Archive for Sony

20 Years of Playstation

Sep16

In honor of the original PlayStation’s 20th Anniversary USA Today has posted a piece which features interviews with major participants, including yours truly. I talk about our early experiences with the machine and the thoughts that led to the first Crash Bandicoot. For example:

In August or September 1994, we got really early developer kits for both the (Sega) Saturn and the Playstation. Most people were thinking the Saturn would be big because the Genesis had been. The Sony was so much better… It was just a nice clean design and Sony was way more organized. After about a month with both machines we just took the gamble… and didn’t make Crash Bandicoot for (the Saturn). The PlayStation was a straight-up game machine. The fact it was as 3-D for real and that it was on a CD was huge. The CD made all the difference for developers and for players.

Check out the full article here.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Playstation, PSX, Sony, USA Today

UK Playstation Mag Interview

Jul08

The below is an interview I did earlier this year:

Andrew, give us a bit of background about yourself before the days of Naughty Dog. (growing up, interests, coding background)

I grew up in the simultaneously cosmopolitan and suburban area of Northern Virginia (just outside of Washington D.C.). I was the right age to catch the first big wave of gaming in the late 70s, early 80s. I played all the arcade classics as they came out and eagerly pestered my dad for an Atari 2600. This was a time when there was tremendous experimentation and creativity going on. New video game genres were invented all the time.

In 1980 my science teacher brought into class a Heathkit H8 her husband built. We were given a single mimeographed sheet of paper with the BASIC commands. I read this and then wrote out longhand a draft of a text-based RPG where you wandered around and fought orcs and trolls for gold and tretchure (I could program, but I couldn’t spell). During lunch I typed in and debugged the game, editing my paper copy as needed. It may seem overly ambitious to try and recreate D&D as one’s first program, but you have to make what you love.

This was taken just after Jason & I moved to California in 1994

At the age of twelve, I met Jason Rubin in class (we were both bored and loved games). Seeing as I was a great programmer and Jason a great artist (by middle school standards), an instant partnership was formed. We sold our first professionally in 1985 (at fifteen). This partnership continued all the way through school and beyond. Our company, first called JAM Software, was soon renamed to Naughty Dog (1987). We made and published six games before the original Crash Bandicoot.

Since Crash Bandicoot: Warped, the third title in the franchise and Naughty Dog’s final main instalment in the series, gamers have felt that Crash Bandicoot has lost its magic. As someone who was there at its creation, how do you think the series could be revitalised?

Crash needs a total reboot. There is an opportunity to reset the history and go back to his creation story and the original conflict with Cortex. In that context, one could reprise classic Crash 1 and 2 settings and villains. At a gameplay level, it would make sense to use a more modern free-roaming style, ala Banjo-Kazooie, but with state of the art graphics. There are very few (almost none) true platform games being made today and it’s a shame, as the mechanics were really fun. I would concentrate on Loony Tunes style animation and really addictive action oriented gameplay. That’s what we did with the original Crash and there is no reason it couldn’t be done today — but it would look every bit as good as early Pixar cartoons.

Given the current Crash games, people forget that he was once cool. Our Crash had a certain whimsical edge to him. Sure it was goofy, but it wasn’t dumb. Crash has a deliberate touch of post-modernity, not unlike other cult favorites like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s thematically very different, but the same kind of self-referential meta-cultural quality is there.

What do you make of Crash Bandicoot today? Are you sad that he’s gone from PlayStation Icon to yesterday’s mascot? (Maybe also talk about your opinion of non-Naughty Dog Crash endeavours, did they fail?)

I don’t pay much attention to recent Crash games. For me, He’s like the hot high school girlfriend who put on 50 pounds. I just can’t look.

Post Naughty Dog Crash games fall down not only in being too goofy, but in gameplay and balance. We tried very hard to make every level and every segment of every level evenly paced, addictive, and engaging. Every pile of boxes, every set of enemies, was carefully placed to try and build a rhythmic pulse to the gameplay. Crash was about being frantic, but at the same time relatively free of frustration (although some Crash 1 levels were too hard). There was a lot of layered depth so that you could merely finish the level, or you could try to maximize your performance in terms of collection, speed, or both.

The latest game in the Jak series was the PSP spin-off Daxter in 2006, which was developed by Ready at Dawn. Do you think the Jak series should be resuscitated, or is it best left in the past? (perhaps speak about what it had going for it, how you feel the series progressed in terms of quality, if it needs to be brought back)

There is a lot of opportunity in the Jak franchise as well, but fortunately for the little orange back-talker, Naughty Dog (aka Sony) still owns the rights. Who knows, he might surface again.

What was it about Sony and Playstation that made you feel that it was the perfect brand for Naughty Dog to partner up with? (relationship with Sony over the years, why you felt it wouldn’t harm Naughty Dog’s future)

In 1994 when we started, Sony didn’t have a mascot character. So we set about creating one on the theory that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to slide into that opening. I’m still surprised it worked.

Ultimately the relationship with Sony was a really great partnership. Sony is a quality driven company, and we were a quality driven studio. Naughty Dog products are fully commercial in the spirit of early 80s George Lucas and Steven Spielberg efforts. We believed in mass market pulp that through sheer quality rose above its commercial pulp sentiment. This jived well with Sony’s culture, which was driven to high quality products with the broadest appeal.

In 2004 both Jason Rubin and yourself left Naughty Dog. Considering the company was, and still is, producing high quality games, why did you leave? (perhaps talk about your time at ND, memories of working on certain games, where you think you brought the company, what state you feel you left it at, and where it is now)

This is complex. At the simplest level, when Jason and I sold Naughty Dog to Sony, the deal structured the working relationship for the next four years. Highly unusually, this actually played out according to plan and to the total satisfaction of both parties. We intended to make threes games, and we did: Jak 1, 2, and 3. In addition, by 2004, Jak X and Uncharted were well underway.

As the company grew, Jason and I groomed senior guys who were capable of running the teams. Namely, Evan Wells, Stephen White, and Christophe Balestra. By Jak 3, Evan was the game director anyway, so it was time for them to fly by themselves. And fly they did, as the post Andy & Jason Naughty Dog games are probably even better.

The two biggest Naughty Dog Ips since your leaving would have to be the Uncharted series and the upcoming title The Last of Us. As someone who is now on the outside looking in, how do you view both of these franchises? (Do they keep in line with what you hoped ND would achieve? Do you wish you were still working at ND in order to help develop these kinds of titles?)

Uncharted is in every way a Naughty Dog series. It follows from, and improves upon, the things we were working on with Crash and Jak, taking them to the next level. Evan was an instrumental co-creator of all the Naughty Dog games since Warped, and he was both steeped in and a major contributor to the games from 1998 on. He and the rest of the gang kept heading in the same direction, they just raised the bar on execution even further.

For a long time, Naughty Dog games have been about integrating narrative and gameplay. We wanted to draw people into the world fully and give them a rich story without detracting from a game’s most important quality: fun gameplay. Uncharted took this to the next level with storytelling that’s better than a lot of movies, while retaining intense playability.

Now I’m also really excited for The Last of Us, as apocalypses and teen girls who fight are two of my favorite things (in fiction).

