Mediagenic    SSI    Lucasfilm Games    Sega of America    Propaganda CODE    SegaSoft    Electronic Arts/EA.com    Ubi Soft

Mediagenic (Activison and Infocom)

1987 - 1991

In the mid 1980's, I sold computer systems, books and games for companies like Software Etc. and Egghead. This is where I first met my good friend Michael Latham.

In 1996, Michael landed a job at an Activision affiliate called Rainbird Software.  He gave me the contacts I needed to apply for an entry-level customer service job at Activision.

Little did I know I was overqualified for the job due to my many years of computer sales.  I was hired by Wayne Townsend --  the best manager I have ever worked for to date -- the week that Activision officially changed its name to Mediagenic.  (Why?  They thought they needed a new corporate name because they did more than just games. Ha! Mediagenic would soon go bankrupt and return to original name of Activision, but I'm getting ahead of myself...)

Mediagenic was then based in Menlo Park, CA. There were around 130 employees, and its major brands were Activision (computer and video games), Infocom and Ten-Point-0 business software. 

The culture was really great: dress was casual, we got free sodas every day and free doughnuts every Monday, free games from the company store, and outside of some basic rivalry between the existing production groups, everyone was friendly to each other. Of course, they were losing money hand over fist, and soon many of these luxuries were going to be gone. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself...

None the less, it was one of my favorite places to work, simply because I has so much freedom to do what I thought was right, and that allowed me to do so much in my career in so little time. You'll see what I mean below.

 

Shanghai 2.0 - Mac II

Producer (while a Customer Service rep) - 1988

 

This is the one that started it all. I was working in customer service, getting phone calls from people about problems with their games. Once, I naively told the VP of Product Development, Sherry Whitely, that Shanghai (one of Activision's crown jewels) would sell better if it had no copy-protection (on top of a list of other "enhancements" for our other games.) Six months later, Sherry gave me my first producer assignment while I was still in Customer Service.  I had four months to upgrade Shanghai to support the "new" Mac II color features and to remove the copy protection.  "Okay," I said, and promptly contacted the programmer, Brodie Lockard, with a list of 10 more things I had on my mind to improve the game, like new sound effects, graphics behind the tiles, and a way to tell the player when there were no more moves possible.  Luckily, Brodie liked all these ideas, and we started work immediately. The first thing I found out about Brodie was he was quadriplegic.  My mind could not grasp how someone without the use of his arms could possibly program a game.  I soon learned he used a typing device in his mouth and poked at the keys with it.  Not only was this inspirational to me on a personal level, but on top of all that he was one heck of a programmer.  He hardly made any typing mistakes while I watched, and his the code he created was very clean! He taught me a lot about overcoming "perceived" problems!

With some guidance from Sherry, we both put in a lot of effort to get all of the features in the game within the time limit. Shanghai 2.0 shipped on time to good reviews, but was not a huge seller, due to the small size of the Mac market in general.  I was then promoted to Assistant Producer and transferred to a new department.

p.s. Brodie read this page on December 2002, and supplied the back of the box scan I was missing.

 

Stealth II, Archon, The Three Stooges,

Tombs and Treasure, Ghostbusters II  - Nintendo 8-bit

Assistant Producer - 1989

I was assigned to the Activision Video Game department.  Never mind I disliked Nintendo games... I was thrilled to finally be in Product Development.  My boss at the time was Tom Sloper, who was the Producer for the Activision Video Game brand. At this time at Activision, all of the Nintendo games were done very quickly to enter the surging Nintendo market.  The mandate was to "just get them out the door" (something we hear a little too often in game production.)  Many of the games were either bought directly from Japan and converted into English (Archon, Tombs and Treasures), or new games that simply were to be released ASAP (Three Stooges, Ghostbusters II). As is typical for a lowly Assistant Producer, any enhancements I suggested were ignored.  That ticked me off.  I had ideas about how to make these games more fun, but there was no time, these were games that HAD TO GO OUT NOW!  All I was allowed to do was run the copy machine, burn EPROMS, put the games through test and send requests to Nintendo requesting their release.  Sigh. Tombs and Treasure was an interesting graphic adventure game that was originally created in Japan. The translator was not very really fluent in both languages, so there were problems in the grammar and intent. I helped rough out the edges on the text and story as well as my other other sundry duties. Here's an interesting bit of trivia: since this game was a graphic adventure and not an action game, it was ultimately branded as an Infocom game!

