Ethan Wilde: Welcome, everybody. Good evening. Welcome to our our second talk.
Ethan Wilde: this semester in the Santa Rosa Junior College's Game Development program, Speaking series, game views.
Ethan Wilde: We're we're very lucky tonight to be joined by Mr. Warren Davis.
Ethan Wilde: who? Has an illustrious career in making video games he's worked on a number of titles. I think that we'll all be familiar with including,
Ethan Wilde: what I believe was the most popular title by the publisher Gottlieb. Qbert, I think we're all familiar with Qbert. I think Qbert's become kind of a cultural icon, in fact, and was really one of the most popular and successful video games of the era that it arrived in
Ethan Wilde: And so I'm gonna invite.
Ethan Wilde: Mr. Davis to to give an introduction, and we're gonna have an opportunity, I think, to to share some some questions with him this evening. And we've got a little less than an hour on the clock now to to hang out and and learn a little bit more about
Ethan Wilde: the history of of video game development from from
Ethan Wilde: the 1,900 eighty's till now. Pretty much so welcome, Warren, very pleased to have you with us.
Warren: Thank you so much, Ethan, it's a it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you very much for having me
Ethan Wilde: so, would you? would you mind giving us a little brief?
Ethan Wilde: introduction to to yourself. I know I gave a kind of a a standard one, but I wonder if you have some way that you could start the story of of how you found yourself.
Ethan Wilde: At some point in what I think was the early 19 eighties.
Warren: With this opportunity to to work in this. Just suddenly emerging field. A whole new form of popular culture video games. Sure, sure. Happy to. I just to give you some context. So II entered the II started working for golly was my first job in video games in January of 1982.
Warren: Now, video games had been around for about 10 years. You know, the Ark, I remember. So II started college in 1973. I was a freshman at A. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1,973, and I remember sometime during my freshman year, the the first
Warren: video game coming in to the game room. We had a game room, you know. It had pool tables it had an arcade, but it had electromechanical games
Warren: the old style of, you know, like a baseball game or a ball, a literal ball came and you hit a button, and it swung a bat. And of course, of course, pinball machines were big.
Warren: but they they brought in this new machine that was so bizarre because it was a television screen. It was what we knew of as a television screen. And yet
Warren: you could interact
Warren: with the picture. And it was a crude, you know, game. It was either pong or computer space. I can't remember which one was first. I think I think it was actually computer space. And Pong came later. But you know, it was just enthralling and fascinating. Now, my chosen major was computer engineering.
Warren: I went to school to learn about computers. And as soon as I saw a video game, I thought, Oh, my God, that wouldn't it be cool to have that job making these things?
Warren: But you know, they were so new, and I had no idea how you would go about that. So I went about my career or my my, you know my college years learning about computers. When I got to be a senior II started to learn more about computer graphics specifically because I was interested in that and
Warren: and then II went to get my master's degree. But I actually dropped out of the master's program long story, but I stayed at college for a fifth year.
Warren: and then I got hired by bell laboratories, and they sent me to get my Master's degree at Ohio State.
Warren: where I again, you know, studied computer engineering. My actual degree was in double E, but that's where I got a Master's degree.
Warren: And then, after that, it's, you know, kind of like, well, you go out and you get a job. Well bell Labs hired me to get my Master's degree, so II stayed with them for a while, and it wasn't a bad job, but eventually I got disillusioned. They they kept sending me on trips that were months at a time away from home, and II kinda got tired of traveling every time they sent me someplace. I wanted to stay there. I didn't want to come back to Illinois.
Warren: so
Warren: so I quit. I actually quit my job bell labs. And I thought, That's it for me and engineering. I just did. You know, I didn't really feel like I fit in in the corporate engineering world. You know, I wasn't really a suit and tie guy. And
Warren: anyway,
Warren: I was unemployed for a while, and during that time I started to study improvisation
Warren: at Second City in Chicago. And I thought, oh, this would be a cool way to make a living, too. God, you know, just standing up on stage and being funny all the time. So I pursued that for a while, but you know really not much money in that.
Warren: And so I would sort of look at the want ads in the Sunday paper. Of course, this is before the Internet.
Warren: and one December in 1981. In fact.
Warren: I saw this advertisement in the the Chicago Tribune
Warren: asking for video game programmers.
Warren: And I, you know my jaw dropped. I just couldn't believe that it was that easy that somebody was just actually advertising for somebody to make video games
Warren: but I immediately sent in a resume and a letter. I got an answer back within days I went for an interview right after New Year's.
Warren: and I was hired almost immediately. and that that began my journey in the world of video games. which was much different than it is to day. Obviously
Ethan Wilde: that that's an astonishing story. You responded to a classified one ad
Ethan Wilde: there were no recruiters for video game developers back. Then there weren't really any video game development companies that that most folks would be familiar with either. Would there have been? No, yeah. You got a imagine video games. Now, I'm talking about arcade games right? Arcade world, probably even fewer people making home games. Because, you know, I think atar the atari
Warren: was probably, and maybe in television had a home game system. You know what I mean. There were maybe 2, maybe 3. The commodore, I think, was out then.
Warren: There were very few home game systems, and they were very crude. The Arcade games were actually like the Cadillacs and the Maseratis. They had the best graphics. They had the cutting edge stuff.
Warren: and there really were only a handful of companies making those, and they were in Chicago. They were the pinball companies. Valley, Midway
Warren: stern, Williams and Gottlieb. Not even sure if there were any others. Maybe Chicago coin. There were a couple of other outliers, of course, in Japan there were a lot of companies making arcade games.
Warren: and in California there were a couple, a a atari and cinematronics come to mind. So. But still, you know, in the scheme of things, just a small handful of companies making arcade games. It it really didn't seem like it was easy to break into that world.
Warren: Which was a New World. But golly was golly! Was looking for people
Ethan Wilde: that is fascinating, and and like you, said Gottlieb. Chicago was the home base in America for mechanical coin operated entertainment. Right? All those in ball companies you named where they're all Chicago companies, aren't they? Yeah, that's extraordinary.
Ethan Wilde: So you were really in the right place onto this opportunity. And what was it like when you showed up at a pinball company? Gottlieb, that wanted to break into video games? What kind of
Warren: working environment. Wh, what was the scene like there? So basically, the
Warren: the pinball department was in a separate location.
Warren: Golly was one of the last pinball manufacturers to get into video games. And the 2 people who ran the department. Howie Rubin was the Vp of business development, and Ron Waxman was the Vp of engineering
Warren: for video games, both of them.
Warren: and they created this department in a separate facility. So it was 8 miles away from the main plant, which was in a suburb called Northlake. We were in Bensonville, Illinois, also a suburb, but you know, and we had a manufacturing plant that when I was hired wasn't being used because Gottlieb had yet to launch their first in house game. So Gottlieb had come out with a couple of arcade games that they bought from Japan
Warren: and manufactured those in like 1978, 79 80, some somewhere around there when when the department, you know. Then they decided, we wanna make our own internal games. And so they started this department
Warren: and
Warren: you know, there was a handful of people there were, you know, maybe 12 people, 12 to 15 people, maybe with clerical staff, 20 tops in the entire building.
Warren: And you know, when I was hired, there were just a few programmers there was, one artist. Really, Jeff Lee was the only artist there.
Warren: dedicated for games, and and like I said, they hadn't come out with any games they were developing. Their first. What would be their first release game, which is called reactor?
Warren: I don't know if anyone's played it or seen it in an arcade. It's a track ball based thing. It was designed by a guy named Tim Skelley.
Warren: So one of the first things Howie and Ron did when they formed the department was they hired Tim Skelley, who actually had a track record. He had made games that were successful and popular for cinematronics, a whole slew of them. So he was sort of like the guru.