With talk of the PS4 on the horizon, what do you think Naughty Dog is capable of on next-generation systems? (technically, narratively)

I think NDI will just keep taking it to the next level. Uncharted 3 and The Last of Us already look so good it’s hard to imagine where there is to go, but I expect not only will things look even more real, but the machines will have the power to include more and more enemies (or whatnot) on screen. We could see zombie games with a couple hundred zombies (not necessarily from NDI).

Finally, tell us about Flektor and your new passion for writing novels, Andrew. (also, perhaps mention how/if working in the games industry fuelled or influenced your passion for writing)

As a serial creator it was interesting how similar writing a novel was to making a game. Video games and writing are both very iterative and detail oriented. They use a lot of the same mental muscles. My latest novel, Untimed, is about a boy name Charlie, who falls through holes in time. A clockwork man is trying to kill him, but there’s an eighteenth century Scottish girl who can bring him back home – assuming they don’t destroy history by accidentally letting Ben Franklin get killed.

Untimed (http://untimed-novel.com) is very much in the same broad fun spirit that characterized Crash and other Naughty Dog games. I return to one of my favorite mechanics, time travel, which I forced into Crash 3 and Jak 2 (no one complained). Creating the world was very similar to what you do with a game. I had to balance the pros and cons of time travel for my heroes. If your characters are too powerful, there is no jeopardy. So I had to invent all the restrictions and deal with the issues of paradox. In many ways, this is like balancing a video game control set. There are differences of course: games are about fun, and novels are about character and dramatic tension, but the fundamental creative process is similar.

By: agavin
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Posted in: Games

Tagged as: Crash Bandicoot, Heathkit H8, Jak, Jak & Daxter, Jason Rubin, Naughty Dog, Playstation, Sony, Uncharted

PS2 Memory Lane

Apr25

I was recently asked a couple of questions about the early days of Playstation 2 development…

My first dev unit looked more or less like this

Can you remember your first reaction when you saw the PS2 for the first time?

My first PS2 glimpse was hardly typical. In the spring of 1999, I had to go down to LAX and claim my prototype unit. It was one of the first to leave Japan (a few weeks earlier we had sent an employee to Tokyo to get one and he’d been turned back at the airport because the customs people thought it might be a weapons computer!). It took several hours of walking paperwork around freight offices behind the airport to claim my prize. When I did, I dug through the giant crate of peanuts to uncover a handmade aluminum cube about 18 inches square, filled with wire wrapped circuit boards. It smelled like ozone. The shell was a bit bent in transit and I was terrified it wouldn’t work. But it did.

What most impressed you technically when you started to work with PS2?

At first, the thing was a beast. Well, later it was still a beast. But what was really impressive once you got into it was how much floating point vector math you could do on the vector units if you took the time to program them. This was HARD. Seriously HARD, but the things worked all from on chip memory and were ridiculously powerful for the time.

Did you notice any wider changes to gaming, culturally for example, as a result of the PS2’s impact?

The PS2 had sufficient horsepower to make games look fairly realistic. You could actually put motion captured human models in a game and have them look okay. On the PS1, this was hopeless. Take a look at how blocky Lara Croft was back in the day and you’ll see what I mean. The ability to have human characters drove the whole style of games in a much more realistic and film-like direction. Before that, games were much more cartoon in style.

The more official dev unit that came many months later

What one, stand-out factor do you think helped PS2 become so successful?

It was small. It played DVDs. The price was reasonable, and the games rocked.

What do you think was PS2’s most technically accomplished or innovative game and why?

I’d say that the Jak & Daxter games were certainly among the most technically accomplished. Our engine was really customized for the machine, and it was a machine that really rewarded custom design. The architecture wasn’t like anything else. But we were evolutionary in game design and there were certainly games that innovated more in genre. The PS2’s middle and late periods brought some really innovative and creative games like Katamari Damacy, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Okami.

What do you think will be PS2’s lasting legacy?

I think the Playstation in general, and the PS2 in particular, really brought video games out of the Mario/Zelda kiddie style and into direct parity with the other broad entertainment mediums like film. The stylistic line between an effects laden blockbuster and a big video game is very thin. There’s even been a lot of back-flow as video game sensibilities push into other mediums.

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Tagged as: Jak & Daxter, Japan, Katamari Damacy, Playstation, PlayStation 2, Shadow of the Colossus, Sony, Video game

The Last of Us – Red Band

Apr03

Naughty Dog and Sony released an awesome “red band” (uncensored) trailer for their upcoming post apocalyptic survival game, The Last of Us:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4pYIsaZqE0]

Looking cool! Damn, those people look realistic.

Find the previous batch of teasers here.

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Tagged as: Naughty Dog, red band, shooter, Sony, The Last of Us, Trailer, Video game, zombie

Jak & Daxter Q&A

Sep12

What was the original concept for the game and how/why did you come up with it? Was it a deliberate attempt to create a PS2 mascot to rival Crash?

Of course we wanted the J&D franchise to be as big (or bigger) than Crash. And while this didn’t come to be, it was certainly our goal. The formulation of new game ideas involves two aspects: genre and style.

As to gameplay genre: On the PS1, good looking free roaming 3D seemed impossible. The machine lacked any hardware sorting or clipping, and had a relatively low polygon count. Plus, the AI challenge of creating a camera that didn’t leave players puking was extremely daunting. So we locked down the viewpoint to improve graphics and focus on traditional Donkey Kong Country style gameplay.

But with Mario 64, Miyamoto showed that free roaming was possible, albeit on the N64 and with no small dose of camera frustration. By the time we began Jak & Daxter (January 1999) newer games like Banjo-Kajooie vastly improved the playability. Clearly, on the PS2, full 3D could be great.

Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?

With regard to style: With Crash we enjoyed enormous worldwide success in no small part due to our collaboration with Sony’s worldwide producers. So for J&D we set out to create a character and environment that merged elements from worldwide cultures. You can see the result in Jak, who is a hybrid of western cartoons and eastern manga.

We asked every Naughty Dog artist to spend a couple of days sketching concepts for the look of the game. We threw these on a giant table and picked elements we liked as a group.

It was an ambitious title for its time – what were your biggest challenges in realising your original vision? Was it a rocky development?

Like every first on a system Naughty Dog game, Jak had a rocky development. First of all, the PS2 was ludicrously difficult to program, particularly in those early days when no workable examples or libraries existed. On top of that, I made the audacious choice to write the entire game in a programming language of my own design called GOAL, creating a brand new compiler and debugger from scratch. In addition, to realize the ambitious graphical goals we invented a roster of brand new technologies: several different level of detail systems, perhaps 10 rendering engines, seamless loading from DVD, advanced runtime physics, and joint animation systems to rival the offline tools. It was really really crazy and basically took us about 20 months just on the engineering side before the engine was able to produce the kind of levels we wanted.

Can you tell me more about the mooted 3rd character and why it was axed?

There never were any serious plans for a third character. But we had more ambitious plans for Daxter in the beginning. He was supposed to be able to hop off your shoulder and run around and do stuff. That didn’t happen until the second game. Same with the vehicle stuff. We squeezed the racer in, but barely, and we had much more aggressive plans for it.

