We interview the creator of Q-Bert, Joust 2, Us vs. Them and many other great titles and technology – Warren Davis.
Runtime: 01:17:47
Year: 2003
Transcript (AI Generated; May not be 100% accurate)
Something that you really didn’t mean to say. You’ll edit it out. Oops. Yeah. Well, you’d be amazed at what people end up telling us that we can’t use that they call us on Monday and say, Do you like not put that on the air? Right? I’m sorry. I like your picture. I agree mugs everywhere.
Should we look like we’re having an in depth interview? Is that you have theirs that I bought for type of thing, or is this it’s a clock.
It has a fast forward and rewind on it.
It’s actually an mp3 player as well. We Timex makes it really? Yeah.
I mean, it’s expensively poorly designed.
It’s, it’s, you know, it’s horribly designed. It’s really bad design. But it’s very expensive. There in order to use this as an mp3 player. Oh, hell
no.
You have to, like if you could just plug in a headphones, it’d be awesome. Be awesome. But you have you have to plug something in here. Once it snaps into the top, there’s a chord with a battery compartment. And that’s where you plug the headphones in. With all the cords and the wires gets a little bit uncomfortable. Plus, you were seeing now Timex makes a watch looks just like this, right? Well, it’s a little simpler, obviously. But you can spin this thing around so that you can lift it upside down. Right, right. This thing you can’t get the time to read anything but this direct I hope
you got that as a promotional thing for buying. It was a gift from my wife. Well, there you go. That’s I understand completely now. It’s something from the wife. So anything that you do not want us to talk about or anything like that?
I’ll let you know. Okay.
That levels? We’re good to go. Okay, cool. This is Shane R. Monroe with retro gaming radio at the Classic Gaming Expo 2003. I’m here with Warren Davis, the creator of Cubert. So if you are listening to the show, and you do not know who this man is, turn the show off now. Because once again, you shouldn’t be listening to begin with. Warren was also responsible for jous. Two and responsible I didn’t work on it. You didn’t work on it and us versus them. That is correct. Which is if I remember it’s a laserdisc game, right? That’s right. All right. So naturally, we got to talk about Cubert. Sure. Give us a little background on how good times were for you in the 60s to bring forth Cuba.
Sadly, I did not partake in the summer of love.
Where in the world did you get an idea for something with a big ol nose person all the time?
Okay, you know, it’s really funny, I did not create the character of Kubrick that was created by a guy named Jeff Lee was a very, very talented video artist. Jeff Lee was like, you know, pretty much V guy doing graphics at Gottlieb back in the early days. You know, Godley was mostly a pinball company, they transition to video with a couple of games they bought from Japan, then they brought in Tim Skelly, who did reactor for them. And he was there sort of as a guru to sort of show us how to make a video game. And then they started hiring all these other people, myself included, to sort of create a video game staff. And Jeff Lee was like the artist. He was like the only guy around for a while doing graphics. And he was absolutely amazing what he could do with the limited number of pixels, just would astonish you. Before Cubert, another guy was working on a superhero game. And the concept was loosely based on Superman to where Superman was fighting like three villains, right? And on the and it was actually, there were two buildings on the very sides of the screen, the superhero would, would fight and fly in the center of the screen. And on the ground, there were little pedestrians walking, these people might have me it was like five or six pixels high. And they all had personalities. It was unbelievable. That’s just the idea of an idea of what Jeffrey could do. And he had created a whole bunch of characters for a video game idea that he had. And he created Cubert as as the player character, I think the reason he had that nose was to shoot things through it. Interesting. Yeah. And so you know, the idea was that this is a character that would shoot boogers through his nose. The boogers.
Oh, yeah, the mic I guess drifted off. I’m sorry. You’re better. There we go. It’s the shirt. Do you want to move it? You want to move the mic? Sound Engineer.
He’s a free one. He’s free.
He mattered more and crappy.
That should be alright.
So anyway, so yeah, so Jeff hadn’t worked or had Jeff had come up with a snots and boogers idea
and views not
I was looking for something to do as a video game, and I didn’t really have anything in mind, you know? Because back then people didn’t sit down and design video games really, you know, you had some concept, you explore the concept. It was very experimental. So, another guy, whose name is Khan Yamamoto, and he is known for doing mad planets. Oh, sure, it’s a game he did. But he was working with these this Escher like cube pattern on the screen. And I was walking by one day and, and I saw the screen filled with these, these Asher cubes. And I thought, well, that’s kind of interesting. Because in my mind’s eye, I would see I saw sort of this pyramid of cubes. And I was new, I was fairly new, I had helped out this other programmer doing the superhero game on some very few routines. But I needed to teach myself stuff like like gravity. And and randomness were two concepts I didn’t really know how to program. So I thought, well, here’s this thing, this pyramid of cubes. And if a ball bounced and hit the top, it would have one of two places to go. And in fact, every time it landed, it would have one or two places to go. And with one with one bite, a bite of data, each bit would be a random decision of which way you should go. And I thought, let me try and program this as an experiment. So I programmed a just balls falling down this pyramid of cubes, then dropping off into oblivion. And there was no game idea. I was just doing this as an experiment. And then I thought, well, let me put a player character in there. So I went to Jeff and he had all these characters that he had designed for snots, and boogers. And I said, I said, Do you mind if I use this? This this orange guy as the players? Yeah, no, go ahead. So I put that guy in and we made him bounce up and down. I got I got it working. So funny. Yeah. And it really just evolved. The game literally evolved every time we got to one step. We said, well, what’s the next step? You know? You know, back then the game, the programmer was the designer, as the programmer was the guy who made it all happen. But I did rely a lot on Jeff for input, and also from Dave field who did the sounds. And he was, he was inspired. They was amazing. He had this we had this phoning Jeff, it was a speech chip that could play different phonemes of human sound. Well, he didn’t like the way the speech sounded. If you actually tried to string together something. It was very monotone It was just horrible. So he had the idea of having it, play random phonemes and that’s what Cubert spoken random phonemes and it was, it’s one of the things that made Cubert so lovable game of personality, but it was it was all that was all Dave’s idea. The idea for changing the colors of the tops of the cubes came from Ron Waxman, Rama Zara, VP of engineering. Ramas is really, really imposing guy, he was very big. He had kind of like squinty eyes, he had a VanDyke beard, always smoke cigars, and he never seemed to smile. And when you got to know him, he was a pussycat. But you know, not knowing him that you would just terrify her that Oh, yeah. And one thing he would do late at night, like if we were working late, he would just kind of sit behind you. He would literally be poultry and just watch you. Yeah. So you know, you’re trying to code and you hear this breathing behind. And I remember I was programming and I don’t know, I was, you know, playing the game balls are bouncing Cubans jumping. He wasn’t called Schubert, some guys bouncing or jumping around this pyramid. And I hear this voice behind me go. Why did the colors change when he lands? That’s a great idea. So I started programming that in and then, you know, honestly, a lot of my role model for the game was Pac Man. You really Yeah. And I always, you know, people thought Cuba was a very original game. I’m very, you know, honored that they think that but a lot of the the basic overlying themes of Cuba were based on Pac Man. You know, one thing was you had you had a joystick and no buttons, right? You, you maneuvered and you tried to get away from something that was chasing you in which in my case, that was coyly the snake. Right. Um, and, you know, in Pac Man, you have the tunnels that you can escape from the ghosts, right? Cubert it’s the disks. You know, that’s, you know, so that’s, that’s
great. That’s a really loose. I mean, that’s a route I can almost like any game and make it sound like Pac Man and average.
