - [Fred] When I had hair. - [Paul] But we had a lot of other ideas. He'd be sitting at a desk, I think that's where we went. This was sort of as I was thinking about what the Starbase itself would look like. So I just have dozens of these and in some cases they make sense. In some cases they're just a reflection of my weird mind. So for every piece of art that we did, oftentimes we had to cut it into chunks and then reposition it. So these are all pixel offsets that I would write by hand and then we would enter in code by hand. Here's some example of text where I'm starting to think about how conversations flow and so you'll see this here is the baby version of all of those diagrams out there. And you can see how I'm thinking about you enter into a conversation, there's a stack of phrases, in some cases they'll delete themselves and take you back. And in some cases a phrase will be replaced by a new phrase and in some cases you'll move to a whole new area of the conversation. I'm not sure that actually makes any sense at this point. So as we've said, the logic in the game was defined by a flowchart and then each point in that logic is represented by a conversation. So in the conversation this is a diagram of how a conversation works. - [Fred] That's one of the more complicated ones. Some of them are simpler, because they have less to tell you. - Right this represents one of the most complicated, which is the conversation with the Starbase Commander. And so the form we chose was a little square is a thing that you're saying. So like, tell me about the Arilou? And then there would be a response from the Starbase Commander, which is a circle. And you would ask a question, they would make a response and then this code here, which is sort of remove RS, which stands for remove from stack. So this is a stack of phrases, so you ask this question, he says this, this is removed and then it's replaced with this. And eventually you'll exhaust these stacks and ultimately you'll get to a point where you move to a new collection of phrases and that's a new topic of conversation. And then down the side here you'll see these are game states that are being changed or looked at as you talk. So for example, one of these game states is, you have sold too many humans to the Druuge, so the conversation changes at a certain point when you start to sell people to the Druuge. The Starbase Commander gets mad and in fact you set a value here that over in a different part of the game where you buy crew raises the price of the crew, because you've informed the Starbase Commander that you were selling too many crew. So we laid this out and Fred would then code this based upon this illustration. And then afterwards we would either, I wrote a little over half the dialogue in the game, and then the other half was done by friends and so I would sit down with them and I'd say, the Starbase Commander is this guy, he talks like this, this is what you need to get across. And then they would go through each one of these, read what I was asking them and then they would answer this sort of in the words of the Starbase Commander as I'd communicated it and then we would get something back like this. Now in this case I wrote this, but so we would just get, these are the statements that you're asking of the Starbase Commander and then here are his responses. And the manner in which the text is written and broken down affects how it appears on the screen. - Talk about the fonts. - Oh okay, I'm a real font nerd, always have been and back when it was all Letraset in books, if that means anything to people, but so we decided that a part of what would sell the personality of the person you're talking with is if they had a different font. But fonts were not standardized in that time the way they are now in Windows, so we wrote a font editor. And then I got sort of obsessed in kerning. And kerning, which you may or may not know is the spacing between letters which is highly affected by the specific letters you're using. Like if you have a capital T and lowercase A, you gotta tuck that lowercase A up against that T. So we created a system for doing that and ultimately I think we ended up with really beautiful text that in some cases very much helped the character sell themselves. So like the evil Ilwrath had this kind of-- - Gothic. - Gothic font. And the heavy Melnorme had kind of a chubby font. And like I'm totally assessed on this. Once on another game we didn't have an automatic kerning system and I made the designers hand kern all the text in the game for days and they still haven't forgiven me for it. - Did we mention he's totally obsessed? - Totally obsessed with fonts. That's uh, I'm really looking forward to that part in future games. So this then becomes the original text that we would get. And then of course as we're playing the game things would have to change or we would find errors in the text and then there's translation which is a whole 'nother deal. But all of this material migrated into the open source version, except they never saw any of these charts. These charts ended up in code and then the code is sort of what marched forward into becoming the open source. And nowadays, I, for example, have been working on tools that let you generate these conversations dynamically and I'm gonna miss writing it on paper kind of, 'cause I got really strong hands at that time. [laughing] But I think I will no longer be limited to a single piece of paper's worth of conversation. - [Man] Was there any point in time where you went through all the work on these and then you just scrapped it? - No so much in conversations, but Fred delights in my pain I wanna just say that and I was once saving out all of the separate rotations of a planet around a star and so as we would place these different planets around stars, the highlight of where the sun shining on it would change. And there was like seven different sizes and 10 different colors and ultimately it meant that there were, I dunno, one or 2,000 separate little pieces of art that had to be saved off separately. And I spent a couple of days doing this. And then I was all done and then Fred said, "Oh, you saved them up in the wrong format. "I think you might need to save them all up again." And I was like, no! [imitating crying] And then I did and a little bit later, he said, "Oh that's okay, I changed the code, "so that other format would work." [laughing] Very very evil. - Umgah joke. - Umgah joke, yes. So this represents ultimately the brain behind the story written down on paper and I think this is the only explanation that's ever been given for this. So in the future history, if anyone ever asks you what these mean, this can be used to represent that. - [Man] It's great. And now then when you figured out that it was, like what process, was it before or after the concept mapping stage when you were like, wait a second, this is, this real science thing is gonna be super boring. - Well I love real science. I'm not a scientist, a lot of family members are, but I love kind of swimming in it. And back before the internet, "The