How close to your original concept was the finished game?

Very close. We wanted to put you into this beautiful fully rendered fantasy world and yet to allow full interactive exploration. We wanted no loading, elaborate storytelling, a camera you didn’t need to manually control, and both classic platform and vehicle gameplay.

Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short?

I’m both most proud and most torn over GOAL, my custom language and development environment. This ended up being so much harder than I thought, and is certainly the most sophisticated programming I’ve done in my career. In the end it was pretty awesome, although not without its quirks. I’m also supremely proud of our completely load-free seamless-world . We were the first to do this (I even have a patent on it!), and few have attempted since. It was a lot of work! And let’s not forget Jak’s control, which I personally programed. Jak has really good control, as good as any game ever. His animation is incredibly fluid, yet he is supremely responsive to both the player and the environment. Even basic elements of his control system were written and re-written a dozen times.

How would you like the first Jak & Daxter to be remembered? What has it brought to the medium of video games?

The single most important thing that J&D brought to the medium (and there are countless smaller things) is its consistent and complete integration of the game and story elements. This comes to full fruition in Jak 2, and continues peerlessly today in newer Naughty Dog games like Uncharted. Jak has a detailed and involved story, but it’s never a semi-interactive movie, it’s a video game! The storytelling does not come at expense of the gameplay.

Which of Naughty Dog’s big PlayStation characters – Crash, Jak & Daxter, or Nathan Drake – is closest to your heart, and why?

Crash and Neo Cortex are my favorites, and I also have a really big sweet spot for Daxter (who is such a hoot). The Uncharted characters are awesome too, but I can’t take any responsibility for them, so the connection isn’t as personal. And don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, even back to the forgotten ones like Keef the Thief, but really Crash’s wicked orange grin melts my heart, and Cortex is who I secretly wanted to be… If I were a cartoon 🙂

This interview was originally posted here.

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The Last of Us – 15 min of Gameplay

Sep08

Naughty Dog has just released a 15 minute gameplay video, so check it out while you wait for the game itself.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzLHYk11aVI]

It’s really interesting how the gameplay has evolved from Uncharted, and how faithful this new style is to survival films. Watching, it has that slow burn tension that is characteristic of Zombie movies. It’s incredibly cool how realistically responsive the AI mobs are to your presence and actions. Good stuff.

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Artificial intelligence, Gameplay, Naughty Dog, Playstation 3, Sony, The Last of Us, video

PostDesk Interview

Mar16

An in-depth interview with Andy Gavin, creator of Crash Bandicoot and founder of Naughty Dog

Andy Gavin reflects and looks back on Crash Bandicoot, and Naughty Dog – calling Crash ‘…the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument’. He also offers some interesting perspectives on the games industry, drawing from his experiences – finally going on to tell us more about what he’s doing now, as a novelist – and how creating worlds has always been one of his great passions.

We interviewed Andy Gavin, the co-founder of Naughty Dog (with Jason Rubin) and creator of Crash Bandicoot. We asked Andy how he got in to the industry, about the inspirations, motives and ideologies behind Crash Bandicoot – one of the games industries seminal characters, and on on what makes a good videogame character. He also told us about the entirely different culture and ethos he built up at Naughty Dog – which meant putting the player first. We also asked him to reflect on his successes and ‘failures’ at Naughty Dog, about what he thinks of the company now and about his future plans. Today, Andy has turned his attention to writing – and is now an established novelist – so we also asked him about what he’s reading, and what he’s working on right now.

Just some of the highlights from this in-depth interview…

“Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game.”
“We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about… …we loved the word bandicoot.”
“I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.”
“Crash is a little like the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument. Then, years later when you run into her, find she’s a hooker with a crack problem’… ‘Naughty Dog on the other hand is the kid that grew up, got straight A’s at Harvard, then founded an internet company and made a fortune. Plus they still come home for the holidays and send Mom flowers on Valentine’s day.”
“My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds.”
“I don’t think the future [of games] will be better graphics – it’s not important any more. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilise game balance will be a challenge” …”new ways of paying will have a huge effect on the structure of games”
“One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition… Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projectswith a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.”
“Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control”

What inspired you to start Naughty Dog – how did you get in to the games industry?

In the 1970s I was hugely into fantasy novels, fantasy role playing games, and early video games. When I first encountered a computer it was only natural that I tried to make games. Back then, unless you knew how to program, computers were pretty much good for a blinking cursor. Then about two years into my programming career I met Jason Rubin. My programs were better than anyone our age, and his art skills (particularly on the computer) were better than anyone else’s. It was a match made in heaven and we started working on games together. In those early days we called the company JAM Software, but we renamed it to Naughty Dog around 1985.

“Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game.”

What were the aims behind Crash Bandicoot – what was the brief? Was it to create a character to compete with Sonic and Mario, and to create a mascot character for Sony – or something more?

Yep. At that time character action was one of the most popular genres, and one of our favorites. Jason and I wanted to take Donkey Kong Country style gameplay and make it 3D. We called it the “Sonic’s Ass” game. And it was born from the question: what would a 3D platformer be like? Well, we thought, you’d spend a lot of time looking at “Sonic’s Ass.” Aside from the difficulties of identifying with a character only viewed in posterior, it seemed cool. Although we worried about the camera, dizziness, and the player’s ability to judge. When it seemed likely that Sony didn’t have a mascot character of their own we jumped on that too. Essentially we planed for Crash to become exactly what it did – but the fact that we were successful still stuns me.

We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about… …we loved the word bandicoot.”

What was the inspiration behind Crash Bandicoot – where did the concept come from?
We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about. We bought a copy of Tasmanian Mammals – a field guide and flipped through. The Wombat, Potoroo, and Bandicoot fit the bill. We loved the word bandicoot. Personality-wise we felt he should be goofy and fun loving, and never talk.

What was the symbolism and ideology behind the mannerisms, attitude and behaviour you gave Crash Bandicoot?

As the machine didn’t really have the power to pull off giving Crash a voice that wasn’t lame, we needed to use animation to draw in the player emotionally. This jived with one of our main design goals, which was to make the animation better than had ever been seen in a game before. We wanted at least Looney Tunes level quality, if not Disney level. Animation is an emotional language and our top flight cartoon character designers showed us how to convey the whole range of human motion in the exaggerated vocabulary of traditional animation.

What was the reasoning behind the colours you gave Crash Bandicoot?

Simple, Crash needed to pop against the background so you could see him easily. Since he lived in a natural world of greens and grays orange was the hottest and most complementary colour. Real animals want to blend. Cartoons want to pop.

Crash Bandicoot is of a few games which has a real cultural impact and it’s created an extremely loyal group of superfans – a fan community which is still going strong, producing fan art, writing ‘fan fictions’ – some devoting much of their life to a character you created. What are your feelings about being behind a cultural icon?

It’s amazing that this happened and I feel very gratified to be a part of it. I chalk up one of the main reasons the game was successful to the character’s iconic quality. Crash is a sort of every-creature. While he has his goofy side, his natural enthusiasm and willingness to rebound from any upset (literally) make him highly endearing.