Warren: and and he was making this game that became reactor.
Warren: Our second game was in development when I was hired, and it was based on Superman 2,
Warren: the movie superman, 2 where Superman battles the 3 Kryptonian villains. But they tried to get the rights to Superman, and they found it to be too expensive. So it became a generic superhero who was fighting 3 generic villains, and your job was to protect. You know, pedestrians who were walking along the street
Warren: and that game never got released, although I worked on it when I was hired a little bit to help out the program to learn the rope, so to speak.
Warren: but it never got released. And then the next game that came out was Cubert.
Warren: Because they, you know, after after the superhero game was cancelled, it was like, All right. Well, Warren, you know you know the system. Now make a game.
Warren: That game turned out to be Cuba. It it. I started it in about March or April of 1982, you know, again, that's about 3 or 4 months after I started. And it was ready. It was rolling off the production line in October of that year.
Ethan Wilde: That is amazing. So you had about about 6 months to work on it.
Warren: Yeah, it it it it, you know. It came together pretty quickly. Our system was easy to program on it. It was a sprite based system, and the hardware did the heavy lifting. You just had to tell it
Warren: what sprite number give it an X and a y, and it puts that in the hardware would put that on the screen every sixteenth of a second. You would. You know you. We did all of our work in a in a simple loop. We would just do everything we needed to do to get all the sprites moved where they needed to move in a frame.
Warren: and then we waited for V blank. And if you, if you had too much work to do, and you missed V. Blank. Well, you were in trouble. That was, that was bad programming.
Warren: So luckily Cubert did not have that problem.
Ethan Wilde: That's pretty extraordinary. So so they gave you a couple of months to learn the in house platform that they had developed with the hardware and the hardware, accelerated sprites, and so on, and so forth. What?
Warren: What was a a day in the life of of starting to build Hubert, like you had a couple of colleagues that you work together with. Is that right? Yes, so I got leave. The the designers were the programmers. That's the way that was got Leave's way of doing things.
Warren: And we had one artist, Jeff Lee, who basically did the art for every game
Warren: with, and the only exceptions were if the programmer was also an artist. So, for example, Tim Skelley did his own artwork.
Warren: and we had another programmer, Chris Brewer, who did his own artwork. But for everybody else who wasn't an artist, Jeff Lee would do their art.
Warren: So I worked with Jeff.
Warren: and I worked with a sound. A guy named Dave feel Dave Field did the sounds, and because it was my first game, I you know II didn't have preconceived notions.
I was. I wasn't egotistical.
Warren: I was just trying to make something I thought was fun. So
Warren: Originally, you know, the origin of Cuba came from seeing this Escher pattern
Warren: on a screen, but it was filling the screen. Jeff had made this pattern for another programmer
Warren: who was playing around with a a bit in our hardware that would reverse the foreground and background planes.
Warren: Our hardware engineer put that in. We have no idea what it might be used for, we just thought, let's so, I guess Kahn was sort of playing with it to see if he could find some use for it, and he just needed some artwork to fill the screen, and Jeff gave him this.
Warren: this pattern of cubes that filled the screen from end to end.
Warren: and I saw that on the screen one day, and I thought, Well, this is interesting, because if if you put, if you carve that into a pyramid right? So there's one cube on top, then 2, then 3, then 4.
Warren: If if a ball or something fell and and landed on the very top, it would have one of 2
Warren: choices of where to go. It could either bounce down to the left or bounce down to the right.
Warren: Well, that's binary. And so it quickly occurred to me that in a single random bite I could determine the path of a ball from top to bottom.
Warren: I thought, Oh, yeah, that sounds like a cool exercise. Let me let me play with that and see if I could get that working. So that was my goal, and that was my only goal. I really wasn't even thinking of making a game. I just was like, I need to learn some things.
Warren: So that. That was my attempt to learn how to program both randomness and gravity.
Warren: because the balls were bouncing. And so, you know, Jeff supplied whatever artwork I asked for. Well, once I did that. And I actually had balls bouncing, and people would come by and go. Wow! That looks really cool. You should do something with that.
Warren: So I was like, Okay, maybe I should like get a character to to jump around, you know, and
Warren: think of these cubes as a play field. So I asked Jeff to if he first I asked Jeff he had any characters I could use.
Warren: and he actually did, because Jeff was always thinking, and always had ideas for things that he wanted to develop, and he had all these characters that he designed, and he put em up on the screen. And
Warren: I said, you know, I like that kind of round orange one with the long nose because he looks a little pathetic.
Warren: So I was like, Okay, let's see, let's do that. So Jeff made me all the angles I needed and all the animations of him jumping.
Warren: Not that there was much, I think. You know. He basically was a static character. He's always looking in the right direction. But when he landed I had asked for a little bounce like I had asked to give him a little bounce in the knees, so there's actually like one frame where he his legs are one pixel shorter, and J. Just to me that.
Warren: So, you know, solidify the the feeling that he landed. So you know, so little details like that were important to me. Cause we were doing whatever we could with the pixels we had. You know the foreground sprites were
Warren: 16 by 16 pixels.
Warren: and you know that doesn't really give you a lot. But Jeff was a master at at giving characters personalities. Even with those limitations. We had 16 colors total at any one time. We never had more than 16 colors.
Warren: So yeah, we just were. We were always looking for ways to exploit our limitations to make the best of them.
Ethan Wilde: I like that phrase, exploit your limitations. That's really a creative way to approach the fact that you had
Ethan Wilde: very early technology for all this, like you said when you saw the first video game. It was a television set
Ethan Wilde: nobody knew about playing games on screen. I really appreciate how you described
Ethan Wilde: the the playfulness of what was basically a prototyping process for you of having that inspiration from the Esher print on the screen, realizing you could actually turn it into a virtual 3D space
Ethan Wilde: and then you you really appreciate you sharing the detail about how you could take a single byte with 8 bits in it and use those binary decisions to navigate. I'm sharing the screen again as you're describing the keyboard playing field. And there's there's 7 levels. I was counting them as you were describing the byte, so you could literally map a path of anything in in one single byte of memory
Warren: with a bit to spare.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah. Well, that's
Ethan Wilde: that's some very creative use of of leveraging your limitations. Well.
Ethan Wilde: how did it go from those those early prototypes and your work with with your team of of Jeff Lee and and David Thiel. You were a 3 person team that made this incredible piece of art that is now part of
Ethan Wilde: popular culture and game history for for all time.
Ethan Wilde: At what point did did it really become this game that was going to be released. And and how did it go from the experiments in what sounds like a really free environment
Ethan Wilde: to work and experiment in. And and and how did it become something that that management thought would go in one of these expensive cases and and get sold?
Warren: Well, it was a free environment, as I'm I'm glad you brought that up, because, it's it's a credit to both Ron and Howie that, especially in those early days. They just let their programmers run wild. I mean there. There was no I mean, they would certainly add their opinions and say what they thought, but they they really let the programmers explore their desires of what kind of games they wanted to make
Warren: and and by and large, I'd say all the programmers we're we're good at doing that. Some of the programmers we, you know that we we did have some programmers that maybe weren't as skilled as others that might have had some programming problems. But you know, but like I said Ron, and how he encouraged everybody to to do what they wanted to do. And
Warren: you know, it was a very. It was an unbelievably
Warren: cool environment to work. In fact, Howie, I love to tell this story. But there were times where, you know, because we had this big manufacturing plant those early few months before reactor was actually being manufactured, and the plant was empty.
Warren: and we all be working away, and Howie
Warren: would come in and go. All right, everybody! Stop what you doin. We're going to go down to the plant, throw football around for a little bit.
Warren: and we're all like how we we wanna work. We don't wanna throw a football.