Anyone in game production frequently works overnight to meet tight deadlines. On the Nintendo version of Ghostbusers II, we had to work 48 hours straight to final the game, twice!  My good friend Tom Bellamy not only worked two days and nights without sleep, but then had to take his DMV driving test immediately after!  (Yep, he passed, in my car no less.)

On Stealth II, I got a chance to design my first game, sort of. The technical limits were laid down early, but I had a blast building the creative design for a isometric jet combat game. This included the main game mechanics for flight and missions, storyboarding the in-game cinematics, researching real-world air force promotions and awards and brainstorming art for all of the weapons and enemy vehicles. Unfortunately, the game was put on hold and later redesigned and released under a different name (Ultimate Air Combat). But it was fun while it lasted!

p.s. if anyone has scans of any of these games, I'd appreciate you sending them to me!

 

Die Hard - Nintendo 8-bit

Designer - 1989

 

In my Assistant Producer Purgatory, I had a lot of pent-up energy and creativity.  When I heard Activison had acquired the Die Hard license, I decided it was up to me to submit a great game design for it. The deck was stacked against me.  A few designs already existed -- mostly ones that were clones of other popular fighting games at the time.  I could not let such a cool movie get such a simple design treatment! Over a weekend, I worked on the design I wanted to play: something more exploratory and strategic. It followed the basic plot of the movie, you were trapped alone, in bare feet, and had to figure out a way to stop the building from blowing up under the noses of 24 terrorists, a ticking clock, and a mastermind named Hans Gruber who reacted to your actions. The idea was to put the player in a REAL environment, not boring "levels" that were the same every time. The goal was to surprise the player every game, making him react as if he WAS John McLane in the movie.

To do all this, the game could not be static; it had to react to your moves, use line of sight for surprise attacks, use "realistic" damage (with you as the player only having one life!), randomize opponent and health setups each game, use digitized "photos" to illustrate key scenes, invented multiple endings, and most importantly, have Hans send out enemies dynamically to "check out" disturbances the player made, using walkie-talkies and a real elevator system! I had everything... sprinting, weapon and ammo acquisition, the detonator sub-plot, crawling through the vents (and avoiding bullets if the enemy hears you), secret rooms and stairwells, the helicopter battle on the roof, even the ability to hurt your feet on shattered glass!

I naively presented my eight page design to the new VP of Entertainment, Joe Ybarra. Of course, I had no idea that this sort of thing NEVER happens; weekend designs that appear out of thin air from Assistant Producers do NOT get even considered for production.  But, I didn't know that, so I handed it over.

Lucky for me, he loved it, and gave the OK for this to go into production immediately (had I known better, I would have been stunned!)  I spent two weeks finishing the full design document, complete with level maps, technical notes and a game play walk-though.

Of course, I had to go through a technical design phase, where a bunch of engineers told me all the things I had in the design could not be done. I argued they could be, they said no, but we agreed to send it off to the Japanese developers anyway, since they were the ones who had to program it.

Around this time I was promoted and transferred to the Infocom division, so I didn't get to produce the game, Tom did it all on his own. I was worried to death the Japanese would make changes, mis-translate, decide things were not possible or dumb, and overall mess it up bad. However, the magic luck that presided over the game continued: they implemented everything I designed, figured out how to do the complex things I asked in simple ways, and even added small touches that were very complimentary (for example, how the items "spring" out of McLane when he takes damage.) Tom handled the project easily, and came to me whenever there was a design quirk to be resolved. After about six months, the game was final, and I waited to see the finished goods in my hands.

Then I guess the magic wore off. The game was not released until at least a year AFTER it was final (Mediagenic had money issues.)  By that time, the bottom had fallen out of the NES market and Activison made some kind of money saving deal with Toys 'R Us to be the sole distributor, further reducing the chance of people finding it and playing it. Strangely, the first game I ever designed ended up my third design published.

As a side note, Activision also contracted an MS-DOS version of Die Hard from Dynamix, which stated production after my game design was locked, so it looked nothing like my game. I asked if I could read over their design, and laughed. While they were displaying their game in a (then impressive) 3D Point-of-View, their game design was dirt simple: just move though each level in a linear format, mowing down all the enemies in your path, getting weapon power-ups at predetermined points, and between "levels" play a sequence from the movie. I thought it ironic that my sophisticated game design ended up on the NES instead of MS-DOS, while their version was something you would have expected on an NES.