Crash Bandicoot Fan Art is very popular – this piece is by ‘ZoDy’ on an online community for artists called DeviantArt

Could you share any interesting facts or ‘secrets’ about Crash Bandicoot that even the biggest superfans may not know?

The original Crash Bandicoot has an entire extra level on the disk that is not accessible without a cheat device. It’s called Slippery Climb and was a monstrously big and difficult “climb on the rainy castle wall” level. It was cut because it was too hard and we didn’t have time to balance it properly.

What makes a good videogame character?

Video game characters aren’t especially subtle, but they are appealing. They need to be visually distinctive, with clear expression of personality traits. Visually, Crash is orange, big head, and gloves. Then on the personality side, playful, resilient, not the brightest bulb, but willing to go the extra mile.

Would you say that seminal ‘mascot’ characters like Crash, Sonic, and Mario are playing a less important or significant role in the games industry? Why do you think it might be the case?

It does seem that as games become more realistic they have less distinctive characters. Many current console games now are essentially military. The badass space marine is iconic, but not really distinctive. What makes one different from another?

“I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.”

Some say that Crash ‘failed to innovate’ over the years ‘rendering the character useless’ – what would you say to that?

It’s not fair of me to comment on the non Naughty Dog games. I feel that our four Crash games innovated relative to the speed of release (1996, ’97, ’98, ’99). We tried to really pack tons of new stuff into every successive game while keeping the best of the old. Fans knew that with our games they would really get their money’s worth. They voted with their wallets in huge numbers, and I’m sure the games are still widely played, probably more than any other PS1 franchise.

How much would you credit the sophistication of Naughty Dog technology to your background in LISP at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory?

I was always a technically ambitious programmer, but MIT and the addition of Dave Baggett to our team really helped us up the ante. Dave and I fed off each other, each convincing the other that the next impossible thing was possible. But Mark Cerny also played no small role in this ambition. While he only coded a guest module or two in each game he’s brilliant and he really pushed Dave and I to rise to the next level.

Why did you decide to leave Naughty Dog 2004?

This is a complicated question and there are several answers. A) My contract was up and to stay (on terms I wanted) I would have had to haggle out a new one (boring). B) I was burnt out after over ten years of 90-110 hour work weeks. C) And most important, we had been training our top guys (Evan Wells, Stephen White, and Christophe Balestra) to run full game teams. They were ready.

Since handing over the reins, are you happy with how Crash Bandicoot has developed over the years?

Crash is a little like the really hot girlfriend that you dumped because of an important at the time argument. Then, years later when you run into her, find she’s a hooker with a crack problem.

What do you think of the company now? Is it how you visualised it would be?

Naughty Dog on the other hand is the kid that grew up, got straight A’s at Harvard, then founded an internet company and made a fortune. Plus they still come home for the holidays and send Mom flowers on Valentine’s day.

Would you ever consider returning to the company?

I still have tons of friends there. I just dropped by the other day and I had a rush of nostalgia for all the excitement and the sense of being part of something huge. But Evan and Christophe have things totally under control. More than that, they keep the ship running better than ever. So they don’t need another officer at the helm.

My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds.

Do you think you’ll ever return to the gaming industry as a whole – or even create another video game?

It’s hard to say. My writing fulfils a very similar creative outlet, namely building worlds. There are still games I crave making (achem… fantasy games). Really I’d love to build the most incredible MMO ever (I’m a huge WOW and Diablo fan) but then I think about the $150 million budget, the six year development plan, and the 200 person team…

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the gaming industry throughout your career?

Ha. I can’t even begin to answer that. My career started when the Atari 2600 was king and continues to modern console games, iPhone, and Facebook games. But the really big thing that is changing is the move away from the packaged goods model where a complete game is sold for $40-70. Download only games with subscription and micro transaction models will soon be the norm.

What do you make of the games currently being released now, …including Uncharted – Drake’s Deception? What do you make of console gaming as it is today …and the games you find most interesting right now?

UC3 is a blast, I love it. I still love fantasy games. My favorites this year, having finally quite WOW (again, for now), are UC3 and Dark Souls. I really want to play Skyrim too, which I’m sure I’ll love. I got it release day too, but I had one novel to finish editing and a second to publish – I didn’t dare put it in the machine.

Zoë Ainscough couldn’t recommend Uncharted 3 enough in a review which appeared recently on PostDesk Gaming

“I don’t think the future [of games] will be better graphics – it’s not important any more. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilize game balance will be a challenge” …”new ways of paying will have a huge effect on the structure of games”

What do you feel the future of gaming will be – and how is it going to develop over the next few years? Will it rely on enhancements in technology – or are you seeing other trends?

I don’t think it will be better and better graphics. That will happen to some extent, but it’s not important anymore. Part of it will be new business models of allowing certain aspects for free and charging for others. Making this all work in a way that doesn’t destabilize game balance will be a challenge. Integration of even more elaborate social structure is another trend. I think that in the next few years we will actually start to see less of the incredibly expensive monolithic console games. As disks go away new ways of paying are going to rear their heads and this will have a huge effect on the structure of games.

Is this forming the basis for the future of gaming?

Across your entire career to date, what achievements are you most proud of? What was your biggest success?

#1 is founding Naughty Dog and establishing in it a kind of corporate culture and ethos that puts the player first. Really NDI is all about providing good value to the player. Value in games is wow factor, fun, novelty, and a polished entertainment experience that minimizes frustration. I’m also proud individually of each of my “projects.” This includes all thirteen major games I wrote, Flektor, my compilers, both my novels, and even my website:http://all-things-andy-gavin.com .

One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition… Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projects with a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.

What has been the biggest ‘failure’ that you’ve had to overcome in your career?

I don’t have what I consider any serious failures. More a lot of “lessons” of various degrees of severity. One of the biggest was difficulties in integrating with radically different corporate cultures after acquisition. Hint this had nothing to do with Naughty Dog or Sony which went great. Jason and I always put customer and innovation first trying to do ambitious projects with a very high level of execution. Sort of an Apple (with Jobs) model. Not all companies run this way. There are other models like “rip off the other guy cheaper.” This is valid, but we just never thought that way.

Has being a novelist always been an ambition of yours?

I’ve been an avid reader my whole life (over 10,000 novels and who knows how many non-fiction volumes). Mostly fantasy, horror, historical or science fiction. In high school, I won several national literary awards for my short stories and I was an editor and contributor to our high school literary magazine. In college, despite being a diehard science guy, I took creative writing classes (sometimes I was the only guy) and submitted stories to Science Fiction and Fantasy magazines (not that they ever bought any!). I wrote the stories for some of our games (don’t judge my novels by that, in the old days games couldn’t afford real stories). But the insane work output needed for Playstation games didn’t leave me the time to write and so it was with considerable zeal that I turned to it seriously two and a half years ago.

“My first novel, The Darkening Dream, was just published. You can find out all about it at the-darkening-dream.com and it’s for sale now.”

Tell us about your new books – and what are you working on right now?