Warren: So you know it was. It was, you know, it was a really really nice place to work an environment to work it. It could not be sustained, I will say
Warren: and a midway through the development of Cuba, we actually were merged back in with the main plant in Northlake, with the pinball developers who at the time
Warren: we didn't know it, but they were quite resentful because they had wanted an opportunity to work on video games, and the company did not give them that opportunity.
Warren: and so there was a lot of sort of resentment towards us, even though we weren't, you know, the guilty party. But
Warren: we didn't understand it. We didn't know why these guys were giving us the stink eye where, as we passed them in the hallway. But eventually, we all got to know each other, and it all kinda smoothed itself out. But it took a while so anyway, and that environment also. As when there you know the video game. If anybody knows or doesn't know. But the our kid industry kind of declined.
Warren: It had been gang busters from the early 1,900 seventys just growing, growing, growing, growing, growing. Arcades jump, you know, you know, were opening up
Warren: in droves all over the country. But then, in like 1983, there was sort of a crash which continued into 1984 with the advent of laserdisc games.
Warren: That's a whole story in itself that I could probably talk for an hour on. But
Warren: you know, as things got tighter there, and and the industry was suffering. Goliba, you know, realized it. It was carrying a little bit of dead weight. It was act there because the department had grown, and they hired a lot of people who really weren't
Warren: good at being self directed. And so then we started bringing in middle manager, and we started, you know, doing design meetings, where you know you'd have to pitch your design and get it approved. And so so you know, the the party was over after not too long.
Warren: But what was the other thing? You would ask? Oh, yeah, when did it become a game? So
Warren: yeah. Originally, I'm just, you know, tooling away, just doing what I think is fun. And it was kind of off management's radar for a few weeks.
Warren: and then at some point
Warren: how he was gone on a business trip, and and when he came back I think he saw it for the first time, and he was like.
Warren: where where did this come from? He just was so stunned, and I'm probably only all I had was you know, balls falling down, and and the character was jumping around avoiding them. And maybe, you know, the snake was chasing him. I'm not sure exactly what state it was in when he saw it, but he was like, Oh, my God! And of course he was pleased because he it looked cool to him as well. The thing I was missing was a goal.
Warren: III mean, I just jumping around trying to avoid balls wasn't much of a goal. And then it was actually Ron Waxman, who, you know, occasionally, after 50'clock, would come out of his office and
Warren: sit in the place where we work. We all shared, by the way, like one big, huge
Warren: room we didn't have cubicles we just had. We. And we only had 3 development systems. So only 3 people could be coding at a time, and if you weren't coding and had to be doing something else. So we gotta prep work, or this or that, or
Warren: anyway, Ron, I was working late, and Ron was sitting behind me, and Ron was a really large, rotund guy, and he would always smoke a cigar.
Ethan Wilde: and he had kind of a raspy breathing that you would just hear behind you.
Warren: and you just sort of learn to tune it out.
Warren: But at 1 point I'm just sort of playing the game, and he's jumping around, and I'm I'm just trying to figure out what to do next. And Ron says, what if? What if the colors, the tops of the cubes change color when he lands on it?
Warren: And I was like Oh, there you go. That's it. Now it's a game. Now I have a goal.
Warren: So, and things progressed, I think you know, pretty quickly from there, because my goal in coding. It was to keep it simple. It was my first game. I didn't want to make it complicated. I wasn't a big fan of complicated games like defender, where you had like 5 buttons. They're all did different things, you know. I like that wasn't for me. I was more of a Pac man, Guy, and like, Okay, one joystick, no buttons. That's I can. I can get behind that.
Warren: So
Warren: yeah, you know. So that's when it sort of became a game, and then it was scheduled. But of course they they gave me the time I needed, and when it. When the coding was done.
Warren: It went through a new phase which was new to me of tuning.
Warren: Hmm, cause that's kind of an important thing with a game, you know. The only people playing it at first. Is the designer and and the team, and then the people in the office. But what about people out in the world. You know, you need to. You need to gather information. So we would do a number of types of tests. We would do arcade testing where we'd actually have an arrangement with an arcade nearby. We'd put the game in the Arcade.
Warren: People would play it, we would. We would actually watch them, you know, surreptitiously. Just hang around the arcade and watch people play. That was useful. We'd have focus groups.
Warren: you know, grab 10 people out of a mall and pay them 15 or 20 bucks to come and play this new video game and watch through a a one way mirror. I was part of that
Warren: and
Warren: And so you know that we went through that process. But at that point it was it, you know, it was ready to be manufactured, and they they had it on the schedule, and and it came out, I'd I'd say, just in the nick of time, you know. So they did react, or first.
Warren: and you know the run only goes as long as they have orders. So the the way the business worked was
Warren: we were the manufacturers of these games we didn't make. We didn't collect the coins right? We didn't put them in pizzerias or or arcades. We built them and we sell. We would sell them to distributors. So there was a distribution network.
Warren: But they needed to know that it could collect quarters so that they can sell it to the people who actually buy the machines.
Warren: So we did coin testing as well. And Cubert tested really, really well, so everybody at Gotley was like, Oh, my God. I think we got a winner. Then, of course, we took it to a trade show. There was a huge coin OP. Trade show in Chicago every year called the Ama.
Warren: and that was in November. and Cubert was, you know, probably the top game
Warren: from people who rated these things at that show and and then it went on and did great business, and you know, that sort of gave me carte blanche. Golly to, you know, nobody really messed with me. They were like, oh, I think this guy knows what he's doing. So
Warren: they they left me alone.
Ethan Wilde: That's brilliant. That's I really appreciate the details you shared about the what I think today we might call the play testing process. Where you where you did the surreptitious surveillance
Ethan Wilde: with a machine planted in an arcade. Those are some lucky arcade patrons do that testing. And then you did the focus groups is that are those practices, things that you think were picked up from Gottlieb's experience building mechanical entertainment. Did they do the same thing with the pinball machines? You think? I honestly, I don't know. II was pretty ignorant about the pinball process, and in my entire career I've never really worked on pinballs.
Warren: So I really don't know what they did with pinball if they went through that same process. I know that later, years later, when I was making home games for Disney. We did go through that process even with home games. So II think it was pretty standard process.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that's that's fascinating. Cause. That's such a big part of like you. You called it tuning right? That was the phrase you used that makes much sense.
Ethan Wilde: in in the work you did cause you wrote all the code for this thing. In the work you did. Did you find ways to leave it possible for you to have some, some flexibility, maybe using variables with values that can control different characteristics of the of the physics simulation, or how fast things move? Particularly, you know, how did you? How did you keep it from being too difficult? Because it is
Ethan Wilde: brilliantly easy to to to learn. It's one of those games like Pong or or or pacman that
Ethan Wilde: you don't need a big instruction set for
Ethan Wilde: it is a very challenging game, too. It seems like it was very carefully tuned to keep
Warren: me feeding it. Quarters. Well, I don't know about carefully. You know. The the word that I kept getting back from management was, it's too hard. It's too hard.
Warren: Make it easier.
Warren: Make it slower. So to answer the first part of your question, there are diagnostics in the game. so you can open up the coin box and and hit a switch, and and there's a diagnostic mode.
Warren: And in that diagnostic mode there are settings where you can make it easy medium or hard. and and basically that just throws in different tables
Warren: to to, you know, tables that I included. But what I found was most people in the in in the field. Most, you know, Arcade owners, whatever. They just never touched it. So it
Warren: yeah, a a. And maybe some did, I don't know, but II never heard of most people. It's astounded to learn that it could be made to be easier or harder, and and the other thing that you could do is set the level at which you get an extra life.
Warren: So if you set that low, that inherently makes the game easier because you you accumulate extra lives quicker.