Like saying, what? Commandos based on Robotron because it’s the guy shooting? Yeah.
You know, for what it’s worth, though. That’s that is you know, that’s interesting. Those are the things I had in my mind is
basically, you’re thinking Pac Man while making humor.
Right? Interesting. Well,
I do have one question. Sure. I do know that that I guess name for Cubert came like towards the end The development variant Yeah, it was the original title was gonna be what’s on the side of goods on the side of the cat which is the the curse words.
What? Yeah, what did you guys call that?
Well, we didn’t call it anything. That was the name of the game. That’s okay. No. Nobody working on the game seriously believe that was gonna ever happen. Howie Rubin. Ruben was our VP of marketing. And Ron and Howie literally were the the overseers of the video department. They grew it, they created it. And how he was a really interesting guy. He was very outgoing, very colorful. You know, we used to work in this manufacturing plant in Bensenville Illinois, when we were starting up, and it was empty there. We weren’t manufacturing anything. So we had 1000s of square feet, just empty. How he was the kind of guy that would come in in the middle of the day, we’re all working and go, Alright, everybody stopped working. We’re going to the plant and we’re going to play football. And he would make everybody go out into the this empty area and start throwing a football around the middle of the day. That was how he Rubin. Wonderful guy, and it was his idea to call the game. Or whatever you want to call it. You know, I know that I personally thought he was insane. And I think most of everybody else thought he was insane. And we said well, how are you going to pronounce it?
Yeah, we’re
going to talk about it. He goes they’ll find a way if this game is as good as we know it is they’ll find a way. So we actually printed up a bunch of these marquees with this with the you know the jibberish swear word on
on the margins actually see the cap with the gibberish that was that’s how
I found out about he’s asked me how many I don’t know how many were made. I have no idea. I have one that I don’t know how many there are floating out there. Okay, but and they went out on test that way. But at some point he got I don’t even know what changed his mind, quite honestly. But we did eventually, you know, realize that, you know, that wasn’t going to work or whatever the reason we changed it to, to to a real name and and the naming of puberty. First off, I never thought of a name. I’m not really good at that. I always called it the cube game. Cube. Yeah, that was it. The Cube game really boring, really uninteresting. Well, we went around the office, and we had everybody give their suggestions of what the name of the game should be. And we had a list of probably 50 or 60 names, really. And they were all pretty inane. You know, and I really don’t remember too many of them. There was one I remember that stuck in my mind for some reason, because I think it was just so ridiculous. Was Arne Aardvark. I think it was somebody suggested that because of the nose, right? I thought okay, yeah, no, but we had a meeting, we all sat together, it was a myself and Howie Enron, Jeff, Dave, I’m imagining who was there who would have been there because I don’t really remember exactly. Rich Tracy was our art director. Bill Jacobs was a director of engineering, there are a bunch of people, I’m sure we they’re probably that, you know, eight or 10 guys sitting in a room, talking about what the name of this game should be. And I remember at one point, sort of like having a little out of body experiences, while I’m like, here’s like, 10 grown men in a room, you know, vehemently discussing, you know, what the name of this weird little character should be. And it was just insane. They’re supposed to
be spitting boogers? It’s not Yeah. It’s called snots.
Since since, since he wasn’t shooting out of his nose, you know, that really wasn’t
what made you what made you decide to not have to shoot anything out of his nose? Well,
honestly, I didn’t want to deal with the programming difficulty of it. Fair enough. I wanted, you know, something similar was my first game. I didn’t want to overburden myself with trying to do anything too fancy. I really wanted to keep it simple. And because of the pyramid, you know, landscape, shooting out of your nose was yeah, there’s anything, it wasn’t clear what you would hit or how you would aim. And I really wanted the controls to be simple. In fact, that was another one of my criteria was, I wanted a game that I could play while holding a drink in my other hand.
So why didn’t you just get rid of the nose? Well, why didn’t you just get rid of or change the nose?
You know what Jeff created the character and we all liked the character and I don’t think we ever even consider that.
Or put hands on the mark. No, it seemed more interesting
to us to just leave him the way he was and have people go, what? What is that for?
You start adding the things together the the Azure cubes in the funky noises and balls bouncing and then you throw this orange guy with a huge Nazarene. And that’s when you start thinking that you watch way too much Sid and Marty Krofft growing.
And you know, and really we didn’t think about it at all, it was just, you know, we were just trying to have some fun and do something that we would enjoy, you know. So anyway, that the name Hubert came about in that meeting, where somebody suggested Hubert with an H and Hubert Hubert and you know, just like hey, he looks like a Hubert. I don’t know why interesting. And then somebody said, oh, wait a minute. What about Hubert with a C. So you have C u, B, E R T. So you have the cube thing, right? People go, Hey, we I think we’re onto something here. Yeah. And then somebody else said, Wait a minute, what about Q? The letter Q, Bert. And we were all like, yes, yes. And then, and then the the, it was with a dash Q dash birth. And then the last thing was don’t make that dash and asterisk. Yes, we’ve got it.
Really was that goofy? Huh?
No, we didn’t. We didn’t jump up like that. But I’m exaggerating. But, you know,
if you guys just say yay, I really
did feel like it clicked that that is absolutely true. We all we just all in agreement looked at and said that’s it. Yeah.
So you guys like Atari where if you guys were working on the game, and everybody was playing it when you came to work in the morning that it was going to be hit? Did you have that kind
of a sense with Cubert people did enjoy playing Kubrat while it was being developed. And we did have a sense that was going to be really popular. And that was why they jumped on the marketing and the merchandising before it was released. They really Yeah, they really knew it was going to be the big Well, smart people.
What’s Cubert the first basically turned slightly turned controls to give you the four way that went in and basically instead of going up, down left to right away.
Yeah, that was that was revolutionary. I’m not sure if it came out before after Zaxxon. Because Zaxxon was another thing that was sort of like a pseudo 3d ride, and you had a different perspective than normal. But I do remember that. I waited to talk about their experience
with Atari, like totally overpowered.
Alright, so I do remember people coming over to me, because I was very adamant about the controls. And they seem completely obvious to me. I mean, he’s jumping in direct, I mean, physically on the screen, he’s jumping in the direction. I didn’t, you know, think there was any problem, but people would come up while I was developing and go, Why don’t you change the thing to be up, down, left and right. And I’d be like, Well, how is that gonna work? Yeah, and maybe like, but it’s so much simpler. And I’d be like, how do I know all the other games that this is too confusing? And I’d be like, but no, that’s the way it’s got to be. I think part of the problem might have been that when I was developing it, we didn’t have a cabinet. Right? Basically, what I had was a square plastic bucket. Large Tupperware, actual bucket, it was like large Tupperware, you know, like the about, you know, eight inches by six inches, you know, and about about five or six inches deep. It was upside down, and the joystick was mounted on the bucket. So you know, and I had a monitor sitting here disconnected. And so I think that confuse people because it wasn’t mounted on a control panel. So you know, people just assumed that the joystick would go in the direction of the vertical and horizontal the bucket, and they had to rotate it slightly and whatever, I don’t know. But I was very adamant about the directional, the directions of that joystick and it stayed stable throughout the game,
whose idea was the pinball knocker?