I have three books in various stages of production. My first novel, The Darkening Dream, was just published. You can find out all about it athttp://the-darkening-dream.com and it’s for sale now. This is a fast paced historical fantasy about a bunch of teens who try to stop some really creepy supernatural chaps from maiming, killing, and destroying the world. The teens get in over their heads. Really over their heads. All of the magic (and there’s a lot) is based on real historical occult, which makes it much creepier than the made up stuff – because truth is stranger than fiction. My second book, Untimed, is a YA time travel novel about the crazy adventures of a boy no one remembers, who falls through a hole in time and finds himself lost in the past. It’s really slick, funny, and fast paced. I just finished editing it and am now figuring out who I want to publish it. Then I’m supposed to be writing my third novel, but instead I’m answering interview questions and learning how to layout a print ready file. J

What are you reading right now?

Julian, by Gore Vidal. This is a historical bestseller from the 60s about Julian the Apostate who is a really interesting Roman Emperor from late antiquity. It’s part of a particular a branch of investigation for my new novel. All of my books involve history in some way. One of my ambitions is to show that history doesn’t have to be boring, quite the contrary. Untimed bounces through four centuries and it’s lightning paced.

“Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control”

What are your plans and ambitions for the future?

In the short run (2012) I’d like to finish two more novels (gulp) and turn The Darkening Dream and Untimed into bestsellers. The writing part of being a writer is really fun and creative – although way more work than I imagined, and I imagined a lot. Creating worlds and stories has always been one of my great passions. I’ve been doing it my entire life. With novels it’s very intimate and you have nearly infinite control. There are limitations of the medium, POV, etc., but there are few technical tradeoffs and no budgets or meetings. Only time and imagination limit what you can do. This is why, despite the profusion of all sorts of fantastic new mediums, novels are still one of the beststorytelling devices. Most games are more about gameplay and fun than story – even if Uncharted has been changing that. Long form television (like high budget cable shows) is also very good now. I love HBO and Showtime dramas. They sport some of the best writing in film or television today. Film is really too short for in depth characterization, although the best of them rise above this limitation.

You can find more on Andy Gavin’s writing at andy-gavin-author.com, on his first novel at the-darkening-dream.com, and the second novel atuntimed-novel.com. The Darkening Dream is available on Amazon Kindle for $4.99 at Amazon.com and for £3.27 at Amazon.co.uk. [Prices correct at time of going to press]

The Darkening Dream is an “ominous vision and the discovery of a gruesome corpse lead Sarah Engelmann into a terrifying encounter with the supernatural in 1913 Salem, Massachusetts. With help from Alex, an attractive Greek immigrant, Sarah sets out to track the evil to its source,never guessing that she will take on a conspiracy involving not only a 900-year vampire, but also a demon-loving Puritan warlock, disgruntled Egyptian gods, and an immortal sorcerer, all on a quest to recover the holy trumpet of the Archangel Gabriel.Relying on the wisdom of an elderly vampire hunter, Sarah’s rabbi father, and her own disturbing visions, Sarah must fight a millennia-old battle between unspeakable forces, where the ultimate prize might be herself”.

This article was originally published here on PostDesk.

By: agavin
Comments (13)

Posted in: Games, Writing

Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Crash Bandicoot, Jason Rubin, Naughty, Naughty Dog, Sony, Video game

Crash goes to Japan – part 1

Jan11

It’s probably hard for younger gamers to recognize the position in gaming that Japan occupied from the mid eighties to the late 90s. First of all, after video games rose like a phoenix from the “great crash of ’82” (in which the classic coin-op and Atari dominated home market imploded), all major video game machines were from Japan until the arrival of the Xbox. Things were dominated by Nintendo, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Nintendo, Sony… you get the picture.

And in the days before the home market eclipsed and destroyed the arcade, Japan completely crushed everyone else. Only the occasional US hit like Mortal Kombat even registered on the radar.

Miyamoto, creator of Mario, playing Crash 1. I’m standing behind him off frame

All of this, not to mention the cool samurai/anime culture and ridiculously yummy food (see my sushi index!), made us American video game creators pretty much all Miyamoto groupies.

But on the flip side, American games, if they even made it to the land of the rising sun at all, almost always flopped.

Japanese taste is different the wisdom went. Special. Foreign games even had a special name over there (which I have no idea how to spell). These “lesser” titles were stocked in a seedy back corner of your typical Japanese game store, near the oddball porn games.

So it was with great enthusiasm and limited expectations that we approached the mutual Naughty Dog, Mark Cerny, and Sony decision that we were going to take the Japanese market really seriously with Crash. Sony assigned two brilliant and dedicated producers to us: Shuhei Yoshida and his then assistant Shimizu (aka Tsurumi-0600). They sat in on every major planning meeting and we scheduled the whole fall for me to localize the game in exacting detail (while we were simultaneously beginning work on Crash 2!).

For the most part, Yoshida-san made things happen and Shimizu, who has literally played like every video game ever made and read like every manga, worked the details. I (with a bunch of help from the artists) had to put in the changes.

Yoshida-san front and center, Shimizu on the far left, Rio (joined the team during Crash 2) on the far right

Somehow Yoshida-san was able to maneuver the game into being not one of those funny foreign games, but an official bona fide release of Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. the first party Japanese studio. And it was to be sold and marketed pretty much like it had been made in Japan! Wow!

So to pull off this cultural masquerade Jason and I decided that Shu (as Yoshida-san was affectionately known) and Shimizu got pretty much whatever they wanted. They after all, knew the mysterious Japanese market. Which turned out to be pretty darn true. And, besides, both are really really smart and crazy hard workers (Shimizu is famous for sleeping under his desk) and so we all got along famously.

The gameplay itself wasn’t really too much of an issue. Shimizu did help us smooth out some sections and make them easier (often by adding extra continue points − opposite of Europe). But there were a lot of other changes.

The Crash 1 main titles, in Japanese

First of all, we had to translate the text. Some of this wasn’t so bad. But the main logo was a 3D object and Jason had to painstakingly create a version of the paper design the Japanese provided us — which required lots of checking from Shimizu as he doesn’t speak Japanese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4XzmZyiIXA

Above is the opening in Japanese.

And things got even harder (for me) with the in game text. The Playstation didn’t have a lot of video memory and we were using a medium resolution 512 pixel wide mode anyway. What little there was, we had pretty much consumed. But the Japanese language has four alphabets! One is Latin, two are similar but different looking phonetic alphabets, and the last is the giant Kanji pictographic database. Kanji would’ve been impossible, but we needed to cram the two extra phonetic sets in. Plus the characters are more intricate than the Latin alphabet and need more pixels. I can’t remember what I did to squeeze them in, but I do remember it was painful. One part I do recall was implementing the sets of letters that vary only by an extra dot or ” mark by drawing them with two sprites (hence saving video ram).

Once the font was installed we had to input the crazy looking “shift JIS” text. One of the problems in those days was that the text editors all 8-bit, unlike today were 16-bit typesets dominate. And with a European language you can usually tell if a line of text had gotten swapped or mangled, but in Japanese… and even worse, in shift JIS it just looks like a bunch of garbage characters.

So again, Shimizu had to check everything. A lot.