In between the limbo of finaling the game and getting published, the manual was written by Gary Barth, a good friend of mine who was the Lead Tester on the game. He learned to play it to perfection (hard to do with a game that changes its strategies as you play!) Since Gary knew the game inside and out, loved the movie and was an accomplished writer himself, he contracted the job from Activision and got his first credit as a manual writer! (Gary has since gone onto Sony, where he runs the Sony Underground video magazine and their Multi-Media department, as well as founded his own Special Effects DVD magazine called MovieFXmag.)

Since its publication over 10 years ago, I can see I made some major mistakes in some of my design mechanics for a NES game (Hey, I was learning here!) But I still fire it up every once in a while and still get a kick out of playing that game. It truly does things you will never see in any other game from 1989, but see in a lot of games now!

Read a somewhat sarcastic but still impressed gamer's review of Die Hard

Read my interview with DieHardFan.com (A very cool DH site!)

 

Ghostbusters II - IBM

Designer - 1989

 

I HATED Activision's first Ghostbusters game (which I won't go not here for space issues, but old-time game players know what I'm talking about.)  Using what I didn't like as a springboard (a technique that would come to aid me time and time again), I knocked out a preliminary design for Ghostbusters II that I considered a major improvement. For example: my design revolved around the player gaining money for catching ghosts, but losing money for the things you destroy with your proton-pack stream. There would also be sub-games, like slime collection and testing, based on the movie's script. Like Die Hard, I wanted to be true to the spirit and narrative of the movie, but not tell a linear story. However, I was not attached to the product officially, I was just invited to add input. The assigned Producer and Designer could not agree on what direction to go, and time ticked away. Ultimately, Michael Latham was assigned as games' Associate Producer, but told  he had only 90 days to complete the game.  (For history buffs: another game Activision did in 90 days was also a hot movie license -- Aliens.)

We knew he had  to work together to hit this tight deadline, which meant finalizing the design immediately. We stayed up all night nailing the specifics for the design concept I had done.  When you do a game design, you have to think of everything the player can do, why it will be fun, and how to ensure it will be fun again and again. You also need to consider programming logic, art, animation, sound and other assets that you assign others to create.

Most of the design was easy to piece together since they were very clear in my mind, but parts of it were quite difficult. We refused to sleep until we finished.  Around 7am the next day, the design was complete.

Unfortunately, due to the limited development time, the programming team decided to implement their own design ideas, so the game ended up with about 10 designer credits. I became a co-designer in the final credits, despite the fact this was my original design to start with!

However, it was a really fun game. Michael implemented some really funny animations, and also implemented some brand new technology into the game to support the digital speech from the movie (at that time, it was a big deal to have digital speech in a PC game.)

Read about and Rate Ghostbusters II on MobyGames

 

Circuit’s Edge - IBM

Assoc. Producer - 1989

All my extra work paid off when Activision closed down the Boston-based Infocom and moved its five remaining members (the rest quit out of disgust) to the Mediagenic building.  The Infocom General Manager, Rob Sears, promoted me to Associate Producer for the Infocom Brand. (For history buffs, I was the final Infocom employee.)

I was assigned to help get Circuit's Edge out the door, and got to make some improvements on it.  (For Sci-Fi fans, the game was loosely based on George Alec Effinger's novel When Gravity Fails.)

p.s. if anyone has scans of this game, I'd appreciate you sending them to me!

Read about and Rate Circuit's Edge on Moby Games

 

BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge - IBM

Producer & Designer - 1989-1991

 

This was the first game I both designed and produced. I loved the BattleTech boardgame (where players attack each other in giant robots called 'Mechs), but felt its tabletop  'Move-Shoot' mechanic was too stiff.  This mechanic was used in the original BattleTech game BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception, and playing that game made me even more dissatisfied with this kind of phased combat. I set out to design what I called a "real-time wargame," with all the strategy and combat tables from the board game done instantly on the computer.  In real-time, it became effortless to deal with 24 units on the map during a battle, and it simulated the pressures on the commander in charge. (For history buffs: my inspiration was a game called The Ancient Art of War.) The developer was a small company called Westwood Studios. The programmer, Barry Green, was also a big fan of the tabletop game (he had programmed and designed an earlier BattleTech game using those rules.)  I cranked out this experimental game design in 3 weeks, and he agreed to try to implement it.  Though others at Westwood and Mediagenic would doubt this concept until it was complete, Barry and I sallied forth.