Warren: So so that was in there, and it was tunable that way for that very reason. But II don't know how it was used.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, how how did you come to the decision to include those kinds of
Ethan Wilde: of owner? Configurable settings? Because it seems like a brilliant way to allow you know, a single location with a single console. Could
Ethan Wilde: could decide if they wanted to like you said. Most owners didn't know to to to change the game's difficulty over time.
Ethan Wilde: As as the players got better at it. They could. They could tune it up.
Warren: I mean, it wasn't my idea. You know, reactor had it. I don't know if if it was Tim Skelley's knowledge and experience that did that other manufacturers did that.
Warren: And you know, part of Gottlieb, you know, when you're in any industry like that, you're grabbing other people.
Warren: You're getting other people's machines in your place to play and examine. That was very common practice. So we would have. You know, we might get a Williams game in and take a look and see what they were doing. And so, you know, you just keep abreast of what is happening out in in the industry. So I think it was kind of a no brainer to do that. It's a selling point. It extends the life of the machine.
Warren: and it's it's fairly easy to do. So.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, that's brilliant. And I really appreciate how
Ethan Wilde: what you're just describing brought you into share with us. How
Ethan Wilde: much self awareness there was in this budding industry. And you know I like to call it an art form. I think video games
Ethan Wilde: are, are are absolutely worthy of the title of of art, just like film and and popular music. All of those are are art forms. So th, there's this whole new form of of creative expression that's interactive.
Ethan Wilde: And you're all learning from each other in this buddy industry. There's there's little groups like you were in spread out around the country
Ethan Wilde: a number of other ones in Chicago. Sounds like as you said, Williams. And Midway we're also building games stern as well.
Warren: did you know any of you? Those what I guess I would call, you know, industry colleagues or or fellow artists? No, II didn't. I mean there was that we didn't have mixers. You know. The only time we would have run into those people would have been at maybe a trade show. And ironically there was a point where John newcomer, who is the creator, the designer of the game joust
Warren: John Newcomer was hired. He left Williams and was hired by Gottlieb.
Warren: So I got to know him, but it was he was there for a very short time, and I don't think he really accomplished much because he was a an artist and designer.
Warren: and it got leave of the programmers with the designers that you know they didn't really trust designing to to artists because they didn't think they would be a a programmer to implement it.
Warren: So But he he was
Warren: for a short time at Gottlieb. I got to know him better when I, you know, after Gottlieb closed because Gottlieb closed their doors, the was shut down by their parent company in 1,984 I ended up at Williams a couple of years later, and then John and I got to work together, and I got to know him very well. So
Warren: other than that I knew of Eugene Jarvis, because who didn't n know Eugene Jarvis in the industry back then, you know, creator of a co-creator of defender and stargate and robotron.
Warren: So but II had never met him until I worked at Williams years later.
Ethan Wilde: That's fascinating to think about everybody being in their own kind of small creative pods.
Ethan Wilde: And then you'd see the you'd see the final output from your your competitors or your fellow artists, and you get to learn from it that way. But but then, as you describe, as the industry evolves, got leap closes, you get a chance to go work in different studios, different organizations. I thought it was really interesting. What you said
Ethan Wilde: about the hesitancy at Gottlieb to let an artist design a game because they didn't know the limitations. They didn't understand the medium of programming, which I think is its own art form. I really think of programming as a as a form of creative writing. And so yeah, I'm I mean, clearly, you created this unbelievable work of of creativity in in code.
Ethan Wilde: Which is astonishing.
Ethan Wilde: so you, as a programmer, you knew
Ethan Wilde: what the limitations of your of your tool set was, and it would help inform you. I imagine the game design. You wouldn't design a game that you couldn't code
Warren: exactly. I mean, you know, this whole pseudo. 3D thing was was a result of
Warren: using the cubes as a play field. It's not like II really planned that in advance.
Warren: But I like the idea of trying to simulate a third dimension
Warren: a and you know it's it's all Kluged. It's all you know hacked is to to make this illusion that it's in 3 dimensions, especially with things like collision, detection, and the arc of his jumps and things like that y. This is all just smoke and mirrors
Warren: and you know th, so you the other thing I said, because I was trying to make it simple right? But Jeff Lee actually came to me with this idea to have characters
Warren: come in from the 2 sides as if there were a different plane of gravity. And I'm I'm like Jeff. There's you know, we we don't have like Floating Point Co process to do all this trigonometry. We don't. We're not doing trigonometry. This is all. This is all smoke and mirrors, and
Warren: but but I thought that would be so cool, and so it actually gnawed away at me for a long time until I figured out how to do it quickly and cheaply. And then I implemented.
Ethan Wilde: That's brilliant. That's that's a brilliant story. Yeah. When we look at the the screen.
Ethan Wilde: it's an entirely 2 dimensional environment that you're programming as you're describing and the illusion through
Ethan Wilde: the techniques that you employed and and the art that you were able to leverage from your from your artist.
Ethan Wilde: gives us this very powerful illusion of I mean it is it is quite an effective magic trick that you pulled off there.
Warren: Yeah, I mean, I wasn't the only one there. There were other pseudo, 3D games coming out around that time. Zaxon, I think, actually came out before Qbert. Marble madness was in that era where where the physics were amazing.
Warren: So you know, you know a lot A, as is always the case, you know you've got, you know, when when a new idea is ready to be implemented when the technology present itself. Ii think you know, you're always gonna find multiple people who are who are ready to go there.
Warren: You know, II kind of feel like even back then
Warren: we could see where the industry was going.
Warren: as far as you know, what technology was going to allow you to do in the future. So people were always thinking about what I well, what I could do
Warren: if if the hardware was faster, if I have more memory if I. And then those things happen. And we were ready with ideas. Because we've been thinking about it for years.
Ethan Wilde: That's brilliant. Yeah, you're coming up against the limitations of your existing hardware platform and and developing those those. What if wish lists?
Ethan Wilde: It sounds like.
Ethan Wilde: yeah, that's brilliant. II really appreciate that we're starting to collect some questions here, which is great. I want to share. one quick comment not to lose the the flow of our conversation, though.
Ethan Wilde: Mister Davis has written this amazing book creating Qbert and other classic video Arcade games and we have,
Ethan Wilde: a personally autographed copy of the book by the author that I'd like to give away to one of our
Ethan Wilde: audience members tonight and to facilitate that with the complexity of technology. Today, I was trying to think about how to do it automatically in Zoom, I couldn't figure it out. So there's there's a small form that just really asks for your name, your email address, and your mailing address
Ethan Wilde: and if you wanna go ahead and fill it out. I shared the link in the meeting text chat for anybody that might be interested in an opportunity to
Ethan Wilde: to dive quite deeply. I think I've I've been reading the book for the last couple of weeks. And there's there's amazing stories in here.
Ethan Wilde: and and a lot of.
Ethan Wilde: I think, really. poignant or salient observations about what was going on in this really important time in history. And and it's not just Hubert.
Ethan Wilde: that that Warren has worked on, and I hope I'll have a chance to talk about that. I could probably talk to you for too many hours, though, and I'm also mindful of the time.
Ethan Wilde: So I hope folks, and and also
Ethan Wilde: if if you aren't so lucky as to win a copy of the book, I do want to share a link
Ethan Wilde: to Mr. Davis's blog site, and he's also got copies of the book available there.
Ethan Wilde: As well as some really interesting other stuff. And and the blog stuff is is pretty cool and fun to check out, too.
Warren: Yeah, I need. I need to update it. II don't think I've I've put an entry in there for probably a year.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, I there's some good ones in there have happened. And II haven't updated it. So I hear you. Well, hopefully, you've been busy
Ethan Wilde: helping to sh share some of this amazing experience you've had with
Ethan Wilde: with other people. Let let me ask you a a question about a little closer to now. you wrote everything from scratch with this hardware.