The Pinball knocker was the idea of a guy named Rick tie. He was one of our technicians, and, you know, avid player, avid game player, and he knew a lot about pinball machines. And he said, you know, what about sticking a pinball knocker in this cabinet? And when Cubert let you know hits the bottom fan. And we were all Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s give it a shot. I I did not like the quality of the sound because it sounded too much like a knock. And it didn’t sound like a fun I really wanted something like sound like a sack of potatoes, you know, hidden hidden soft dirt. So what we had what we tried was we took a little piece of foam, little black foam stuck it on the side of the cabinet where the thing hit. Lo and behold, it was the absolute perfect sound. But sadly, from a manufacturing standpoint, they didn’t want to go into the labor to make sure that somebody would find that spot inside the cabinet place it and and do that for the for the manufacturing run. So it never happened. We just left it with the NOC and I was always disappointed but you know what, people over the years? I think it’s one of
the Yeah, absolutely. It’s
like what signature item? Yeah, I think it was one other game that use that in baldachin. I
don’t know. Maybe you know what it is offhand? I don’t there was some other game that used what was the other game there was some other game these.
I thought this is I mean, only Cuba is the only other game I’ve seen the use of this and I can’t remember now. Yeah. Oh, wow. Oh, so now I know you’ve been asked this one. So we’re gonna we’re gonna cover some common ground here. Sure. The speech samples? Did you purposely remove any possible speech patterns that could have accidentally been put together to basically tell the player to go after themselves?
This is the truth. Whether people believe me or not, I can’t say but Again, they feel our sound guy was the guy who programmed the random phonemes. And they were truly completely random.
So it is absolutely possible for me to go and play Cubert and have him tell me to go after myself.
Yeah, I don’t think there was a way to, you know, really prevent Wow things, but the you know, the likelihood of that happening is so slim. And I won’t say that my answer is the definitive one, you can talk to Dave feel about that someday. But my understanding is that they are just random. He is not programmed to say anything and, and he’s capable of saying anything. How many syllables? Does he say? It’s phonemes? And I’m not sure how many there are. But it’s it was a speech chip that was based on, you know, the human language. So, you know, I think I’m not sure exactly how many
2020 of them were available?
I don’t know, I don’t have a definitive answer. No, that’s, that’s fair enough. I
mean, just a ballpark. I mean, hundreds.
I know, I know, couple days between 20 and 40 is about phonemes. There.
Gotcha. Okay. Okay. And what? That seems I had a train of thought, and I just lost it. Can I ask, How does it feel to have a game that has been poured so many times? I mean, I could probably name 17 different variations of Cubert. And I’m assuming that you guys had no recourse to pursue any of them. Or you just chose not to?
Well, I, you know, I had no ownership of the Kubrick game or character ever, or I was an employee. They didn’t have a royalty, thank you. They didn’t have a royalty program at the time of Cubert. Down, I didn’t get I didn’t get a bonus, I got a generous bonus. That was very nice. But it wasn’t what I would have gotten if there was a royalty program in place, they did put a royalty program in place couple of years later, can’t believe they didn’t give you the lakshan off of that. Well, they, they gave me a little bit very little. But honestly, at the time, I was thrilled because this is my first game. It was very successful is very popular. And that was an enormous amount of gratification. For me. The fact that people copied it was just flattering. It was flattering to you. Yeah, I mean, I wasn’t in the business to make money. I wasn’t in the business to become wealthy. I never expected that I expected that I would have some fun and maybe create something that I would enjoy. So did you hear that bill? Not everyone’s in this for
money. One of our avid listeners, yeah, understand the concept of creative
outlet? Well, you know, honestly, the only thing I’ve ever looked for in my entire career was, you know, to be compensated in a way that I felt was fair. Yeah. And, you know, I didn’t feel a need to become, you know, insanely wealthy. But honestly, I wouldn’t have turned down more money.
Now, how many units did have Cubert? Shift? I mean, just a ballpark? Do you have an idea?
Honestly, don’t know, I really don’t. I mean, I remember standing in that plant and just seeing tons of them. And that was overwhelming to me. But I really don’t know what the final numbers ended up being I have no idea. I assume you have one at home. So I do have one I have an engineering sample. So it doesn’t actually have the the final artwork, it has a different side panel. And I also have the the marquee that has the swearing instead of Kubrick.
Cool, yeah, that’s very cool.
Um, the development the the development of the characters slick Sam, coyly runway, where those come from?
Well, you know, the characters all came from Jeff Lee, he designed them all. And I’m actually you know, when it comes to a lot of the details, I’m not really sure whose idea was why. I don’t remember whose idea was to turn them upside down and have them come in from the other angles. That’s just that’s almost disturbing. Yeah, that might have been Jeff’s
noise. That noise you tell me where if you still in contact with the sound guy. That sound is almost subliminally disturbing to me. It’s like they did with the shining the movie The Shining that music they played the beginning they purposefully mess with you
again, random phonemes but at a lower pay. Yeah, it’s just
makes my hair almost standard thinking about it. Yeah. But
you know, and then we needed again, they all the characters serve some sort of gameplay purpose. So you know, the slick and Sam green guys falling down. You know, we needed somebody to Fort Hubert in his quest to change the colors. So they were
they were thrown in there. Was there ever story developed for Cubert while he was changing the colors, anything like that?
I didn’t develop one. I don’t know of one. Jeff might have come up with something like that. I, I honestly don’t remember. And, and honestly, it wasn’t important to me at that time. Because this is at a time where, you know, you know, Space Invaders, you know, didn’t have a story. You know, Hackman didn’t really have a story, you know, games just didn’t they weren’t really necessary, but it was at a time where people were starting to think in terms of story with video games. but that really wasn’t where my interest was. I was interested in the, the, you know, the the look and feel of the game itself.
As you feel we when it became a cartoon
I was amused by the word I know honestly, it never occurred to me that somebody would want to turn turn that into a cartoon. And once I got past that it didn’t occur to me how someone could turn that into a cartoon.
You know, you’re gonna do a Pac Man movie. You look you’re gonna be next. If it makes $20 million. You’re gonna come to your house and get Cuba.
We’ll find out. I don’t know. Well, this guy is godly. I mean, godly was still around. I mean, godly was not around God leave was bought by Columbia Pictures. Oh, great.
Well, no, that means it’s guaranteed.
At some point, they were owned by Coca Cola, but then Coca Cola got rid of them. And then Columbia Pictures was bought by Sony. So Cubert. And all of those properties are owned by Sony.
Which explains why there was that 3d Kubrick I mean, at three, let’s say Kubrick cubes, I
think that was humorous cubes was actually an arcade game done at Gottlieb about probably a few months after that. I was never released.
I was gonna ask you about that. Next. I’m talking about the cubes that was done for the PlayStation.