Concise Encyclopedia of Science and Technology" was a form of entertainment. And I still read through this just for fun sometimes. So sometimes I would have a specific topic that I would search and then sometimes I would just paw through it until I found something intriguing. And sometimes it would be an article on parasites. And sometimes it would be eulite, or Gondwanaland or how gaps in transistors work. And there's a lot of parasites in the world, that's an important lesson to be learned. But for me, either it would be a concept that was intriguing or it would be a name that was intriguing or a process, but the mistake that I made was thinking that it was the literal version of that that would entertain people. It's an interpreted version or a version that simply inspires a thought which you then deliver entertainment within. So if I actually were to describe to you the genome of cassowary's, that would not be very interesting, but if I told you the cassowary's are the most dangerous birds on Earth and they periodically kill people and they are actually little dinosaurs and you should learn about cassowaries and avoid them, highly dangerous creatures. But to me what's funny about that is my paranoia about giant birds, how colorful they are, how fast they move, how tricky they are, but not the technical details that exist in here. However, this is inspiration, at least for me. - And all of that gameplay, figuring out the gameplay, happened before this. It wasn't until we had the entire gameplay working when I said, Paul, I'm running out of things to do, you need to set this down. So that, yeah. - [Man] Very cool. - It can only live in your imagination so long. It's rather hard to do a direct brain to game transfer. You have to go through some intermediate medium. "Star Control" began with this goofy little drawing. And most of my designs begin this way with a goofy little drawing. I'm not embarrassed at all to do horrible drawings. But this pretty much says the whole concept, which is science-fiction "Archon," in this case over the phone, because I was interested in making this a modem game. I ended up abandoning all of that, but the fundamental idea of fighting ships and then having a strategy game carried through. And down here I start putting out words that I think are interesting; cruiser, scout, destroyer and start sketching shapes. Now this was originally intended for the Commodore 64, so you get very very simple shapes. So I was trying to build that little language. Now next I wanted Electronic Arts to publish this and to give me a bunch of money to make the game, so I decided I would sell this game to them through an advertisement, they had very unique and particular ads, so this is a sketch of how I thought I could lay it out and then ultimately I went into-- - [Man] Hold that up again Paul. - Oh sure, so this is a sketch, I just drew in a journal of how I would lay it out, how to try to capture Electronic Arts format for advertisements. And then they went and they wrote the captions and did the art and then this is sort of, this is a copy of the copy, but this is ultimately what I went to them with and they passed. But very importantly, there was a producer at Electronic Arts who thought it was cool and she ended up going to Accolade and saying, "Look, I can get you a much better deal "at Accolade for a three-game project." And that "Star Control" was the key to all of that. - [Man] Nice. - So then in here this is just more original ideas. This ranged from a few words I was writing about "Star Control I" to a very simple couple of pages on "Star Control II" and there's always a germ of an idea and it very rarely looks like what you end up with, but it's important I think to understand how we got to where we went, to see how it started. And "Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters" as you can see was proposal number four. There were three other proposals that we offered at the same time as "Star Control II" that will never see the light of day, one of which involved time traveling and saving the dinosaurs. So I studied field geology in college, I really loved that class right up until the point I caught a sublethal dose of poison oak. But I've always loved maps, whether it's in Dungeons & Dragons or field geology, so when we were laying out the star map, before I spent way too much time building the star map editor, I laid this out on paper and I thought about constellation shapes and constellation names and how to distribute the various characters that were established in "Star Control I" and then how to add new characters to "Star Control II." This is actually upside down, so I'll flip that around I do believe. Yes, that makes more sense. So for example, this hexagon of stars here is the Vulpeculae star system which I believe is Latin for wolf. And this is where the Androsynth vanished and the Orz appeared, which is a major plot element. And then out here I think there were times I might not even have known what the new aliens were gonna be out here, but I would just sort of mark off an area of space for them. And I don't even think I've indicated that this central area is where the Doctrinal Conflict is occurring and that's the battle between the two different subspecies of the Ur-Quan. And so later on I think this map, this is probably, oh gosh I think I was starting to work on the clue book. And so these ancient maps were all over the walls and were frequently falling apart. That's an earlier version of that. And I think this was maybe the very earliest one, you can tell 'cause it's super ugly, but this pretty much just says, totally dangerous region crawling with spinward Ur-Quan fighting with anti-spinward Ur-Quan. And then the Spathi are here and the Orz are here and the VUX are here. And I think some of these ended up getting moved around, but I think I've got the Galactic Cores is that way and the spinward and antispinward are this way. So this was how we sort of laid it out. And to me this is pure Dungeons & Dragons at this point, you know, using paper role-playing game to sort of lay out a map and think about an adventure and then we subsequently translate it further and further into a digital form. I think this may have been in little, this is probably a 10 second sketch that turned into that. So you're sort of going backwards through time here. Seeing it in a more and more primitive sense. This is something that did not happen. This was I think a previous drawing that was laying out, a hot dog versus some sort of pool shape. [laughing] That one I didn't like. So when I say that for every good idea, it's important to do 10 bad ones, it may be 100 bad ones, but if you don't do them, you won't figure out which is the good one and which is the bad one. So this is where I think we started to lay out key star systems and maybe the QuasiSpace portal system. And then as with everything else this migrated from a paper form into a digital form and then we would revise it in digital form, so it's highly likely that none of these paper versions are accurate to what ended up in the game.