Our opening and closing cut scene dialog was recorded in Japanese using very high profile Japanese actors (so they told me). We replaced those audio files (using one of my automated systems of course!). There were also a good number of cases throughout the game where we had placed text in textures. The configuration screens, loading screens, load/save screens and all sorts of other ones. These all needed new versions. We collected all of these textures, shipped them out to Japan and got back Shimizu certified versions in exactly the same sizes with the Japanese text. I used and upgraded the system that I had built for the European version so that any file (texture, audio, etc) in the game could be “replaced” by a file of the same name in the same directory with a .J on the end (or a .S, .E, .F, .G, .I for various European permutations). The level packaging tool would automatically suck up the most appropriate version and shove it in the J versions of the levels. I’m not sure we left ANYTHING untranslated. Even Japanese games usually had more Engrish. Achem, English. I so remember a Castlevania with “Dlacura’s grave.”

Then the Japanese came up with this idea of having Aku Aku explain various gameplay mechanics to you when you break his boxes, much like the raspberry boxes in Super Mario World. This was a great idea, except it meant that the game was suddenly filled with about 200 extra paragraphs of text. Undecipherable text. I had to squeeze that into the levels too. More problematic was the seemingly simple fact that when a big block of text comes up on the screen the game effectively needs to pause so the player can read it. You can’t just “hit pause” but need a separate state. This simple feature caused a lot of bugs. A lot. But we stomped them out eventually.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WojXNCbHOmY&feature=related

Above you can see a walk through of the first level. A lot of the PITA localization work was in the save screens (big fun: character entry screen in three Japanese alphabets) and the various statistic screens at the end of the level. I think the Japanese allowed us to do away with the horrible password system and use memory card only.

The Japanese box and CD with its very strange Crash and Eve painting — it was nice and colorful

The Japanese also had some famous actor record a whole collection of really zany sounding grunts and noises that Crash was to make. Shimizu lovingly crafted long lists of extremely specific places in the game where exactly such and such exclamation was to be uttered. He was never one to spare either of us from a great deal of work 🙂 But his willingness to tackle any task himself, no matter how tedious, made him hard to refuse. I also had to squeeze all these extra samples into the extremely tight sound memory, mostly by downgrading the bit-rate on other sounds. This caused Mike Gollom, our awesome sound design contractor to groan and moan. “3.5k is pure butchery” he’d complain. I found this SGI tool that used a really advanced new algorithm to downgrade the sounds, they sounded twice as good at any given bit-rate than the Sony tool.

Anyway the really funny bit about these Crash sounds was the subjective feel they left us Americans with. Strange! They made Crash sound like a constipated old man. But the Japanese insisted they were perfect. I guess they were right because the game sold like crazy over there.

Another weird audio difference was that five of the songs were swapped out for new ones. Josh Mancell the composer put it this way:

An 11th hour decision made by the Sony people in Japan. They felt that the boss rounds needed to sound more ‘video game-like’. The only reference they gave was music from the Main Street Electrical Parade at Disneyland. I only had a day or so to write all those themes. My favorite comment was about the original Tawna bonus round music. It roughly translated into ‘the sound of the guitar mixed with the tree imagery is too nostalgic-sounding’. I’m still scratching my head on that one.

You can find the different tracks here.

There were also a host of minor but strange modifications we needed to make. One was that a few characters originally had four fingers, which is typical of most American cartoon characters. Apparently the Japanese have a more than usual dislike of disfigured humanoids. Fingers were added (to make them the normal five). There were a whole bunch of little visual, audio, and gameplay changes Shimizu had us make to the game. Most of these I felt were neutral, different but not really better or worse, so I just trusted him and put them in. Occasionally if they were a really pain I pushed back.

Eventually, right around Thanksgiving, just in time for Jason and I to head to Japan to promote it, the Japanese version was ready!

Coming soon, I plan on a part 2 covering Japanese marketing and promotions!

If you didn’t catch it, I have a similar detailed post in the European localization of Crash.

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Cover of the hint guide in Japan

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Atari, Crash Bandicoot, Japan, Japanese Localization, Mark Cerny, Mortal Kombat, Naughty Dog, Nintendo, pt_crash_history, Sega, Shimizu, Shuhei Yoshida, Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment, Super Mario World, Video game, Xbox

Making Crash Bandicoot – part 5

Feb06

PREVIOUS installment, or the FIRST POST.

A Bandicoot, his beach, and his crates

But even once the core gameplay worked, these cool levels were missing something. We’d spent so many polygons on our detailed backgrounds and “realistic” cartoon characters that the enemies weren’t that dense, so everything felt a bit empty.

We’d created the wumpa fruit pickup (carefully rendered in 3D into a series of textures — burning a big chunk of our vram — but allowing us to have lots of them on screen), and they were okay, but not super exciting.

Enter the crates. One Saturday, January 1996, while Jason and I were driving to work (we worked 7 days a week, from approximately 10am to 4am – no one said video game making was easy). We knew we needed something else, and we knew it had to be low polygon, and ideally, multiple types of them could be combined to interesting effect. We’d been thinking about the objects in various puzzle games.

So crates. How much lower poly could you get? Crates could hold stuff. They could explode, they could bounce or drop, they could stack, they could be used as switches to trigger other things. Perfect.

So that Saturday we scrapped whatever else we had planned to do and I coded the crates while Jason modeled a few, an explosion, and drew some quick textures.

About six hours later we had the basic palate of Crash 1 crates going. Normal, life crate, random crate, continue crate, bouncy crate, TNT crate, invisible crate, switch crate. The stacking logic that let them fall down on each other, or even bounce on each other. They were awesome. And smashing them was so much fun.

Over the next few days we threw crates into the levels with abandon, and formally dull spots with nothing to do became great fun. Plus, in typical game fashion tempting crates could be combined with in game menaces for added gameplay advantage. We even used them as the basis for our bonus levels (see above video). We also kept working on the feel and effects of crate smashing and pickup collection. I coded them again and again, going for a pinball machine like ringing up of the score. One of the best things about the crates is that you could smash a bunch, slurp up the contents, and 5-10 seconds later the wumpa and one-ups would still be ringing out.

This was all sold by the sound effects, executed by Mike Gollom for Crash 1-3. He managed to dig up the zaniest and best sounds. The wumpa slurp and the cha-ching of the one up are priceless. As one of our Crash 2 programmers used to say, “the sounds make the game look better.”

For some reason, years later, when we got around to Jak & Daxter we dropped the crate concept as “childish,” while our friends and amiable competitors at Insomniac Games borrowed them over into Ratchet & Clank. They remained a great source of cheap fun, and I scratch my head at the decision to move on.

Now, winter 95-96 the game was looking very cool, albeit very much a work-in-progress. The combination of our pre-calculation, high resolution, high poly-count, and 30 fps animation gave it a completely unique look on the machine. So much so that many viewers thought it a trick. But we had kept the whole project pretty under wraps. One of the dirty secrets of the Sony “developer contract” was that unlike its more common “publisher” cousin, it didn’t require presentation to Sony during development, as they assumed we’d eventually have to get a publisher. Around Thanksgiving 1995, I and one of our artists, Taylor Kurosaki, who had a TV editing background, took footage from the game and spent two days editing it into a 2 minute “preview tape.” We deliberately leaked this to a friend at Sony so that the brass would see it.

