The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
http://www.nodontdie.com/rebecca-heineman/
Holy shit.
This is an enormous interview with Rebecca touching on a lot of stuff. I always really appreciate hearing from people who have been in the industry 20+ years and have some real long term perspective, and there's a lot of great questions in here about the current state of the industry, both AAA and indie, the importance of project management, the problems of sales and exposure, reflections on the different industry crashes. I really do encourage everyone to read the (very long) entire thing, its just great
But it also contains this story about the port of DOOM to the 3DO
On the 3DO specifically
Holy shit.
This is an enormous interview with Rebecca touching on a lot of stuff. I always really appreciate hearing from people who have been in the industry 20+ years and have some real long term perspective, and there's a lot of great questions in here about the current state of the industry, both AAA and indie, the importance of project management, the problems of sales and exposure, reflections on the different industry crashes. I really do encourage everyone to read the (very long) entire thing, its just great
But it also contains this story about the port of DOOM to the 3DO
We're talking about a lot of bleak stuff, and we need to get a little bleaker still with this whole 3DO thing. I know you had said on the Internet you're happy to talk to anyone --
Oh yes. That was a hell project.
Has anyone taken you up on that yet?
Nope. You'd be the first person to interview me about that. No one has actually formally interviewed me on the wonder that is 3DO Doom.
I know there's a lot to talk about, but, like --
Oh, it's a whole conversation in and of itself.
I'm sure it is.
Let me give you the elevator pitch, and I'm really gonna edit it for time.
[Laughs.]
There was a company called Art Data Interactive. The CEO was a guy who was just a member of a church somewhere in Southern California. Somehow he was able to convince his friends at the church and other friends that 3DO is the wave of the future and that he needs their money to go ahead and form a game company. "Get in on this."
He raises $100,000. He then starts making this game. A Battle Chess ripoff.
And he feels the way he wants to do it is he wants to film all the people dressed up as chess pieces and that's what he's going to put on the game board.
The guy has no clue at all of game development. Nothing.
So he films all these scenes with money and then runs out of money and then he finds a programmer who makes a really crappy game because he just slaps everything together. And then he puts it out in the stores and thinks he's going to make all this money.
Well, the sales weren't really much and he got notified from all the vendors, all the stores saying, "Who the hell are you? Who is Art Data Interactive? I don't know. This chess game? Interplay's got Battle Chess. Why would we want your chess game?"
[Laughs.]
Well, at the time id was doing Doom and it was the big thing, and he thought, "Hey, if I license Doom and put it on the 3DO, it will put my company on the map."
So he went over to id, and at this point and time, id really wasn't sold on doing anything on consoles. At that time. And so they said, "You know what? If you want Doom? $250,000 and you'll get the rights."
Which at that time, everybody who saw this said, "Nope! Too expensive. Too expensive."
And really, id was just telling everybody to get lost. Randy, on the other hand, the CEO, said, "It's $250,000?"
And he raised it.
[Laughs.]
And he went to id and said, "Here's a check for $250,000. Give me the rights to Doom."
And id's like, "Okay? Here's the source code to Doom and thank you for the check, have a nice day."
And of course, you know, the royalties. Standard contract.
Well, Randy, because he did not know anything about game development, said, "Okay, we're gonna make the best game of Doom ever! We're gonna have new levels, new weapons, new everything."
As soon as he signed the contract -- the ink wasn't even dry yet. And he went onto a press tour telling everybody he has the rights to Doom, Art Data Interactive is gonna kick ass, they're gonna have new levels, new weapons, and everything.
He even had a friend of his draw mock-up weapons. Just draw them on Photoshop and so forth and give him these screenshots. And he was saying, "These is actual game screenshots."
Of course the press is going, "Oh my God! This looks great! This is awesome!"
Well, he then went to a developer and said, "Hey, can you just do a version for me?"
And they said, "Sure. What you want is gonna take two years and a budget of, like, $3 million."
He said, "Oh no, no, no. You're lying to me."
He went to another developer who, in turn, somehow he finagled them to start on the project but he actually was intending not to pay them.
Well, after a few weeks of working on the project, this company then said, "Hey, we need our milestone payment."
And Randy after a while hemmed and hawed and hemmed and hawed and then this company stopped working on the game.
Well, now this is around July of 1996 I believe. And because of all the press tour, the 3DO company was actually hearing all the positive press that Doom was coming out for the 3DO and people were getting excited about it.
And then they come to find that after they went over and actually inspected Art Data Interactive and realized that this guy has no clue about what he's doing, they're like, "Oh my God. We are screwed."
[Laughs.]
At this particular time, I had just shipped Wolfenstein 3D for Interplay. I took the Mac code, which I did -- because I did the Mac port of Wolf 3D, ported it over to the 3DO, enhanced everything, and the game was running 60 frames a second. It was a phenomenal version of the game.