I did much more than just the basic game design, I also wrote the game's story and text, did the AI script programming of 25 missions, generated maps, touched-up the cinematics and 'Mech art, created the original draft of the manual, and suggested the concept of a 'Mech Recognition poster and proposed its layout.

About 4 month into development of the game, I met with Jordan Weisman and Sam Lewis of FASA (the licensor). I learned they were in the process of "updating their fiction" and moving their "universe timeline" up 25 years.  What this meant was they were introducing new 'Mechs (called Clans), new technologies for those 'Mechs and a whole new story (old alliances would break, and new enemies would be made.) 

This was really cool stuff, and I wanted to support all of it. The next day, I decided I would break the game in half -- the first half would be in the old history (using the current story/scenarios we had developed) and the second half of the game would jump forward 25 years an include the new stuff.  Changes included a new story with the old "enemies are now friends" bit, expanding our current list of 60 'Mechs and vehicles to close to 80, and offering all the new technologies to boot.  From that simple conversation with Jordan and Sam, I created more work for all of us, but ended up with the only computer game to straddle both sides of their timeline, and it gave the game a kind of epic feel.

For history buffs: BattleTech 2 was Westwood's first real-time strategy game.  They would later develop Dune 2 (which led to Command and Conquer) and be dubbed the "creators" of the Real-Time Strategy genre.

After less then a year of development, the game was ready for testing. Gary Barth was assigned as a tester on the game. Let me say that real time strategy games were not Gary's forte, he was an ACTION man (see Die Hard above.) Gary didn't see the appeal of the concept that you did not directly control your units but gave them commands, and if they lacked commands they would charge off on their own, sometimes so intelligently that they would win their battles. Gary scratched his head and said to me "What kind of goofy game is this?  I don't have to do anything...the game can win all by itself!" As I said earlier, the concept of Real-Time Strategy was not in the public consciousness yet.

Once complete, I was told that the sales needed to break-even on this game were about 21,000 units, which was a more then either BT:CHI or MechWarrior I had sold at that time.  Since the standard Mediagenic PC game was selling around 13,000 at that time, Marketing doubted BT:CHR could ever reach that number.

When released, the game sold in at 20K units with instant re-orders. We got the cover of Computer Gaming World, and Questbusters magazine nominated BT:CHR for Game of the Year.

All told, the game sold about 60K units, both on its own and later as part of a bundle pack called Powerhits: BattleTech. Who knows how much it could have sold if Mediagenic put more marketing into it up front, and if they did not go bankrupt 3 months after it was released.

Read about and Rate BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge on Moby Games

Read about and Rate Powerhits: BattleTech on Moby Games

Visit these sites for more info: Wars In the Inner Sphere, Sarna.net

 

Aftermath

I'll never forget my last day at Mediagenic.  Mediagenic had been gone bankrupt, and had been bought by a new company. But due to sever money issues and re-orgs, there was another round of layoffs in the beginning of 1992. This layoff was the fourth I'd witnessed in three years, but it was the worst. People were being pulled out of their cubes left and right.

I figured I was safe; I had a hit game and I was working on the design for BattleTech 3, which was really starting to sell! However, Sherry came to my cube, tapped me on the shoulder, and with tears in her eyes brought me to her office to give me my severance package (which Mediagenic ultimately did not honor, BTW!)

I was told I was being let go because they were not going to make any more BattleTech games. Three years later, MechWarrrior 2 was released from Activision (that's another long story) and Westwood released their own RTS called Command and Conquer. Both were top of the charts for years.

Fate is funny sometimes. I had proved in 1991 that both the BattleTech license and the real time strategy genre were moneymakers. But if things worked out and I had stayed at Mediagenic, I would never have gotten my next job nor met the person who would change my life in infinitely better ways.

But I had no idea of that at the time, and collected unemployment for 3 months until my next job.

Go to this awesome Infocom reference site

Check the Ye Olde Infocom Shoppe if you want to buy / trade games

 

Mediagenic    SSI    Lucasfilm Games    Sega of America    Propaganda CODE    SegaSoft    Electronic Arts/EA.com    Ubi Soft