Ethan Wilde: There were no
Ethan Wilde: operating systems or or other people's software that gave you an Api to do stuff you wrote from scratch and today, you know, many of the people in our audience that are that are game developers or game students. We use game engine software, which is like purpose built software where there's a million lines of code in there that has kind of categorically all these different
Ethan Wilde: features that would accommodate many aspects of kind of modern games. Right? Kind of out of the box.
Ethan Wilde: what do you think about the evolution of the tool set for this field of creative programming.
Ethan Wilde: And
Ethan Wilde: and how how did that? Did any of that impact you at any point when you're making games, did things start to become
Ethan Wilde: more than just one programmer writing it from scratch?
Warren: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know. Listen, III think tools today, like, you know, unity or or unreal engine are the logical successor to the tools we had
Warren: back when we started. Now.
Warren: when we were when I was making Hubert, we basically had 2 tools
Warren: for generating images. And basically it was a grid of either 8 by 8 pixels for background, or 16 by 16 pixels for foreground.
Warren: and of course it was blown up, so each pixel would be like, you know, 30 pixels, or 20 pixels.
Warren: just so you could put a solid block of color in there and see it enlarged. You'd see it's at its regular size, and that's how the artists built our sprites both foreground and background, and they could change the colors. So we had a way to select your 16 colors out of the 32,000 in our palette.
Warren: So but those were our tools, and we all. We've always had tools when I was working at Williams. And III wrote the tool that allowed people to digitize actors into images for world combat Mba jam.
Warren: So you know. But that tool was basically written from the existing hardware at the time, which was the target board which came out with an SDK that lets you write your own software for it.
Warren: So I wrote software for our needs. And you know, all the palette management with stuff that I had to research figure out algorithms and and implement them so and on and on and on. So you know, unity and unreal, just the logical extension of that you you nobody could in their lifetime sit down and write
Warren: a modern video game from, you know, scratch and assembler language. It would take years, you know. So that's what tools are for. You know, you wanna you wanna leave the creative stuff to the designers and programmers and artists. You wanna let them be creative and not do the same mundane jobs over and over again. You wanna automate those. And that's kinda what we've been doing all along.
Ethan Wilde: That is a a really
Ethan Wilde: clear explanation, I think, and and a connection to what
Ethan Wilde: seems to be really true the way you describe it, the the original creators like yourself. You started with very small tool set. But then you built your own tools. There's this story, I think, in human civilization
Ethan Wilde: of creators. Realizing that they needed a better tool, and then they became a tool maker.
Ethan Wilde: And then there's just endless cycle. And now we're in
Ethan Wilde: 40 years or so since since Cuba came out.
Ethan Wilde: And and we've got these amazing reality simulation engines that like, unreal.
Ethan Wilde: yeah, that's that's really brilliant
Warren: way to imagine the tool set evolution, and and we didn't have an operating system on Qbert, as I said, was just a a loop. But over at Williams we did have an operating system was a very crude and simple one.
Warren: but it did allow processes to sleep of their own choice, so they would do some work, and then they would sleep, and then that would,
Warren: you know, turn over to another process. And and that's so. So there, you know, that was a Eugene Jarvis implementation on sort of a
Warren: crude or simple, I shouldn't say crude but simple operating system. And then we had a display system as well
Warren: and as as the graphics engines, or as the graphics started get more complex, we had
Warren: graphics engines that would get more complex and display systems that would. So yeah, it all sort of just sort of grew very organically and naturally based on
Warren: the hardware based on the speed based based on what what we could. Do.
Ethan Wilde: you know, on that note, let let me share the first and one of our questions from from our audience. Because we're not. We're kind of talking about tool sets and and and one of the phenomena, I think, of
Ethan Wilde: of popular games, you know. Titles like Qbert is that
Ethan Wilde: E. Every hardware platform owner wants it on their platform. Maybe they want exclusive. There, there's this whole history of particularly the the feeling of the
Ethan Wilde: very high-end Renaissance coin operated arcade games back into the home console market.
Ethan Wilde: d. Were you involved in, or or do you know how the processes would work for something like Hubert to be ported to to like Atari hardware like the our question ask, or Greg asks, were you involved in the ports of Hubert to Atari 5,200, and other home consoles.
Warren: Directly. No, I wasn't so. Gottlieb, in particular, struck a deal with Parker Brothers and Parker Brothers was the company that
Warren: Hired out all of the subcontractors to make all the ports of our games.
Warren: So I had nothing to do with any of the ports. However, what I did do was, I sort of put together a little document that sort of had the progression of tables, the tuning tables, and you know the colors and just everything that I could do to describe the game in detail.
Warren: to give to all the guys who are doing the port so that they knew what they had to implement every now and then. I remember on a few occasions I get a phone call from somebody. If they had a question
Warren: that I would answer. But other than that, I really had no involvement in the ports.
Ethan Wilde: You you you did what you just described sounds to me like what we might call today developer documentation for the project.
Ethan Wilde: With all of those resources that you gathered together so you could turn it over to another developer to basically replicate the work. Right?
Warren: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's astonishing. That's really, really fascinating.
Warren: We're then given names by somebody else. And people would throw this name at me, and I'd be like, What's that?
Ethan Wilde: And then, oh, well, II was doing that for years. I just never called it that. Yeah, that's brilliant. Yeah, th, you you were there in the formative days where things now have become common practice. And there's some formalization around a lot of these things that you and your colleagues were inventing on the fly as as useful.
Ethan Wilde: useful practice. It's pretty cool.
Ethan Wilde: Le, let let me ask you another one of our our guest questions, because I think it's a
Ethan Wilde: something that I think we all need to share as as pop culture, mythology, and lore, and that is
Ethan Wilde: who came up with what's the story behind Kubernetes? Expletive?
Ethan Wilde: Speech Bubble, because that is, I think one of the things that
Warren: takes this game to a kind of a cultural icon level. Yeah. So that was Jeff Lee, our artist.
Warren: He created like, I said he had created the character
Warren: and and in fact, he had created the character with the long nose, because he was hoping that it would shoot out of its nose. So you know, that was, that was the design of the character. But of course I wasn't making that game, so I was not interested in that. And I thought it would
Warren: Co. Not only complicate things, but it also wouldn't lend itself to the play field to be shooting out of his notes, so that went away very quickly.
Warren: But the the the balloon, you know, Jeff, it was just Jeff's sense of humor. You know I had Kubert hopping around and getting bonked on the head with with some ball, which you know was clearly hard and not soft, even though it bounced so he just thought, oh, that'd be funny if if you know, he kind of
Warren: was pissed off enough about it to put up a cartoon balloon with swearing, which, of course, was you know that's been around since you know the
Warren: I don't. I don't know the exact origin, but it's certainly been around since. Newspaper comic strips in the early 19 hundreds.
So!
Warren: And then and then, of course, Dave Feel came in and had the genius to to give that voice when he saw the the the visual of it.
Warren: He knew exactly what to do. He had this speech, Chip that did human speech. but terribly. It was just a horribly monotone, and he hated using it.
Warren: And he said, You know what I'm just gonna throw basically throw random numbers at it. and just have random human phonemes strung together.
Warren: and and there you have it.
Ethan Wilde: That's a beautiful story. Yep, you know.
Ethan Wilde: II really do think that that mark that that speech bubble before we talk today, I went to look up. What that
Ethan Wilde: particular use of, you know. Typographic symbols to express expletives is Wikipedia calls it a grix, and just like it comes from the very beginning of the twentieth century. They say back into 1901,
Ethan Wilde: they find it in in a comic strip. And it is something that's like a cultural artifact
a signifier, the symbol that comes from popular culture, the comics.