Hasbro. Oh, there was a Cuba for the PlayStation there. And then
there was one for this Super Nintendo. It wasn’t exactly the
PlayStation. I think Kubrick three yet. And I believe Jeff Lee worked on that on the graphics on that. But I had nothing to do with it. I had nothing to do with the Hasbro one. Although I did talk to some Hasbro people while it was being developed, but I didn’t really I wasn’t involved in any sort of decisions or any of the gameplay. What do you think of those? Well, I have played it. And in some regards, I like it. But honestly, there were, I had started thinking about doing a 3d version of Cubert and how I would do it. And there were a lot of things I would have done differently. I mean, more power to them. They did it their way. But I you know, I just
don’t hold back. But you really think
Do you feel like do you feel like you cubit is yours? As far as you feel possessive of him? Yeah. Do you feel for this? Ah,
from a creative standpoint? Yeah, kind of. I mean, I share that with with Jeff Lee and Dave Thiel, I, I’ve always thought of the three of us as a group as the creators of cubers.
Because we asked this question with David Crane with pinball. And he’s like, No.
I mean, I’m trying to figure out we try to figure out how people within are very responsible for pioneering things like Cubert and pitfall. Hackman, things like that. How you cannot be attached to that. I mean, other than the fact that you were just an employee. I know. And you weren’t, you know, it wasn’t making you money hand over fist, but later on, yeah, I mean, don’t you how do you not develop an emotional attachment to something that is obviously made such an impact on so many people?
Well, I’m grateful for that. Certainly. And that is the emotional impact it’s had on me. I’m not in any way bitter about the money part of it. I mean, if I if I was poor and living on the streets, I bet I’d be real bitter
was so much the money aspect is this, the winner would identify as you when they somebody was warned David, oh, that’s stupid guy. Like we they were like, oh, that’s our guy. But if you go to me right now, and he goes, I am not the pitfall
he doesn’t want to be associated. Well, no, you know what it? Well, certainly, I don’t I would not define my life by Hubert. If people define me by Kubrick, that’s their thing. And that’s fine. I’m not there are certainly worse ways to be defined, you know. Hitler comes to mind.
Let me let me put into perspective. That’s how I kind of did it with David. Let’s say they took Hubert and turn them into a first person shooter.
Okay, not some movies actually comes out.
Yeah, let’s see what they take you over and they totally bastardize him into something that you would have never ever wanted worse than the Hasbro stuff, right? And they said, I put on the package. Warren Davis’s Cubert Cubert. Shooter. He remind you when he went out to Walmart and saw that on the show, yeah. When I bought it.
Yes. If my name was on it, it would bother me if my name and that’s very unlikely, if not, my name wasn’t on it. And somebody did that with Cubert. Well, it’s, you know, again, it’s, it’s it’s not my property, and it would it would would I be disappointed? Absolutely. I wouldn’t want to see Kubrick, you know, in something that I don’t think is successful or proper for him. But again, it’s not my place. So, you know, I would personally be disappointed. But, you know, I also understand that there there are business aspects to this and I don’t have the the say so to say no. That’s fair enough. Fair enough.
Have you played what is what is the best version of Cubert that you’ve ever played, that’s not the arcade version or emulated, like on a port to a console or a computer.
That’s that’s really I really, I’ve only played the ports in a very cursory way. My favorite qubit is the one that was not released figures, which I don’t faster, harder, more challenging Cuba. Yeah, they are very familiar. But that is my favorite, honestly. And and I’m thrilled beyond words, that it’s actually out there for people to play, because it literally sat in my Cuba cabinet for 15 years. And as far as I know, I have the only set of roms of
it. So you, you
MAY Yes, i i gave those to the main guys. So maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. Maybe there’s a you know,
maybe you say that. Yeah.
But so tell
him what, for those people. I mean, there are a lot of people who don’t know the difference. I mean, a lot of Cuba fans that don’t know that that exists. What are the differences? Well, just a summary,
let me give you that, when, when when Cuba came out, people, some people that I worked with a guy leave internally thought it was too hard. So I kept making it easier and easier. And when it when it got out into the arcades, you know, when we, we did play test all these games, we would put it in an arcade and sit there and watch me play it, a lot of times people would jump right off and die, and they’d be frustrated, they’d walk away. But occasionally, you know, people wouldn’t, and then people would watch and they’d see how it’s done. And, but there was still an a feeling that it was too hard. So I was I did make it easier. And then when it when it was out and popular for months, people really got really good at it. And you can play, you know, forever on one, four. So I felt the pressure and there was a, you know, a desire internally to do a sequel that was maybe a little bit harder. So, you know, they said, we really we wanted to I said, Well, what do you want to SQL? And they said, well, we want something that’s faster, harder and more challenging. So I said, All right, I’m gonna make a game called faster, harder, more challenging Cubert. And that’s what I did. So what’s different about it? First of all, it starts off much faster, the original game started slow and got gradually faster this off, this starts off at a nice clip. The other thing is the discs on the sides of the pyramid are not fixed, they move, they will actually I never notice that they flash and they’ll move up a step. So you sort of have to keep aware of where they’re going. The other element that happens later on is that slicking Sam, when they when they come down and start jumping, rather than just turn a color back to its original color, they change the top of a square to a pattern that Cubert cannot change by jumping on only coiling jumping on that will change it falls down. So the new element to the game is that you have to not only you know nor coyly to a to a disk, you have to get get him to follow you over any of those squares. So it’s not right. It’s not right. Yes. And also the progression of the game was changed slightly so that things that used to happen at every level, change every round. You know, while they’re playing the game, and then when there’s a new character called cube Bertha, and we have this idea of a female Cuber who really as opposed to coyly who wants to kill Cubert cube Bertha wants to smother him with love, wants to get him to get in with him. She is a female purple, he basically takes the place of coyly in the game. And I don’t think there’s really any difference. I don’t remember any other difference other than the fact that she’s a different character. She comes in later, and there are bonus rounds, which I don’t think the original had no, or bonus rounds where you have like 20 seconds to change as many colors as you can. And then slicking you have a million slick and Sam’s falling down like a rainfall. And you can you have to stop them. And again, they’re changing colors back and you’re changing colors. And then it’s like whatever, whatever the board looks like after 20 seconds, you get points points
based on that. Yeah, I thought it was where there were there no operator difficulty levels and Cubert I would think that if it was too hard, then it would just give levels and let you turn it up and down
there. In both games, there were some operator adjustments where you can change the difficulty from easy to hard. And there were a number of things that part of that was in the timing and the speed of the game. And part of that was the points at which you got an extra man. So you know, you’d get an extra man at a lower point level that makes the game easier,
how much how much code base change was there from original Cubert and the faster harder more challenging Cuber
I’m not that much honestly we pretty much kept the game the same. We did change a few things. We added cube Bertha like I said we you know we added a bit but it really wasn’t that big of a change. And I think it only took me two, maybe two months to to get all of the changes incorporated in and put it out on test. And it was put out on test. But it was put out on test, you know, like maybe three or four months after the original. So people were still mastering the original. And they felt you know what the time isn’t right for this. They shelved it. And then they never came back and unsheltered. they’d forgotten for years.
So what about what about Cuber? cubes? Cubes cube is
I have absolutely nothing to do with nothing at all. Nothing at all. Another programmer, he was a junior program. He started out after I did, and his name was Neil Bernstein, a really wonderful guy and a talented guy. And he said, you know, well, of course management came to me and said, Listen, you know, we do want to do another Kubrick game and I was of the mind, you know what? I’ve done Cubert I want to move on to other things. There were a lot of areas that I wanted to explore. You know, I just didn’t feel a need to do another Kubrick game. And Neil was interested, and I basically gave him my blessing. I said, more power to you good luck, whatever you want to do. And he did it.