They liked what they saw.

Management shakeups at Sony slowed the process, but by March of 1996 Sony and Universal had struck a deal for Sony to do the publishing. While Sony never officially declared us their mascot, in all practical senses we became one. Heading into the 1996 E3 (May/June) we at Naughty Dog were working ourselves into oblivion to get the whole game presentable. Rumors going into E3 spoke of Nintendo’s new machine, the misleadingly named N64 (it’s really 32 bit) and Miyamoto’s terrifying competitive shadow, Mario 64.

Crash and his girl make a getaway

For two years we had been carefully studying every 3D character game. Hell, we’d been pouring over even the slightest rumor – hotly debated at the 3am deli takeout diners. Fortunately for us, they’d all sucked. Really sucked. Does anyone remember Floating Runner? But Mario, that wasn’t going to suck. However, before E3 1996 all we saw were a couple of screen shots – and that only a few weeks before. Crash was pretty much done. Well, at least we thought so.

Now, we had seen some juicy magazine articles on Tomb Raider, but we really didn’t worry much about that because it was such a different kind of game: a Raiders of the Lost Ark type adventure game starring a chick with guns. Cool, but different. We’d made a cartoon action CAG aimed at the huge “everybody including kids” market.

Mario was our competition.

Jason says:

The empty space had plagued us for a long time. We couldn’t have too many enemies on screen at the same time. Even though the skunks or turtles were only 50-100 polygons each, we could show two or three at most. The rest was spent on Crash and the Background. Two or three skunks was fine for a challenge, but it meant the next challenge either had to be part of the background, like a pit, or far away. If two skunk challenges came back to back there was a huge amount of boring ground to cover between them.

Enter the crates. The Crates weren’t put in to Crash until just before Alpha, or the first “fully playable” version of the game.

Andy must have programmed the “Dynamite Crate/Crate/Dynamite Crate” puzzle 1000 times to get it right. It is just hard enough to spin the middle crate out without blowing up the other two, but not hard enough not to make it worth trying for a few wumpa fruit. Getting someone to risk a Life for 1/20^th of a Life is a fine balancing act!

Eventually the Crates led to Crash’s name. In less than a month after we put them in everyone realized that they were the heart of the game. Crash’s crash through them not only filled up the empty spots, the challenges ended up filling time between Crate challenges!

This isn’t the place for an in depth retelling of the intrigue behind the Sony/Crash relationship, but two stories must be told.

The first is Sony’s first viewing of Crash in person. Kelly Flock was the first Sony employee to see Crash live [ Andy NOTE: running, not on videotape ]. He was sent, I think, to see if our videotape was faked!

Kelly is a smart guy, and a good game critic, but he had a lot more to worry about than just gameplay. For example, whether Crash was physically good for the hardware!

Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash.

The second story that can’t be glossed over was our first meeting with the Sony executives from Japan. Up until this point, we had only dealt with Sony America, who got Crash’s “vibe”. But the Japanese were not so sure.

We had been handed a document that compared Crash with Mario and Nights, or at least what was known of the games at the time. Though Crash was rated favorably in “graphics” and some other categories, two things stood out as weaknesses. The first was that Sony Japan didn’t like the character much, and the second was a column titled “heritage” that listed Mario and Sonic as “Japanese” and Crash as “other.” The two negatives were related.

Let us remember that in 1995 there was Japan, and then there was the rest of the world in video games. Japan dominated the development of the best games and all the hardware. It is fair to say that absent any other information, the Japanese game WAS probably the better one.

Mark presided over the meeting with the executives. He not only spoke Japanese, but also was very well respected for his work on Sonic 2 and for his years at Sega in Japan. I could see from the look in Mark’s eyes that our renderings of Crash, made specifically for the meeting, did not impress them.

We took a break, during which it was clear that Sony was interested in Crash for the US alone, hardly a “mascot” crowning. I stared at the images we had done. Primitive by today’s standards, but back then they were reasonably sexy renderings that had been hand retouched by Charlotte for most of the previous 48 hours. She was fried.

I walked over to her. I think she could barely hold her eyes open. I had spent the previous month spending all of my free time (4am-10am) studying Anime and Manga. I read all the books available at that time in English on the subject. All three! I also watched dozens of movies. I looked at competitive characters in the video game space. I obsessed, but I obsessed from America. I had never been to Japan.

I asked Charlotte if she could close Crash’s huge smiling mouth making him seem less aggressive. I asked her to change Crash’s eyes from green to two small black “pac-man” shapes. And I asked her to make Crash’s spike smaller. And I told her she had less than 15 minutes. With what must have been her last energy she banged it out.

I held up the resulting printout 15 minutes later.

Sony Japan bought off on Crash for the international market.

I don’t want to make the decision on their part seem arbitrary. Naughty Dog would do a huge amount of work after this on the game for Japan, and even then we would always release a Japanese specific build. Whether it was giving Aku Aku pop up text instructions, or replace a Crash smashing “death” that reminded them of the severed head and shoes left by a serial killer that was loose in Japan during Crash 2’s release, we focused on Japan and fought hard for acceptance and success.

We relied on our Japanese producers, including Shuhei Yoshida, who was assigned shortly after this meeting, to help us overcome our understandable ignorance of what would work in Japan. And Sony Japan’s marketing department basically built their own Crash from the ground up for the marketing push.

Maybe Charlotte’s changes showed Sony that there was a glimmer of hope for Crash in Japan. Maybe they just saw how desperate we were to please and couldn’t say no. Maybe Universal put something in the coffee they had during the break.

Who knows, but Crash was now a big part of the international PlayStation push. So there were more important things for us to worry about then Sony and the deal:

The fear of Miyamoto was thick at Naughty Dog during the entire Crash development period. We knew eventually he would come out with another Mario, but we were hoping, praying even, that it would be a year after we launched.

Unfortunately that was not to be. We started seeing leaks of video of the game.

It was immediately obvious that it was a different type of game: truly open. That scared us. But when we saw the graphics we couldn’t believe it. I know there will be some that take this as heresy, but when we saw the blocky, simple, open world we breathed a sign of relief. I think I called it I Robot Mario, evoking the first 3D game.

Of course we hadn’t played it, so we knew we couldn’t pass judgment until we did. That would happen at E3.

CONTINUED in PART 6 or

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The Big Fight!

By: agavin
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Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Crash Bandicoot, game, Game design, Games, Insomniac Games, Jason Rubin, Mike Gollom, Naughty Dog, Platform, pt_crash_history, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sony, Taylor Kurosaki, Video game, Video Games

Making Crash Bandicoot – part 2

Feb03

CONTINUED FROM PART 1 ABOVE.

So what was it that Sega and Nintendo had in 1994, but Sony didn’t?

An existing competing mascot character. Sega had Sonic and Nintendo had Mario (even if the N64 was just a rumor at that point). But Sony product slate was blank.

So we set about creating a mascot on the theory that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to slide into that opening. I’m still surprised it worked.