Ethan Wilde: And you guys pick up on it and bring it into this new form, this interactive form of of pop culture. It's it's really a cool
Ethan Wilde: layer onto onto the game playing experience, too, because as kids II was lucky enough to grow up not far from Santa Rosa. We in our town of 3,000 and Cloverdale we had a storefront coin operated arcade. Open it just like you described in the heyday little tiny towns in America had these things, and all the kids in town would spend all day there, and Qbert was there, and we were always. It was always very busy, Hubert, and everybody thought it was funny
Ethan Wilde: that it was
Ethan Wilde: the game played with with rules, and as a teenager you wanna play with rules, and that it threw up swear words in this symbolic form was was kind of a thrill to be an adolescent boy, and and you know any adolescent child with a game that kind of was swearing at you. Your main character you were controlling was was cursing on the screen was
Ethan Wilde: taking it to another level that kids really appreciate, I think. And it was a lot of fun anyway.
Ethan Wilde: So I just wanna I wanna share that personal experience with you and how much I think that symbol is
Ethan Wilde: one of the powerful things about this game experience that really resonates with people break in the rules a little bit, you guys who are a little naughty.
Warren: Well, you know, seriously, I it didn't. It never occurred to me that that was naughty. In fact, it seemed the most innocent thing you could do if he really cursed. That would have been naughty. This was, you know, this, you know, Bugs, Bunny would do that you know what I mean. So it's seemed very innocent.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, no, I agree. It's a it's a nice way for for you to to make a little humor in there, too.
Ethan Wilde: I want to take a chance before we run out of time to
Ethan Wilde: to see if you tell us a little bit more about about what it was like as you move beyond Gottlieb.
Ethan Wilde: You said you got a chance to go work at Williams. I know you're credited with a lot of work on on joust 2, which I think this is a a screenshot of and
Ethan Wilde: joust the original joust and joust. 2 were some of personally my favorite.
Ethan Wilde: Coin operated games. That kind of broke the mold
Ethan Wilde: did something very different than all the just shooting games or other. Seems like a new
Ethan Wilde: new genre of gaming, in fact. And what was it like to go to Williams and and meet some of these other people and kind of switch studios. Again, I'm gonna call you an artist. And I'm gonna say, you're going to new creative studio now, where everybody's got different ways. You already described some neat technical stuff.
Ethan Wilde: What was the environment like there? And and what was it like to work on this project, which is, I think, another milestone.
Warren: Well, I gotta say I was very excited about going to Williams when I left. When Golly shut their doors. I was out of the video game industry for about a year and a half. I went and got another job that was in a you know, it was a software job. It was an interesting job
Warren: but it wasn't video games. And then about a year and a half later I got a call from a head hunter asking if I wanted to go back to video games with this Williams opportunity. I was like, yes, of course.
Warren: and I was excited because Williams had such a great reputation. The games that came out of there were amazing. Now when I got back there when I started, Williams, I believe it was 1986.
Warren: So it was after the crash.
Warren: And just the industry was sort of just starting to come back, which is why they were hiring.
Warren: But the video department had been decimated from the crash. So there was.
Warren: I want to say.
Warren: maybe 2 programmers in the video department. You know, Pinball was coming back. So there were a lot of some video people had gone over to pinball
Warren: and they really weren't working on very much video wise. But they did have a joust, 2 in the works. And III came in, and the first thing I started doing is working on some art tools because they had a new system. They needed our tools for it, and it was a good way to learn the system.
Warren: But what happened was the guy who was programming joust. 2 got fired
Warren: so they needed somebody to come on and and finish it. And so they asked myself and Christina, Dona Freo, who is another programmer. You know, a. And again, it. She is interesting in itself just to have be as by being a woman programmer in that era.
Warren: because there were not many. We had one woman programmer at Gottlieb, who who never had a game release. She was working on one, but it never got released. And then Christina had done a mystic marathon and bubbles, I believe.
Warren: and but then she got pulled off of whatever she was doing to help me.
Warren: finished joust 2 working with John Newcomer, who is the designer? But I have to give John all the credit. John was the designer. I was just there as Christina was to to bail out the programming end of things, and
Warren: So I can't take too much ownership, you know. The everything had been established before, you know, before joust to. So. But that's quite an interesting challenge in this era, too, is we're talking about.
Ethan Wilde: You came on to a partially finished software project
Ethan Wilde: as a programmer. And again, probably, weren't. You know.
Ethan Wilde: I'm not sure how much documentation you you received or or or how did code? Basically, you know, we you know you have the code code and and make sense of it, and and know how to finish it.
Warren: Well, you know, assembler language is not that complicated? Honestly, you just have to slow your brain down and realize. You only can only do one little thing at a time.
Warren: But you have to realize the computer is, gonna do exactly what you do and much faster. So yeah, III did not have a problem with assembly language. I always enjoyed it.
Warren: you know. Sometimes it was a chore when you had a complicated thing, and you had to literally tell it what to do one little step at a time. But you got used to it just like you get used to anything else.
Warren: yeah. But yeah, it it it. It was just a matter of finishing it. And
Warren: and like I said, Why did I don't think we did anything groundbreaking all, everything had been
Warren: you know, the the the way had been paved before we started, so
Warren: it was just a matter of finishing it up.
Ethan Wilde: That's brilliant, that's brilliant. One of my colleagues who's joining us tonight?
Ethan Wilde: Lx, Pula has a question I'll share with you. Do you have any perspective on competitive gaming
Ethan Wilde: from Dora Self or Billy Mitchell to modern Cubert Speedrunners? As the progenitor of of modern E sports. That's quite a topic itself.
Warren: Yeah, it is. And it's interesting, because, nowadays, as I go to many retro gaming conventions and shows around the country, and I have for last 1015 years.
Warren: I am more aware of these people and have become friends with with the people who are the record holders or the the people who are in that. And when I was making video games I never knew anything about that. I mean, I was completely separate from from any of that thing I mean, I had seen the cover of life magazine
Warren: that showed all of the the the game players. The classic cover from Autumo Iowa.
Warren: where, you know, twin galaxies was but other than that, I mean, I really was just not aware. And and my thought was, Hey, that's great. You know. These are games. People play games competitively, and if people are, they want the high score, you know. That's what they? That's what it's about. You know, we, you know you play for fun, or you wanna play for the high score.
Warren: we certainly knew that about our games that people were doing that. So why not keep records? And
Warren: and it just seemed again, seemed like a natural progression. So
Ethan Wilde: that's a really interesting way to think about it, too, as a progression evolution.
Ethan Wilde: Do do you recall a time or or how do you reflect on the fact that now it has been
Ethan Wilde: made into effectively a professional sports genre with with modern E sports, where there's really large cash prizes and professional teams of
Warren: competitive gamers that go to very well financed tournaments. Yeah. it hurts, that is, people are making so much money. I never got to make that much money by making the games.
Warren: But no, yeah, it's things just a teeny little bit.
Warren: For the most part I have no complaints. II had a very good life, so.
Ethan Wilde: Oh, I'm I'm glad you mentioned twin galaxies when you're talking about that, too, because that's really like the the spectrum of of
Ethan Wilde: having a high score for the sake of the notoriety, or, you know, for the for being the high score to now, you know, competing for millions of dollars is is just quite an arc in a short 40 years, for
Ethan Wilde: for the way people have
Ethan Wilde: I don't know. People who are very good at video games are are getting
Ethan Wilde: some very s powerful affirmation and and reinforcement from our society. If we're willing to put millions of dollars out and purses.