And how was Kuma Kuma Kuma was that actually released? I don’t even remember actually seeing an actual cabinet.
Yes, it was I don’t know how many they made. And I honestly don’t think it was that successful. But I was finished and released. Yes,
there was a ColecoVision cartridge or what? It was a ColecoVision cartridge.
A pure cannabis. Yes. Interesting.
I think that the ColecoVision report was like one of the most amazing ports where the time
I agree. I agree. I had an illegal mission at home at the time. And yeah, I thought it was a really faithful port. Very, very impressed.
Do you? Are you a video game player
as well as a developer? You know, not as much as I used to be. And I’m a it’s a rare video game that grabs my attention.
What is something that grabs your attention? Well,
there was a game for the PC and adventure game called the Pandora directive. It was part of a series of games featuring Tex Murphy. Right. Yeah,
I thought it sounded familiar.
I love that game. The Pandora directive. I mean, when that game came out, I played it from start to finish and I thoroughly enjoyed it to me. It was the perfect game. It was everything a game should be it had a story. It got you immersed and involved and had humor and action. It had thinking I love that game. I loved a lot of the LucasArts Star Wars games, the original ones. I love mist and Riven those really intrigued me. You know, I’m not I’m not a twitch gamer. I really like adventure games. I like games with story. I like games with puzzle solving. A lot of the games I found did fall into sort of a mediocre category. That’s some really good stuff in them, but nothing to really elevate them beyond everything. Oh, another game I love was called shivers, which was sort of a hard thing game. I love that game.
He’s a games that we never had PCs fast enough to play exactly right.
Back on Amiga. I think back then. So I didn’t get to play any of that stuff.
Nice. I still have hopes that. I mean, I’ve been working in the console market now.
What are you what you’re doing now? Man? Yeah, yeah, it
was always a big, you know, it was a big transition for me, because I really didn’t have a lot of 3d experience. But, but I picked it up. And I actually found out that the knowledge that I did have was pretty applicable to modern games. And I learned a lot on the way and now you know, I’m actually very excited about the game I’m working on now. Although I really can’t talk about it. Of course not.
Who do you work for now? Or can you tell her a small developer called
Equinox?
Me too. Do you have a publisher that you’re working through? Well, probably can’t tell me
talk about it. Yeah. Okay,
what did you What have you worked on?
What have you done before that?
Well, okay, let me run through them all. Of course, you know, Cubert in us versus them at Gottlieb and us versus them.
Now, let’s talk about that. While we’re there. No, I’ve
been thinking a lot about us versus them lately. I was always proud of that game. And the interesting thing about us versus them is it was sort of very different from anything out there. It was a laser date laser disc game with computer graphic overlay. But we actually had actors, and we actually shot scenes, and there was an actual story. And we shot flying footage. You know, I actually went along with Dennis Nordmann, Denis Norden, who’s another guy who designed it and rich Tracy and I were really the three sort of designers of the game and they had the concept. I sort of joined the team and we all worked on it together. Jeff Lee did the video graphics day fielded the sounds. Dennis and I went out and actually did some flying with the guys who were shooting flying footage. The interesting thing about us versus them is that it would switch angles. So some, some some levels you’d be behind the your, your fighter plane, some you it would be sidescrolling some you would sort of be above looking down. There were five different sort of, you know, angles that you could play at and I think Just thinking about a lot because I, my memories of it are old. I’ve never seen it. There’s a version of it on Main but without the laserdisc under underlying, and that really makes the game work. Right. So you really can’t experience it without that. But we had a full orchestral score with an actual orchestra. It was composed, composed and conducted by Dave Zabriskie, who has a, you know, to my mind, a musical genius, a guy who was working at Gottlieb and then later worked at Williams. But it was it was a phenomenal game, I’d love to see an actual working cabinet. I
had one last year, that’s too bad.
There was one here last year kidding, man, I would have loved to seen that. Yeah, I haven’t had a chance to play it either. One of my favorite things in that game is at the very end of the if you play that game all the way through, we have this actor, Tom, who plays the President of the United States talking to you and congratulating you on finishing the game. Now he’s sitting at a desk in front of a desk are the letters of the alphabet. So he gives you the speech. And then and then and then just segues into saying to enter your initials in the high score table, move the joystick to select your it just so I just found it. So music that here’s this guy, this presidential guy, congratulating you on saving the world and then telling you
that would be funny. It was great. That was a great Plaza. I’ve always wondered about the computer overlay laser discs games, they almost seemed like they were all a desperate attempt to cash cash in on Dragon’s Lair spaces. sort of thing. I’ve always wondered from a development standpoint, was that really what was going on? Or was it simply a matter of hey, there’s some new technology, but see what we can do with it.
You know, it was the latter. Honestly, I don’t, I wouldn’t say there was anything desperate about it. When when laser discs came out, people started to go, Hey, this is a valid thing that we can put in video games. To get movie quality graphics, I there was nothing desperate about it. We spent, you know quite some time developing our hardware, a hardware engineer named Dave Pfeiffer did, you know converted our our hardware which was originally done by a guy named Joon Young. And both of these guys very talented hardware engineers at Gottlieb. And they, you know, so they came up with this laser disc scheme. And we opted to go with computer overlay graph, you know, the computer overlay as opposed to Dragon’s Lair, which just basically has all animators all animated. And then we did Mach three, and Mach three turned out to be very successful. I don’t, it really was just trying to exploit some new technology in a cool way. That was really what our goal was. And then we just tried to take it another step with us versus them by adding story elements at different angles. The sad thing about us versus them is I always remember is that it came out at a time where operators arcade operators start to realize that you know, if you kick the side of a cabinet, which apparently happened a lot you know, the the laserdisc would skip, the the cushioning or the the shock absorption qualities of that original player in the cabinets. Were not up to snuff for field use. So people were losing a lot of games, people would ask for their money back, they would break down a lot. The operators weren’t happy. The operators, the operators organization, they started to turn down their orders, they started to cancel orders. And this was happening all the time that us versus them came out,
right. Yeah. That was a problem for everybody. Yeah, we Yeah, exactly. But everybody was having
us versus them. I’ll never forget this us versus them went into an arcade on test. It was the number one game for something like 12 weeks. Real is the number one game in this arcade from weeks after week after week. And we couldn’t sell them because we had we actually had a lawsuit. Gottlieb had a lawsuit against our distributors, or vice versa. And because of this whole LaserDisc fiasco, so it was just bad timing. Very sad. And
so how many how many did you guys do there was Mach three and then us versus them? And that was
That’s right. I don’t know how many us versus them is actually got produced, but it was very small number we could not sell the people just didn’t want to buy it. Because all the problems. Yeah. And again, like you say, it wasn’t just gonna leave across the board for everybody. I probably LaserDisc games just died. And it’s sad because I think they, a few years later, they solve those problems, and they would have been robust enough to stay in those cabinets. But operators were burned and they didn’t want to try it again.
That’s crazy. Let’s talk about jobs too.
Okay. short conversation.
Maybe, maybe not. How did how did you get involved with that?