I was already known to 3DO, so they contact me. 3DO said, "Hey, we've got this project. Doom. We really want this game out by Christmas. Is there any way you can go ahead and do it because you know id?" I said, "Sure. Put me in touch with Art Data."
Well, of course, I talk to Art Data and they say, "Sure." We negotiate a price. They said, "Sure." And then I said, "Great."
Then what Art Data told me was the game was 90 percent complete. All I needed to do was finish up some bugs and get the game ready for shipping and get it out in about a month or two. And for me it's like, "Oh yeah. I've been doing projects where I just fix bugs and get games out the door. Nothing new to me." So I say, "Sure."
So then, of course, I ask them, "Give me the source code and the assets for Doom that you've got."
Two weeks go by and I keep getting excuses after excuses.
Randy says, "Well, why can't you just start it right now?"
I said, "Because I need this."
So I then called id and they sent me all the assets and everything for the Jaguar version of Doom as well as all the PC version stuff, too. I look at the code and I say, "Yeah, the Jaguar version, I can just do a straight port."
I said, "Well, I'll start working on it because I'm running out of time."
Well, then, I had a friend of mine who was working at Art Data come and privately take me aside and say, "Uh, we don't have anything. The developer that was working on it? They only got to it, like, the code to compile and nothing -- everything Randy was saying was lies."
I'm like, "Oh."
And that point, I was gonna say, "Okay. I'm canceling this project. We're done."
But then I had my friend at 3DO begging me, "Please. We really need this game out by Christmas. People are expecting it."
So I then told 3DO, "Sure. I will do it for you as a favor to you at 3DO. To help you with your platform."
Because they've helped me and helped build my company at the time. So, I did it more as a favor to them. And at that point, I then realized that because of all these delays and everything, it is now August. They need to ship this for Christmas, which means the drop-dead date for the disc would be November.
So that gives me October -- let's see. I started around August and I released the final disc on November 1st. That was 10 weeks.
I just said, "This is just going to be a straight Jaguar port."
I spent 10 weeks producing the source code that you saw up on Github and of course, when I was submitting builds to Randy over at Art Data, the frame rate wasn't that great because I just got the game prototype.
I didn't have time to optimize it.
And he was saying, "Why isn't this game running at 60 frames a second? Where is my new weapons? Where is my new stuff?"
And I'm like, "Do you have any idea how game development is done?"
Because he truly believed all you had to do to put a weapon in a game is to draw it.
He did believe that if you drew a weapon -- you just gave me the art file -- I would put it in the game and it would magically fire bullets. It would do all the effects animations and switch and -- he thought that was just me putting the art in there, hit "compile," and I'm done.
And so he was really pissed off at me during the development of the game because he was saying, "Where's new levels? I promised people new levels."
And then of course I turned around and said, "Well, you promised me a source-code drop and you said this game was 90 percent done and here it is I have to start from scratch."
And there were several times where I wanted to quit that project.
But every time, I was talked out of it by my friend at 3DO.
And so eventually I got the game basically shippable. I don't call it "finished." I call it shippable.
At that point, I sent the discs off to 3DO. 3DO fast-tracked it and had it approved, like, within a few days.
And then Randy at Art Data did the stupidest thing -- even more stupider than everything up to this point. He pressed 250,000 copies, as I understand it, of Doom for the 3DO.
To put it in perspective, there were only 250,000 3DOs in existence. It was a blunder of the same proportions of ET, where Atari printed out as much cartridges as there were consoles. Which is -- mathematically, you're never gonna sell them all.
Randy was so hard up for money because his investors were saying, "Hey, we invested all this money. Where are your profits?"
He thought, "All I have to press is 250,000 copies of the game, ship it to the stores, and then I will get the money for 250,000 copies."
Not understanding that you have to advertise it. There has to be a market base. It really shows how little he knew of the industry.
So, of course, Doom 3DO comes out. They sell, I think, 10,000 copies, which is what they should have sold.
Then it was, of course, universally panned. The music was great, but, you know, I myself knew the game was gonna get rated poorly because of the frame-rate issues.
But it was like -- 3DO had been promising people either indirectly through Randy that Doom was coming out that they had to fulfill their promise. So, in that particular sense, 3DO as well as Logicware, did fulfill the promise that was given to the public that 3DO Doom was available in stores.
[Laughs.]
Now, we didn't fulfill the promise Randy was saying, which was new levels, new weapons, "the best Doom ever."
No.
Yeah.
And of course after that, within a few months later, Art Data Interactive went out of business.
Now trust me. That's the Reader's Digest version.
No, I believe you.
To give you an idea, the whole thing from start to finish was about 14 weeks. I got the phone call in July. Then negotiated the contract around the end of July. About two weeks later we got the contract. Then it was two weeks of them stalling of giving us what we were being told was available: a semi-finished version of Doom.