Ethan Wilde: somebody is to report good video game play? It's it is quite a transformation. It is kind of flipping.
Ethan Wilde: The table's over a little bit, though, because,
Ethan Wilde: it, it seems appropriate that that the creators of games would
Ethan Wilde: have
Ethan Wilde: more rewards, you know, maybe even financial rewards from the level of popularity, like, perhaps you know how
Ethan Wilde: consumer pop culture. Genres, like film or music, seem to be structured as the artists. The creators receive a lot of the or at least maybe a fair share of the cat.
Warren: You're talking about royalties, and the fact is that there were royalties in the video game industry. but not at Gottlieb when Cuber was made.
Warren: And that's a sort of a little story into itself, you know, because, you know,
Warren: Williams, I believe, was giving royalties to their programmers, you know, and they were, you know, they and they enjoyed financial success if the game was successful. So you know, they would give their developers somewhat of a cut. Golly instituted a royalty program after Cubert and Mach 3 Mach 3 was a laser disc game, which was also very successful for them.
Warren: And they announced it one day, and they brought everybody in, you know, to a room and said, All right, we're announcing our royalty program. So
Warren: if you know, you know, and and they use Cubert as an example, they said so. For example, if if we had had this royalty program. When Warren made Cubert he would have made a bonus of, you know, like $110,000, or something like that.
Warren: But they they didn't, and it was not retroactive. So you know, and $110,000 back then was a very nice chunk of change. So, but certainly since then most places have
Warren: instituted some kind of royalty program, and I do think most
Ethan Wilde: most game developers are compensated, you know, especially on a reward based system, where, if their game does well, they will, they will make money. So yeah.
Ethan Wilde: no, it's fine, really. I'm very grateful to you for
Ethan Wilde: so many interesting insights into the evolution of this of this field.
Ethan Wilde: Would anybody else in the audience like to ask a a question in the text meeting chat that I could
Warren: share with with our guests tonight. Please do.
Ethan Wilde: I want to give people a chance to
Ethan Wilde: to be part of the conversation, because you've got so much information to share.
Warren: We haven't mentioned anything about us versus them. I just pulled up my notes on us versus them. And yeah, let's let's do something I did for Gottlieb. I was just gonna run through some other things. So and then the other games I worked on directly were
Warren: terminator 2 based on the movie and revolution X featuring Aerosmith.
Warren: We actually had Aerosmith in our studio for 3 days to videotape them for the game exclusively.
Warren: So, yeah. yeah, there's revolution X
Ethan Wilde: far out. So yeah, I had. II was in the Arcadian street for about 14 years
Warren: and I left to move to California in 1,995. 96. Actually, I sort of was going back and forth
Warren: in 95, and then ended up moving in August 96 to California, and where I worked for Disney, making home games for a few years I was an imagineer at Walt Disney. For a few months.
I worked in the home industry, working on a spiral the dragon game
Warren: I worked for Ilm Lucasfilms Special Effects Company
Warren: for a couple of years. So yeah, it's been a wonderful career. And I've gotten to do a lot of cool things. So anybody wants to ask anything about anything. I'm happy to answer.
Ethan Wilde: I'm interested to know a little bit. I mean, I'd like to know more about Revolution X in a second. But
Ethan Wilde: can you tell us about us versus them? Because this is 1984?
Ethan Wilde: And this is taking
Ethan Wilde: kind of
Ethan Wilde: popular game entertainment in a totally new direction, because this is not
Ethan Wilde: just, you know, low res pixels being pushed on the screen here.
Ethan Wilde: this is you working on a project that used
Ethan Wilde: full motion video that you know was cinematic
Ethan Wilde: and and very rich
Ethan Wilde: and then you used it as
Ethan Wilde: the material to build a game out of.
Warren: Well, yeah. Well, in our case, I mean, laserdisc games came out before us versus them. This was this was actually sort of on the tail end of the laserdisc craze, and, in fact, Gottlieb had built a laserdisc system, and the first Laserdisc game they put out was Mach 3. And that was a huge success. So between. And so they basically had like 2 successes.
Warren: not in a row, because I think mad planets was another game that came out and that did you know moderately well, but they were kind of flush with cash because they were doing really well in the video game world.
Warren: So they have this hardware from Mach 3. And usually what would happen is, you know, game would be out for a few months, and then the collections would sort of wind down. People sort of had their fill of it. They got used to it. They got bored with it. There's some new game out.
Warren: and rather than sell an entirely new cabinet, they found that, you know, operators could repurpose the Cabinet they have. and put a new game in there. You just slap some new artwork on it, maybe a new control panel, and you got an UN brand new game for a fraction of the cost.
Warren: so that they call that a kit.
Warren: So they, after Mach 3 was sort of winding down. They said we would be nice if we had a kit for Mach 3
Warren: to put another game in there. and we wanted to use the same control panel.
Warren: So the the
Warren: the designer of this was actually a guy named Dennis Nordman.
Warren: So he was actually hired just to be a designer after the mistakes of a you know, the earlier days, where they did not, where they all the programmers, were
Warren: designers. Now they were suddenly relenting and they started the real okay. Maybe we can actually have a designer be a designer.
Warren: So Dennis came to me with the concept, and I loved it. I just because I loved the idea of of making a laserdisc game. I love the idea of filmmaking, and II love the idea of Science Fiction. II loved everything about it. So we you know, the 2 of us basically massaged his original concept into what was practical
Warren: and then godly sent us out
Warren: to film. You know, they've sent us to California and and a learjet to film what we needed in the skies, and we trained these producers in California to to get the exact kind of footage we needed at the angles we needed at the length we needed.
Warren: and they did the special effects, and
Warren: then we came back to Chicago. We we shot in a forest. The forest scene we we got a Steadicam operator, and Steadicam was brand new at this time.
Warren: We. We've we hired actors to do these goofy little interstitial jokes in the middle of a wave. We had a blast. We had an amazing amount of fun making this game
Warren: and it's got a new, a new life now, because even though laser disk games died, and that's a whole story, I really shouldn't even begin to get into. Why, laser disk crashed in 1984. But they they're given a new life because the laser disk players.
Warren: which were kind of the problem, have are being replaced with little circuit boards that will run the video these solid State circuit boards called a dexter board. And so you'll find a lot of these old laserdisc games popping up in arcades today
Warren: because they can run
Warren: you know, without crashing, and without dying, and they're much more
Warren: reasonable.
Warren: But I loved this game. I was very proud of this game. And it was a shame because it was really poised. It tested very well. It was poised to be a a huge hit, and then
Warren: just the laserdisc
Warren: industry crash laserdiscs became, you know, verboten. Nobody wanted one. People were returned, you know, cancelling their orders for laserdisc games industry wide. It wasn't. Wasn't just this game, so it was just bad timing
Warren: sadly.
Ethan Wilde: The the visuals from this are astonishing, as you describe that story of coming out to California on a Lear jet
Ethan Wilde: and then working with basically Hollywood folks right to
Ethan Wilde: put together what is basically a huge amount of cinematic footage.
Warren: Yeah. And then they went off to other cities. They went off to San Francisco and Hawaii, and
Warren: and then we shot some we shot some footage in Chicago out of a helicopter.
Warren: You know. Th there are a couple of Chicago levels, and I was in that helicopter. It was 26 degrees below 0
Warren: when we shot that, and the steady Cam operator was literally hanging out the side of the helicopter. There was an open door he was. He had clips and a harness that he was wearing. It was insanity. It was II you know, and we were. We were flying up through the Chicago River about 6 to 7 stories up.
Warren: I mean, those buildings are like 30 to 50 stories high, and we're, we're, you know, flying so low. I don't even know how we got permission to do that. But it was crazy. It was a crazy time.