Just too, is being programmed by another programmer entirely. He wasn’t doing a really good job. I guess he was. He was behind in his schedule. And basically what happened was I and another programmer at Williams were asked to basically come on board and finish the game up. And I I don’t know if he quit or was fired, but he was no longer there. They need to finish the game. So my involvement was really minimal. I came in and just sort of, you know, helped to get the game in shape to go out the door. That’s that was it.
So you didn’t do any of the design concepts or anything else. You were just a cleanup crew.
I call myself a supplemental programmer on that.
What about the other guy that worked with you didn’t I mean, how much of the project was complete when you got to it?
I’m guessing maybe 75%? Yeah, it was. It was there was a core there. But there was a lot of stuff that was problematic, and it wasn’t ready to go out. And
I’ve actually never seen an actual Josh to machine was in a very limited run. Was it too late?
Will you live in a cave? No, I never saw you. Technically you have. Even when I took you the Pac Man arcade? There was just too there. You won’t, right? No, we were isolate the crap out of it. I like it.
I can’t really take much credit for it. And John newcomer who did the original jous was involved as a designer and artist.
It’s a lot easier than the original just because you can change the horse to a Pegasus and that kind of stuff. And this seemed like it felt easier. Yeah.
Well, how long were you Williams?
I started Williams. Let’s see I got lead close their doors are a mile star as they became known at that time, closed their doors in 84, I want to say, and I was out of the industry for about a year and a half. So it’s probably like if I at six, I was headhunter, call me asked me to if I was interested in getting back into the arcade industry. And I was very much. And I was really thrilled at working Williams, because of all the great games that came out of Oh, yeah, I was thrilled with, you know, working with people like Eugene Jarvis and Larry Damar. And at that time, Larry, Tamar was was pretty much working on pinball games. And it actually, you know, that the time I came to Williams was a time where the arcade industry was sort of dying, you know, the heyday, that initial heyday of the early 80s, in the late 70s was over. But we were about to enter into another era. And that’s where I started working with video digitizers. Which, you know, honestly, I have to say, I’m sort of proud of that, that that was my main contribution at Williams. I worked on Terminator two. I was part of the team that really no, I love Terminator two, but that that happened because I actually was working at Williams, we were, we were developing a completely new system. It was going to be the next generation. Eugene Jarvis and I were working together, Eugene was pretty much designing it. He was like the idea guy. I wrote the display system. Eugene wrote the operating system. We had a great hardware guy, Mark Loffredo, who was designing the hardware and it was a 256
color system. It was very nice. It
looks so cool. And you could get really sort of almost true color graphics out of 256 colors. Of course, all of the you know, the tools that to reduce, you know, there’s a lot of algorithms to reduce colors down from true color to 256 colors, right? Those were sort of in their infancy. They were only the crudest algorithm. Some of the cooler algorithms came along years later, but we use what we had. And we started to dip once the system was developed, we started to develop two games, Eugene and Jack Hager really talented artists, who I think is a wonderful human being. We work together on Terminator two and Revolution X and Jack Hager. He’s a guy that has his own, you know, huge, huge history in the in the cleanup industry. Well, Jack, and Eugene were working on a game that became narc tall, and I was teamed with John newcomer and we were working on a game that ultimately did not get released. And you know, that’s a story that I need to be a little bit delicate about because there was some political stuff going on at the time. I won’t get into the details of it because it really is a very political story. I ended up quitting. I ended up leaving Williams
Oh, you can’t stop now. Now you guys all interesting. Come on, give us the give us the light brown bag version.
All right, well, alright, John knew Kim and I were working on this game was called you you SSA? I believe it was called. Okay. And the idea was that, you know, there was a Russian takeover of our country and resistance fighters were fighting back.
Now was this this Terminator two style hardware?
Similar not not entirely. Okay. It wasn’t a multi planar not a gun game. It wasn’t a gun game. It was a game with two steering wheels. Okay, we were working with a split screen so two players could play and it was basically a tank game. So you had an overhead view. The enemies were in tanks, and the player was driving a flatbed truck with a missile launcher in the back. We do that now. And you could you could shoot a missile launcher and steer it with your steering wheel cool, and hit the tanks. John newcomer built models that from model kits and I don’t know where he found these McDonald’s 711 houses I we shot these video cameras straight down. This was really amazing. True Color Graphics, it looked like a photograph. And the tanks, it’s all the same thing and the flatbed truck all four models. They looked awesome. And we had to we brought this game pretty far along, but and the idea was that each half of the screen scrolled independently, right? So sometimes you might see the other player sometimes you might not. There was some political backlash. I honestly couldn’t tell you everything about it. But I will tell you that Steve Richard, who is a famous pinball design, yes. And a wonderful guy, I gotta say, I respect and love that guy tremendously. But at the time, he felt he was sticking his nose into the video department in ways that I didn’t feel were quite appropriate. But of course, you know, who was I? I was this snotty nose guy from Gottlieb but did Cubert everybody else there were these classic Williams guys that have been there forever. Right. So you know, I and John newcomer was was also a guy who, despite having success with joust you know, Josh was not necessarily thought highly of it. Williams while it was being developed. So, John newcomer sort of was I won’t say he wasn’t respected but he was you know, he was a vision whipping boy, he wasn’t elevated to the place that you know, somebody like John black
sheet. Yeah, here’s the black. He’s the redheaded stepchild
that you you may Joust, and you’re the bad guy.
Yeah, exactly. That’s, I think I totally screwed the rest of my career.
Well, you know, I mean, I hate to be the guy who made baby Pac Man that midway you have to be the guy making jokes. Oh, I just made that shitty game. Jealousy. No. Alright.
So ultimately, what happened was, you know, we felt really good about our game narc. Was narc was developing on its own. And, you know, there was competition. That was the Williams way there was some competition. And we basically lost, you know, we didn’t have the approval of upper management. I think part of it probably was that upper management did not want two games coming out at the same time competing with each other. Right. I was. Eugene called me into his office. He said, Hey, weren’t you know, I’m sorry about your game being canceled. You know, we would like you to do a football game. We have this football game we want to do and it became high impact eventually. Yes. And I said, and he said, How do you what do you think about doing that? And I was like, Well, I’ll tell you, you, Jane. I’m not really interested in doing a football game. Not a big football fan. I don’t you know, I don’t have a I’m not the right guy for it. Right. But thanks for offering it to me. And you know, I’ll come up with something else I want to do. So while I’m talking to Eugene, Ken Fidessa, who’s the VP of Engineering? He phones Eugene. He goes, you’re talking to Warren Eugene is Yeah, well, I come on down to the office. We go to Ken’s office. Oh, hell, Ken Fidessa goes. So Warren. Eugene told you you’re working on the football? Oh, no, here it comes. So I got to feel bad for you, Jean. I don’t, I don’t have harbor any resentment about that. But he tried to play it delicately. And it didn’t work out. And that was pretty much the more I knew I had to leave. I just felt like I wasn’t treated with respect. And I did leave. And I went over to premiere technology, which is the X Gottlieb pinball guys. company run by Gil Pollack and became their consultant to create a video game for them. That’s a whole nother story that I really wanted to talk to you as my voice is running out. But that’s a story that can take you know, a couple of hours. But I did a game for Premier technology was called in 1991. By by Ken For desert, William saying how would you like to come back? Wow. You know, and I said, Sure. In the game, they were working on this Terminator two. And they had a guy who left in the middle of the project, and they needed somebody to fill in who is experienced and knowledgeable. And I was thrilled to come back and I I had a great time working on that game.
