Of all the strange and wonderful stories I could share about my time in the game industry (including six-figure sushi spreads in LA, hotel rooms ablaze in Beverly Hills, all-night parties in Vegas and SF, sweet suite tickets at NFL, MLB and MLS events in the NW as well as soup served in 1000 year old turtle shells in Tokyo) my social media guru advised me to just keep it simple and name drop a little. So, I’m taking you back to my first summer at Big Bang.
I lived and breathed that game all through a particularly hot Seattle summer. The game suffered on multiple fronts from being a melting pot of ideas from a slew of temporary designers … by the time I had arrived the art department had taken over design and a lot of stuff wasn’t working as intended while the different worlds were falling victim to “feature creep”, pushing the experience even further away from the core Lode Runner mechanic than the initial concept of sweeping splines in 3D space originally had. Mildly put, there was a lot more important stuff to shore up in the months till launch than fixing bugs in the editor which was the last thing that Robert (the only engineer on the project) had time for. This coupled with the fact that level building now was nearly back on schedule, added to my surprise one afternoon when Scott asked me if I could come in on the following Saturday to teach the editor to a new designer.
“It’s a friend of mine, his name is Alexey Pajitnov. He created Tetris, you’ve heard of him?” asked Scott. Really?! Even my folks knew what Tetris was. I arrived early that hot Saturday morning and propped the front door open with a large rock then got busy building levels. Sometime later I looked up to see a large, heavily bearded man looking at me from the darkness of the inner office. I got up and introduced myself then blurted out “I really loved Tetris!”, but was met with a dismissive sigh – only then did it occur to me that nearly everyone he met probably said the exact same thing. To my defense, I doubt many of the previous fan-boys loved Tetris exactly as I did; twice I played for 72 hours without stopping for any reason (once holding a piss for a day and a half). I remember that after 30 or so hours of continuous play the TV would jiggle and expand until the screen wrapped around my head and the Tetris pieces filled my consciousness (probably something akin to video games’ seizure warnings). I swear that I experienced virtual reality without a headset several times while playing that crazy game.
The next couple hours with Alexey weren’t exactly a joyride, but I did learn how to swear in Russian. I’d blurt out “Wait!” or “No, don’t do that!” a second too late and Alexey would crash the editor and grumble something… then we’d start over. When he could take no more he thanked me and left with the software and an instruction pamphlet I had created. I received a few exasperated phone calls in the following weeks, but eventually he returned with an interesting sample of levels that had a very unique approach.
That fall, Scott accepted the job of president at newly founded Nintendo Software Technology, which was just down the road a mile in Redmond. We were about two months from completion of 3D Lode Runner and Scott brought six of us over to finish onsite and help start up the new enterprise along with some good people coming “over” to NST from DigiPen. At that time, NST and Digipen shared most of the upper half of a Nintendo warehouse located a couple blocks from NOA headquarters (the rest of the loft was packed full of old Nintendo coin-ops wrapped in plastic – some uncirculated, which of course, eventually I got my hands on).
After working on a few games like Pokemon Puzzle League and Ridge Racer 64 I got word that I’d be on the team developing a new Wave Race game for the GameCube. But, Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to first come over and look over this new dev group in person. I must say, this celebrity encounter was a little less personal than meeting the famous Alexey. Shigeru toured the space rather quickly, stopping only briefly to examine the small group of designers. Quickly moving from one to the next, he peered intently into our eyes as a Jedi Knight might stare at a Storm Trooper… I was never sure if he was trying to pass on some vitally important piece of information or was simply scanning our brains to see if there was a decent idea floating around the room. But, that was the extent of it. I made some great friends and learned a lot while there, but left after a couple years to pursue some personal projects that just couldn’t be denied any longer. OK, enough with the past – from here forward we’re blogging to the future!