Warren: Sounds like a lot of fun.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah, see that that's wild. So you go from the really intense experiences of
Ethan Wilde: of
Ethan Wilde: taking taking your art to another level, bringing cinematic content in and and being involved in the shoot to to working with
Ethan Wilde: like pop culture icons from popular music.
Warren: Yeah, how did this
Ethan Wilde: come to pass? And this is with midway.
Warren: Yeah? Well, well, so a lot of people are confused about this. So basically, bally Midway was a company. and Williams was a company, a separate company
Warren: I guess Midway used to be its own company, but Bally bought it. It became Bally midway. And then somewhere in the late 19 eighties. Williams bought
Warren: Bally midway. Okay?
Warren: So
Warren: they just basically enveloped a a bally midway and brought them into Williams even though. And then Williams decided to use the midway name on their video games.
Warren: But it was William. So so all of these years I only worked for one company, and even though they called their games midway. It's really Williams, was the the company. Yeah. So but yeah, with the the lead, the lead guys for this particular game revolution X.
Warren: Basically, we, we we had done Terminator 2, and the leads were Jack Hager, who's an artist? Fantastic artist, and George Pietro, who's a programmer. They were the lead guys on Terminator 2.
Warren: And I was like a senior programmer. And basically we sort of rolled that team when we were done with, we rolled that team over to Revolution X,
Warren: and they they did a pitch, a video pitch which I believe you can see on Youtube
Warren: to Aerosmith's management. You know why we want Aerosmith
Warren: to be in this game? And they agreed. And then, you know, it was. It was so surreal to have these guys with us. They were great, they were fantastic. They were down to Earth. They could not have been more kind and normal and willing to do whatever we wanted.
Warren: you know, just blew away our our expectations, and and we had a fun long
Warren: but fun 3 days.
Ethan Wilde: that is wild.
Ethan Wilde: We got a I think we got a few more questions that came up.
Ethan Wilde: one of one of our our
Ethan Wilde: audience members tonight wanted to know if you
Ethan Wilde: play any of your own, play any of your own games
Ethan Wilde: with any frequency or or or how often you revisit them.
Warren: I wouldn't say with any frequency, but III do play them, you know. I've been going to a lot of retro gaming shows especially in not this year, but last year, 2022, II was in about 18 events over the year retro gaming events, and, you know, inevitably they will have some of my games, and and I will play them. You know I II enjoy playing, Hubert, although my personal favorite is faster, harder, more challenging.
Warren: which we didn't really get to talk about, but that was a a sort of a super version of Qbert
Warren: that never got officially released after the original, but I made it, and I had it in my own personal Cuba cabinet at home.
Warren: and it got released through main. You know the mid-nineties line like 1,997.
Warren: And it's actually out there. And it's been out there since 1997. So you can play it through main. It's it's basically a harder and slightly different version of Qbert. Same basic gameplay. Just, you know, the the progression of the waves is different, and the skills are different.
Warren: But yeah, that's my choice. That's the game I prefer to play.
Ethan Wilde: That's great. So so we can get that and play on the on a main emulator.
Warren: You can. And if anybody has the new wave toys Cubert, that came out last year
Warren: it's a miniature 11 inch tall version faster, harder, more challenging. Hubert is on there, you can switch to it.
Ethan Wilde: Oh, that's cool.
Warren: That's that's a good
Ethan Wilde: It's a good thing to know.
Ethan Wilde: Greg? Greg asked a question.
Ethan Wilde: In the early days. Was there a way to emulate your code, or do you have to burn a chip to see it run.
Warren: We didn't have to burn a chip. We could run it through RAM. So we had our development system. We had a couple the first one we had was an Intel system, but it used something called in circuit emulation.
Warren: So basically, what would happen is you had your development system, which was like a little Mini computer, and there would be a ribbon cable coming out that would plug into our video game hardware where the CPU would go.
Warren: And so you know, the the computer is controlling all of the
Warren: the CPU functions. So we could single step. We could see our code. You know, we could look at registers and and part of that was, instead of having Roms. Where the program goes, we would have RAM or or same thing for the artwork, you know, we would have ramps. So we would write our code in assembler on the on the development system, and we could download it through the ribbon ribbon cable into the RAM. And so we didn't have to burn. Roms.
Ethan Wilde: yeah, that's brilliant. That makes perfect sense.
Ethan Wilde: Yeah. Now, now, the those modern game engines we were talking about earlier. You just push a play button and the whole project fires up.
Ethan Wilde: There's some amazing software development.
Ethan Wilde: Any other questions anybody. II don't want to keep Mr. Davis all night, but I'm II gladly talk to you for days, and I, if you ever come to Northern California.
Ethan Wilde: And you head up to Sonoma
Ethan Wilde: County Santa Rosa is up in Sonoma County. If you're familiar with that, and we've got
Ethan Wilde: some some great landscape and nature, and and really good food and wine. And so if you if you make it up here, please get in touch, and and we'll
Ethan Wilde: do something special to to thank you for your your time with us, and maybe get a chance to talk some more.
Warren: I would love that. Yeah, I I'd love to get up there, too. You know, I get up as far as San Francisco. I don't usually get much past there depending upon.
Ethan Wilde: I think I saw some applause. Icons in here, too, I think I want to
Ethan Wilde: again. Where did I got too many pages open here. I've got the copy of the book right here. My, my! Zoom's not doing a very good job of
Ethan Wilde: seeing it, but I got the screen. Share up, too. Very excited to get to share a copy of this with somebody from our audience, from from the
Ethan Wilde: raffle that we're gonna do, I will. I will be emailing the the winner
Ethan Wilde: and we'll get the book out in the mail
Ethan Wilde: to and again share again Mr. Davis's website
Ethan Wilde: for folks that might want to grab that
Ethan Wilde: did you have anything you wanted to say? as we wrap up tonight, Warren? I just want to say thank you to everybody who attended. You know. Ii certainly am. Am. I wish I could have seen you and and and seen your faces. But
Warren: I I'm actually very, very happy to talk to people. It's been a gift to be recognized, you know, for for years. You know, all of us who are making video games in the eighties pretty much were anonymous. And it's really wonderful to connect with an audience and and and know that our work has been appreciated. So thank you all for that. And thank you for showing up tonight. And
Warren: yeah, whoever gets the book, I hope you enjoy it.
Ethan Wilde: Well, you know. Thank you, Ethan, for the opportunity. I really do. Personally, I want to tell you that that the the art that you made in the form of these games, it really had a big impact on my life growing up, and it made me want to make games
Ethan Wilde: and it. And it
Ethan Wilde: gave me a chance to to explore software development and interactives. And most of the games I've made in my life for, like for museums or educational institutions, and they don't rise to the.
Ethan Wilde: to the polished fine art of of something like Hubert, for sure. But
Ethan Wilde: But you really blazed a trail for a whole new form of art and creativity with some of the projects you worked on. And and just how you talked about you evolving the tools
Ethan Wilde: artists like yourself, you know, really help to build what is now
Ethan Wilde: on the shoulders of successive generations of developers, engines like unity and and unreal. And I think it's all just quite an amazing phenomenon that humans love playing games so much
Ethan Wilde: that that we will do extraordinary things to continue to explore that space of of of play
Ethan Wilde: and with all our new technology, there's always gonna be something that people do with it, to to have fun
Ethan Wilde: and and to hit whatever that spot is that humans need for for playing
Ethan Wilde: so it's it's really great to get to talk to you. And I hope we get to talk again sometime.
Warren: Same here. Yeah. And I agree with everything you said. You know the need to play is a a huge human need, and II do it as often as I can.
Warren: Alright, bye. Well, goodnight. Take care, everybody have a good one.
Ethan Wilde: Bye-bye.