The first real Crash

Next we had to find a creature to hang our hopes on. We wanted to do what Sega had done with the hedgehog and Warner Bros had done with the Tasmanian Devil and find some kind of animal that was cute, real, and no one really knew about. We bought a copy of “Tasmanian Mammals – a field guide” and flipped through. The Wombat, Potoroo, and Bandicoot fit the bill. For the meantime we went with Willie the Wombat, as both Jason and I like alliteration. We never considered it a real name as it was too dorky. And just a month or so later someone told us about some other non-game property with the same name, so it remained a working title. By October 1994 the character was a Bandicoot as far as we were concerned. We loved the word, but we kept calling him Willie, and the game Willie the Wombat until spring of 1996. It wasn’t really worth it to sort out a final name – some marketing department would probably change it anyway.

In September and October of 1994 we were busy trying to figure out who this Willie guy was. We felt he should be goofy and fun loving, and never talk — on the theory that voices for video game characters were always lame, negative, and distracted from identification with them.

But the villain gelled faster than the hero.

Dr. Neo Cortex — pissed

I remember it clearly. The four of us were eating at this mediocre Italian near Universal and I had this idea of an evil genius villain with a big head. Obviously brainy cartoon villains have big heads. He was all about his attitude and his minions. Video games need lots of minions. Jason had become very fond of Pinky and the Brain and we imagined a more malevolent Brain with minions like the weasels in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. A villain, all full of himself, unable to conceive of ever doing anything the simple way, but constantly (in his eyes) betrayed by the incompetence of his henchmen.

I put on my silly villain voice and intoned, “If you had three neurons between you, you couldn’t make a triangle!” With this attitude, his name, Doctor Neo Cortex, popped instantly into our heads.

For “Willie” was to be – in our minds – a game that tried to combine the game play of Mario or Donkey Kong Country with the animation and cartoon sensibility of a Looney Tunes or Tex Avery cartoon.

To that effect, we took the very unusual step of hiring real “Hollywood” cartoon designers to help with the visual part of the production. This was Mark’s idea at first, although Jason and I saw the brilliance of it immediately. In those days we were enamored with the idea blending the best of Hollywood into game making – creative synergy if you will. In the long run, we would be disabused of much of the synergy notion. However, production design, sound design, voice acting, and later motion capture, were to be the areas in which Hollywood resources proved valuable to video game teams.

A Crash that wasn’t

The guys we brought on were Charles Zembillas and Joe Pearson. Charles was principally character, and Joe background. These two were instrumental in developing the look of Crash Bandicoot, particularly prior to us hiring Bob Rafei in January 1995. Bob was an extremely talented young artist who would eventually come to head the art design at Naughty Dog. But in 1994, what Charles and Joe did was provide the fleshing out, or visualization, of ideas pitched mostly by Jason, myself, or Mark. In essence, they translated into cartoon sensibility.

Charles in particular was a very fast sketch artist, with a real knack for capturing cartoon emotion. So we would just say things like, “Cortex has a huge head but a tiny body, he’s a mad scientist, and he dresses a bit like a Nazi from the Jetsons” and in 2 minutes he’d have a gray and blue pencil sketch. We might then say, “less hair, goofier, crazier” and he’d do another sketch. Repeat.

The jungle, concept

Joe did the same for the backgrounds, but as landscapes have more lines, on a slightly longer time scale. Given that “Willie” was Tasmanian we set him on a mysterious island where every possible kind of environment lurked. Evil geniuses like Dr. Cortex require island strongholds. So we had lots of environments to design. Jungles, power stations, creepy castles, evil natives, sunset temples, spooky caves, etc. At some point early on we hit on the “tiki” idea and thus: goofy Easter Island tikis everywhere.

Jason’s comments:

When we started designing Crash, or Willie as he was first known internally, we decided that there need be no connection between the real animal and the final design — hey, all mammals, uh marsupials. A Wombat looks nothing like Crash. He is closer to a Bandicoot, maybe, but that was pure luck. Instead the design of the character was determined 51% by technical and visual necessity and 49% by inspiration.

A (very) partial list of the Necessities:

Why is Crash Orange? Not because we liked it, but because it made the most sense. First I created a list of popular characters and their colors. Next I made a list of earthly background possibilities (forest, desert, beach, etc.) and then we strictly outlawed colors that didn’t look good on the screen. Red, for example, tends to bleed horribly on old televisions. At the time, everyone had old televisions, even if they were new! Crash was orange because that was available. There are no lava levels, a staple in character action games, because Crash is orange. We made one in Demo, and that ended the lava debate. It was not terribly dissimilar to trying to watch a black dog run in the yard on a moonless night.

Why is Crash’s face so large? Because the resolution of the screen was so low. Some people think we were inspired by the Tasmanian devil. Perhaps, but it was the necessity of having features large enough to be discernable that caused us to push for the neckless look. The move made it a little harder to turn his head, and created a very unique way of moving, but it let you see Crash’s facial expressions. And that was to be very important.

Why does Crash have gloves, spots on his back, and a light colored chest? Resolution, bad lighting models, and low polygon counts. Those small additions let you quickly determine what part and rotation of Crash you were looking at based on color. If you saw spots, it was his back. Yellowish orange was the front. As the hands and arms crossed the body during a run the orange tended to blend into muck. But your eyes tracked the black gloves as they crossed Crash’s body and your mind filled in the rest.

We were wrestling with these design constraints the entire process. Joe and Charles, with all their talent, were free to do anything that they could imagine on paper. But Bob and I were the artists that eventually had to ground that back in the reality of calculator strapped to a TV that was the PlayStation 1.

Charles would hand us a sketch and we would start the math: 240 pixel high screen, character 1/6 to 1/4 of the screen height, character 40 to 60 pixels high, proposed hat 1/8 of height of Character, hat 5 to 6 pixels high, hat has stripes. Striped hat won’t work because the stripes will be less than 1 pixel high.

Take the image Andy posted titled “A Crash that Wasn’t.” I can tell you immediately that the tail and any kind of flappy strap was immediately shot down because it would have flickered on and off as the PlayStation failed to have pixels to show it. And that little bit of ankle showing beneath the long pants would have been an annoying orange flicker every few frames around the bottom of his pants and shoes. Shorter pants would have to prevail. Crash did end up with a belly button, but it would be about 2x as big.

The first sketches of Crash as we know him

Charles would look at us like we were speaking Swahili. But then he’d go off and draw something totally cool and all would be well.

Cortex had few of these issues. We could make him totally improbable, un-animatable, and just keep him bigger on the screen. He didn’t show up too often anyway. He could never really walk with those short legs. He had to do a weird thrusting tra-la-la dance. But he looked cool so we just kept him stationary most of the time.

Cortex was my favorite. I think Andy preferred Crash. They fit our differing personalities! Andy has the original ink Crash sketches and I have the original Cortexes. Both are a true testament to Charles Zembillas’ skill as a character designer. [ NOTE from Andy: I love both, but I too have a secret fondness for my brainchild — he’s just funnier, and he takes himself way too seriously to ever dress in drag. ]

CONTINUED HERE WITH PART 3 HERE or

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