That was gonna be way too much fun to work on.
It was it was a great experience in every way. Jack Hager again, phenomenal artists George Pietro was a you know, the young kid coming up when narc was being done. He helped out on archinaut He was taking the lead designer role on Terminator two. I was a programmer we had enough third programmer named Bill dabble. Steen, who was also a junior guy was his first game. And we had a we just had a great
time. How did you guys handle on video digitizing back then? I
mean, now it’s like, you go down Walmart and buy a digitizer. But back then, video capture was like very experimental. How did you guys work with that? Well, one of the things that I had sort of pioneered at Williams during my earlier stint there was video digitizing. And I remember he said something about that. I was wondering how that worked data system. We were using a target board which was which was a board by a company called true vision. The original actually the original digitizer we had was something For the Amiga.
Oh hell no. Did you have you? You guys had a digit you didn’t you with a pinwheel? The camera point? Oh, no, I haven’t I still have one of those kicking around
and saying was that it did the job were like very difficult to work with because the the wheel, the target board was nicer, you can take a camera and digitize very nicely. But we did not have the speed on the computers to grab full frames and save them to disk we just didn’t have it just wasn’t possible. So what we could do is freeze frame of video, or have you know, have somebody in a pose and digitize that. And they actually did that on narc and high impact football. So they were using my video digitizing system, all that period of time that I after I had left on their games while I came back for Terminator two, you know, they were still using that. And I was like, oh my god, are you still using that horrible? One of the things that I did was I sat down, I rewrote new software for the target.
Okay, so what I did was I rewrote new software for the target board. And I don’t think it might have been the same two might have been a newer target board new version. And it was a much more streamlined interface. It was much nicer you could you could, we still didn’t have the speed we needed. But you know, you could get much better quality and you didn’t have to freeze frame videotapes. You could let a tape run, and you could grab as fast as we could we grab friends. And they ended up using that for Mortal Kombat. And that’s I mean, I thought I thought this this capture looks similar. The when, when those guys when Ed Boon and John Tobias, you know, we’re talking about more of the kind of game they wanted to do. I was jazz, because to me, that was the kind of game that needed to be done to show off this video digitizing. Absolutely, I was so proud of those guys, because they really did use that to the absolute best effect. And it was awesome looking game. groundbreaking for its time. Absolutely. We
consider that one of the all time game shifts. Yeah. And yeah, that’s awesome. And
those guys, and they those two guys had the sensibility all of the gameplay design decisions with them. And my contribution was the video digitization. So that’s really
cool. I mean, had my hand in it. And I’m proud of that. That’s cool. Did you get I mean, did you get credited or anything on I actually got I got some bonus money for that game really? Well, you should have got some a made enough.
It’s actually kind of a funny story. When they were sort of done with the game, Ed Boon came in to me one day in my office and he said, Hey, listen, we want to get this full screen digitized picture for our attract mode, but we don’t have any memory. Could you write some sort of compression algorithm or decompression to, you know, to get us to be able to fit in in memory? And I had been playing around with some compression algorithms at the time. And I said, Sure. So I said sure. But you’re gonna have to give me royalties. Nice. Just joking around, really. And I didn’t give him that And months later, I got a royalty check. Nice. I don’t know if that really was the reason or what but that’s yeah, that’s
that’s very cool. Did you guys you guys did all your video capture from I’m assuming the tape that they sent over? I mean, you guys didn’t actually like have r&d in there doing reshoots. Right.
Well, actually, we had a we had a lot of reference footage. We had people on the set shooting reference footage for us, right. So all of the sets we got from that. We had Linda Hamilton’s stunt double available to us. Wow. And I went I did not go out there and do this. But I think Jack and George did go out there. And they actually had Robert Patrick. One day, Eddie Furlong for a day. Wow. And Arnold’s stunt double wearing an Arnold prosthetic mask,
right? You abused him,
we actually have these people available to us on a blue screen to do whatever we needed. And wow, that’s that’s how we got all of that. Wow, that’s really Robert Patrick in the game. That’s way cool. At the very end, you have to play it to the end. Yeah, that’s way cool. So it was it was very cool. And of course, you know, who knew that the movie would be as big as it was was huge. Oh, yeah. still huge. It is huge. And and the game turned out great.
You know, I agree. I think it’s one of the coolest games ever. The who came up with the, the concept. And this is just wild because I don’t know if Operation Wolf uses the same technology, who came up with the concept of putting a gun on a joystick. I said using a Lego, I have absolutely no
idea. I don’t know anything about the origin of that piece of hardware,
really. But you had to read it though. I mean, the code or did somebody else had the code written before you came in? Yeah, that
was pretty much already done by the time I came on board. Yeah, that’s cool.
Cool. So do you have you have anything you’d like to plug a website? Something that you’re working on or you just worked on that you’d like to see people learn about?
You know, I don’t really have anything to plug. I’m not I just don’t I’m thankful. People are interested in this stuff that I did. 20 years ago. It’s it’s still astounding to me. I’m very glad to have been part of this industry and continue to be part of the industry. And, you know, it’s a lot of fun. What can I say? I’m having a good time. Right. Well, thanks
for you guys have anything I do. Okay.
You worked on revolution. That’s awesome. That’s correct. Right? We’re Where did the concept for that? By the way, I’m probably like one of the 10 people on this planet who play that game religious law and play the crap out of revolution. I’m the politic the only two people who bought it for the PlayStation. Um, but I was gonna ask you.
Ah, is that the Amiga version? I
think evolution X
Yeah, I think was revolutionary. I know. I had teach you for the Amiga. Did you guys use amigas in development other than just for video capture stuff?
I never did. No, but I think some of the artists did use like Deluxe Paint and things on the manga for that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean
interrupt. Oh, no, that’s fine. I
just remembered that because my brain is Cylon style.
What I was gonna say also, that’s another game I used to benchmark when I play MAME emulator. The main have I played what have you played revolution next to me?
I haven’t I didn’t know was on made
it. It’s in Maine, but I don’t think it works. 100% If you go to the third level. Third, like was it the jungle? I can’t remember what it is. If you go the route of the bus, I can never get past the bus. The bus
is my I was one that coded the helicopter SWAT van level in Terminator two. And I always loved that. I found that to be incredibly fun. And we want to do something similar revolutionary. So we came up with this bus. And it is hard. It’s really really, you
know, with everything the hit is what happens to me. I go okay, I hit everything. Well. But if you don’t go the bus route, if you go the other way, the other path, it crashes. You guys, is there some kind of some kind of encryption?
I couldn’t I couldn’t even tell you. I don’t remember. I really just don’t know.
What do you think? What do you think of emulation in general? You you’re your supporter.
I’m a total supportive emulation. I think it’s wonderful. I think again, if you know, these things without emulation, I mean, these things really have run their course money wise. I don’t think anybody really has any right to be upset about these games still being played for enjoyment by people. I I’m very jazzed personally about it. I love the fact that these games are available to people, just from a historical perspective. And, you know, I, I honestly wish somebody would, would get us versus them. So you can play the you could see the actual LaserDisc footage and the video overlay. I’m waiting for somebody to emulate.