And so once it became obvious to us in the middle of August that they were not going to deliver us anything, that's when I took it upon myself to actually get the assets from id.
And that is when I began the port from the Jaguar port base.
And so I had from two weeks in August, all of September, and all of October.
Near the end of October was when I delivered the final discs of what I would consider a shippable version of Doom for the 3DO. And it went straight to 3DO. I remember we sent it to them in a FedEx overnight.
They then had their testers play it and I had to do one rev in which we made the screen smaller to get the frame-rate up. And then, at that point, they approved the golden masters, sent it off to Art Data Interactive. As far as I know, they never played the game. They just simply said, "All right! Press a whole bunch of them."
Even 3DO said, "Wait a minute. You really shouldn't be pressing this many." But he said, "No, no, no. It's going to sell gangbusters." They said, "Well, if you want to write us a check for that amount of money, we're not gonna stop you."
The rest is history. [Laughs.]
What did Randy think of the final product?
I'm certain Randy was pissed off about the final product because he was expecting it to be the best Doom ever. A game that was supposed to make him famous and his company famous and sell so many copies that it would effectively make him a millionaire.
No.
That game wasn't going to make anyone a millionaire. Not that version of the game, anyways.
And of course, within time, his company imploded around him.
What's he doing now?
I have no idea.
On the 3DO specifically
That was something I wanted to ask you about more specifically, because I know you were involved with some titles for 3DO. Why did that fail?
Well, it's more like: it couldn't.
[Laughs.]
You see, the thing that makes the videogame market work is it's kind of like what we're doing today with printer cartridges: We give you the printer and we make our profit on selling you the ink. So, the videogame companies, when they bring out a new console, they're actually losing money in a majority of cases. Like, every Xbox One that was being sold, every PS3, every Xbox 360, when it first came out they were losing money for every unit being sold.
Right.
But the idea is that for every game that is sold, they get a cut. So, it doesn't matter who makes it.
If Electronic Arts makes the game for the Xbox One, they write a small check to Microsoft. Every game they ship on the Sony platforms, there is a check written to Sony. So, every game that is sold, there is a small amount that is given to Sony. Cumulative? They're making shitloads of money.
But 3DO, on the other hand -- Trip Hawkins, for whatever reason, thought he was going to make money by using the VHS model of making money. Back then, there was a tape war for video-cassette recorders. Beta and VHS. Of the two, Beta from Sony was far better. However, VHS was made by a small consortium of companies, and what they did was simply license the patents to anybody who wanted to make a VHS tape or tape-player. And they made money from that, and then everybody who made a blank tape had to buy the rights to the patents.
So, effectively, they were making money from everybody making players and they were making money from everybody making the tapes. And all they did was create the technology.
Trip Hawkins thought, "Why don't we do that with videogames?" He created the technology to create a 3DO player. He then licensed the blueprints to Toshiba, to Panasonic, to Matsushita, other companies. The idea was they're gonna make players that play 3DO software and pay a royalty to the 3DO company. 3DO, on the other hand, was also licensing to videogame companies to make the software in which 3DO would get a cut for every copy ever sold.
So the whole concept was there would be competition from all these companies making 3DO players, and of course they'd want to have them built into TVs and built into other things because all you did was just get the base chips in. You could actually install it in a TV if you wanted to.
And then through price competition, it would all go down, but every unit sold, there would be a check written to 3DO. And with all these players out there, everybody making 3DO software out there, they would be making money.
Well, there's one huge glaring flaw in this plan: In order to get into the market at any time, you had to give away the players or at least lose money on them. Well, these companies - Matsushita, Panasonic? They would have none of that. They said, "No, no. We're going to sell these players and we need to make a profit." So the 3DO Multiplayer came out in 1995, 1996 -- I can't recall exactly the year -- for $799.
That's right. I remember that.
And that was an insane price. That's like today, coming out with a PS4 and saying, "You know, your new PS4 is $1100."
Well, the PS3 was, like, $600 when it was first announced, right?
Yeah, it was. But they dropped the price relatively quickly.
Right. I remember that, too.
But, see, the thing is Sony can do that.
Whereas Panasonic, if they had lowered it below their costs, they wouldn't make any money. In fact, during that time, when it became clear that the players were just not selling because they were just too expensive, there was a time in which 3DO was writing checks to Panasonic to drop the price because it was like a last-ditch effort to save the platform.
And of course, because nobody was buying the players -- I mean, they only sold about 300,000 at most -- with an install base of just 300,000 units, yeah, and you could only sell on average 2 percent of the units? You can't make a profit on only 15,000 unit sales. Especially with the 3DO, when you had spend a couple million dollars to develop the software.
So, it didn't take long for the 3DO to realize that their entire business model was broken and everything imploded relatively quickly.