Well, one guy has done Mach three. Oh, really? Yeah, it’s it’s based on maybe 63 or one month of the names in the 60s. He got he figured out how to compress the impact. You got the impact of the videos in Mach three is in May. It’s not in the official name isn’t like in the special laser this name? Wow. The Daphne team is roaming around here. What’s the deal with it? I think it’s something to do with the core. Hmm, why some games aren’t emulated. Yeah, because
it requires a PC emulation.
Well, what court Do you really want core us versus them ran on?
No idea. The concept of doing the computer overlay actually requires I think it actually like an 8088 or something emulator that was Dragon’s Lair there to run on a PC but the problem is why they don’t have us versus them and things like that. And there’s because they require some sort of an overlay that they haven’t emulated that part. Yeah,
well, no, if you go to mean you can play the video graphics. Oh, here’s the video grab the video graphics overlay was a pretty much standard Galib hardware. Gotcha. But it did interface with the laserdisc in some way. It’s sort of new on frame it was on and kept in sync. Right. And that’s the part that has to be emulated.
Interesting. I bet they just don’t have the video. I bet that’s the problem. They just don’t have they don’t have access to the video, the laserdisc maybe I don’t know what to ask.
There are a lot of you know, a lot of technical obstacles.
But hey, that’s cheap over there. And Dragon’s Lair. Zone we’re playing right here right now, which is snagging
most of the most of the team is developing the laserdisc emulators here. So I mean, they’ve been they’ve made mentioned all sorts of stuff working.
That’s awesome. Someday. I’m sure they’ll have it. Oh, yeah, sure.
Gentlemen, are we done with him? No. I’m trying to get I’m trying to get you cut loose. Stop fighting.
He’s telling me what unimportant people like to do here. Because
Kubrick in the past guy, blast up my head. Let’s finish up by
Oh, well. I just was kind of curious what was the concept behind revolution next, what made you guys decide to do that and how did you get involved in it?
The we basically kept the same team from terminate too, and we moved over to a new game. And again, the leads of the of the project were George Pietro and Jack Hager. And what I was working on was a new display system a new, sort of a pseudo 3d Because Terminator two, Terminator two was multi planar, right. And that was developed by the guy that left who I came and replaced, but that was already in place. And it worked great for Terminator two, but I was kind of looking to do something that was maybe a little more pseudo 3d, we used a pseudo 3d system in mock us versus them to get, you know, the different points of the different perspectives and points of view. So I tried to do something similar. And the results were very good. So we actually I created a sort of a universe building tool. So you can actually create these these worlds, but it was only pseudo 3d. It was it was everything was billboards. And you could only move forward, you couldn’t like rotate to the side. So you could lateral side to side and you can move forward and back. And that was to me was a step forward in gaming, because we really didn’t have true 3d systems yet in the arcades. Right. So I developed this display system. And then George and Jack had this idea for, you know, revolutionary music is the weapon. That was the Aerosmith and, you know, Williams had, you know, people that contacted Aerosmith, you know, people and you know, our people talk to their people, and the next I’m just saying
what, why why Aerosmith Why not like somebody like a poison, or somebody
represented, what we what we were trying to represent, you know, revolution, using music as a way to break free of, you know, establishment, and was there always
CDs that you were throwing and everything? I mean, did you tailor the game around the concept that you’re using a musical group? Or it was it actually based on?
I mean, we actually throwing CDs the whole time? Yeah, that was the concept that was originally okay. So you didn’t like tailored around what you signed? No, no, it was like, we wanted to get the Aerosmith and we actually had him for two days in the studio. 13 hour days. Damn. Time Williams had we had our own blue screen studio where we, you know, use my little software system to digitize stuff.
That’s so cool. And everything that looks real and video games, you guys like pioneered that stuff? That’s
so awesome. They would do whatever we said, you know, George was directing. Steven Tyler, he’s like, yeah, do like do do a kick, like, you know, you do. And he’s like, Yeah, you know, you had a mic stand with all the scars. They were just they were that they couldn’t have been nicer guys. I mean, they were, they were awesome. pictures of him and stuff. Yeah, we got pictures of them. And they were crawling out of us. They were calling up people’s wives and stuff. Call my wife and tell you. I mean, who would have thought I would never on my own. Think of asking a celebrity do that. But it’s a funny thing. That’s funny.
Do you consider yourself a celebrity? No. You are. You’re
okay. I consider myself a regular guy. You know, the other thing we haven’t really talked about, and that’s fine. And I’ve also been an actor, as long as I’ve been a video game designer. Oh, I didn’t know that and living in it. I you know, I haven’t accomplished much that people would know. Um, so you know, a lot of people think well, you know, you’re not famous, you’re not really an actor, although that’s not true. But living in Los Angeles. You know, I’ve met many celebrities. And you know, those are celebrities. That’s myself a celebrity. I’m just like, your regular guy that you happen to do something that people still like and um, you know,
what if What have you done as an actor amiibo films, stage
mostly stage in Chicago.
I like to remind everybody that classic gaming expo will be closed in 15 minutes. At five.
I’m getting I’m getting vibrated. Okay, I don’t need to take this moment.
What movies did he do? Oh, yeah.
Right, right. mostly stayed in Chicago. That’s where I started out game Chicago. And then when I moved to Los Angeles, I tried to get TV and film. But it’s not. I don’t get much. I’ve been on general hospital twice.
Let’s see how he watches. My wife. My wife watches.
Joe house was probably six years ago. And I was the assistant to John Jack’s Okay, in one episode. Oh. His father is funny. I was on this past summer last summer as a security guard in a cemetery.
Okay, and
the acting and the voice parts on the on the security, cleaning? Did you have to say the
heroes what’s called an under five. I was I had less than five lines or fewer. As a security guard in a cemetery Ay, ay, ay, held a gun on on the good guy who was trying to break into a mausoleum to save somebody from exploding, and he knocked me out I was my partner at General Hospital. And I was on the practice. I delivered the verdict. And I was on ER, as a radiologist. I had one line. Cool. So that’s my that’s my television actor. We’re playing
the LA Do you live in the Midwest?
Sure area.
Oh, I used to live off of Venice and Fairfax.
Yeah, sure. Okay. Not too far.
Yeah. Are you over by my farmers market?
That where you are not too far from the farms? Okay. You don’t have to include that right? Yeah. That out.
You don’t want stockers or anything? No, I’d rather not.
Got you guys. Cute suits.
You guys cute. Oh, hell no. Well, thanks Warren for stopping by with us. We’re gonna let you get out of here. We really appreciate your time. And thanks for hanging out. Very, very, thank you for Cubert thrilled to be here. And meant a lot to us. I mean, me I’m sure you’ve heard it before. But there are games that stick in people’s heads forever. And Cuba is one of them.
I honestly couldn’t be more thrilled and it’s it’s very rewarding. You know, I That’s why you asked earlier. If I’m remembered as the Kubrick guy you know, there was there’s I have enjoyed my life and if I’m remembered by everybody else that way I couldn’t Cool
thanks again.
You are very welcome here you
are you going to team says can take off these microphones bow?
Are you gonna spill at the end? You know, is a Shane R Monroe for retro gaming
is Shane R Monroe with retro gaming radio at the Classic Gaming Expo 2003. That was Warren Davis. What? Thank you,
can you fix my games by me alone? You’re tired. I’m good.