[size=24:867a4c8e8b][b:867a4c8e8b]Right, this in this form must NOT leave this site, there is stuff don does not want in the public.[/b:867a4c8e8b][/size:867a4c8e8b]

 Note *don* is not his screename. Lots of stuff is quite pointless :P



[quote:867a4c8e8b][16:44] *** *Don* has added you to their contact list.  You may choose to accept or deny this action.  You may also add this user to your contact list or ignore this user.
[16:45] *** You have been successfully added to *Don*'s contact list.
[16:45] jordangrodecki: Hello?
[16:46] *Don*: hello?
[16:46] *Don*: hey jordan
[16:46] jordangrodecki: Hey
[16:46] *Don*: ah there u r
[16:46] jordangrodecki: hehe
[16:48] *Don*: hey, im a bit busy at the moment, if you want you can just post questions here or I'll be available around 5 or 6pm EST tonight and you can IM me then
[16:48] jordangrodecki: Alrighty
[16:48] *Don*: oh i just got ur email
[16:48] jordangrodecki: I just need to convert that time to GMT to see when that is 
[16:49] *Don*: heh, yea, where are you based? west coast? another country or what?
[16:49] jordangrodecki: I'm over in the UK actully, heh
[16:50] *Don*: ah I think you're five hours ahead of me, not sure though
[16:51] jordangrodecki: Looks like it, lemme think... that means you will be on at 10/11PM my time...the second which is a little too late for me, heh
[16:52] *Don*: yea it might be easier if you catch me in the morning, IF I'm up! sometimes I'll get in to work early around 7 or 8am, but usually not till 10am and then things are very busy
[16:53] jordangrodecki: Yeah... that would probably have to be at the weekend then, seeing as I am still going into a school of sorts
[16:53] *Don*: Yea, I have lots of stories from Sega, the disturbing part is I have a lot of stories from MicroProse days (the UK office rocked by the way, the kicked out some great stuff), Midway days (kings of hell development), and a few other companies
[16:54] *Don*: yea the weekend is good
[16:54] *Don*: this would be something interesting to do while watching the olympics this weekend hahaha
[16:55] jordangrodecki: hahaha. plus I have the whole of next week off, so I can basically be on any time. totally unrelated, but maan...its strange talking face to face to someone who worked at Sega... IM is different to emails :P
[16:57] *Don*: yea IM is much cooler, the funny part is that I and these other guys don't feel like real big Sega names because we really picked up what was left on the cutting room floor and tried to slap something together, much like any fan would do if a company came up to them one day and said 'hey we'll pay you to make a new Sonic game but not let you work with any of the original Sonic developers'
[16:57] *Don*: whats a good time for you this weekend? I'll be around from noon till 8pm on saturday, i may be busy on sunday
[16:58] jordangrodecki: I should be around all the time :)
[16:58] *Don*: ok cool, yea it'll be interesting to see what these guys haven't told you yet, I'll bet Chris has forgotten some of the designs he did for the 32x and I don't think Mike was producer on it till well into the Saturn dev
[16:59] jordangrodecki: Indeed :)
[16:59] *Don*: Ok, well hit me up this weekend and if you have any questions in the meantime just email me. 
[17:00] jordangrodecki: Alright then, I guess I'll see you then
[17:01] *Don*: ok, 'Cheers' as you guys in the UK would say.... oh and I'm finally getting to see the band Queen after 25 fucking years... can you believe they haven't come to back to America since 1980!?
[17:01] *Don*: (actually i should say half the band and Paul Rodgers hahaha)
[17:01] jordangrodecki: Hahahaha, Queen are such a strange band, but cool
[17:01] *Don*: ok see ya this weekend man
[17:01] jordangrodecki: alright, seeya!
[21:36] jordangrodecki: Hey don... are you busy right now? I just have a quick question I would like to ask? =P
[21:37] *Don*: sure go ahead
[21:38] jordangrodecki: Cheers. What was X-Treme like on the 32x, as we know nothing about it on there...The only screenshots we see are of Ofer's fisheye lense....
[21:39] *** You have been disconnected. Wed Feb 08 21:39:20 2006.
[21:39] *** You are currently disconnected.  Messages will not be received.
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[21:40] *** &quot;*Don*&quot; signed on at Wed Feb 08 21:40:09 2006.
[21:40] *Don*: hold...
[21:40] jordangrodecki: Arg, sorry, internet connection dipped :/
[21:40] *Don*: ah let me repeat my response in case you didnt get it
[21:40] *Don*: jordangrodecki: Cheers. What was X-Treme like on the 32x, as we know nothing about it on there...The only screenshots we see are of Ofer's fisheye lense.... Don Goddard: yea, yikes that fisheye was freaky, in my opinion it was to cover up the fact that nothing was curved! There were steps everywhere and you couldn't run ten feet before hitting a step or wall hahaha. The 32x was a bastard add on to the genesis that tried to provide 3d support, only it couldnt texture for 'shite' as you UK guys would say.
[21:41] jordangrodecki: hehe
[21:41] *Don*: So virtua racing was phenomenal as was virtua fighter 1, but anything else had major issues with texturing. We hoped to get decent performance with large checkerboards because you could do them as polys
[21:42] *Don*: then we realized that the 32x could only draw a few hundred polys and an entire world would be difficult
[21:42] jordangrodecki: VF1 was amazing to see when it came out, and VR...that thing cost L80 for the MegaDrive (gen) over here!
[21:43] *Don*: hehe yea! I loved Virtua Racing it was just like the arcade, even had polygon sparks come off the bottom of the cars when the dipped
[21:43] jordangrodecki: Indeed
[21:44] *Don*: So I thought, hey these doom clones did a damn good job with texture mapping by raycasting and dark forces was a doom like engine that used pretty nice curved walls
[21:44] *Don*: so I tried to do a doom engine rotated 90 degrees so you could have loops
[21:44] jordangrodecki: Wow
[21:45] *Don*: so I actually got a 32x version working very fast (the sad port of doom on to the 32x was a real dog! got like 10fps and you had to use a joypad to control it...altogether horrible)
[21:46] jordangrodecki: Aha
[21:46] *Don*: unfortunately, we couldn't figure out a way to do more than a single 'rail' style game and we really wanted a roaming 3d thing
[21:46] *Don*: I also came up with a blazingly fast scaled/rotated sprite routine that let us put up thousands of sprites
[21:47] jordangrodecki: This is truely groundbreaking stuff.  Nobody else has been able to say a word about 32x
[21:48] *Don*: I had a demo of about a thousand rings and sonic running around on an invisible plane (black background) and it was 60fps and felt very nice, shinobu actually showed up after I had it going (it was a 'Daddys and Daughters day' where dads could bring in their daughters to see how they work)
[21:48] *Don*: he was floored by it, it's really cool to see a japanese biz guy smile they almost never do! He was loving it and letting his daughter play it. Needless to say it was just a demo and pretty basic.
[21:49] jordangrodecki: My god thats amazing.... there is a demo on the internet showing what the 32x could really do if pushed to the limit, its quite amazing
[21:49] *Don*: Yea, I guess, but it never got past the demo stage, so you know it just ended up another bastard child that didnt survive
[21:50] jordangrodecki: I see...
[21:51] *Don*: oh yea? I'd love to see that, it was a cool little machine but you had to texture every surface yourself and there was NO zbuffer! So there were concepts like doom used where it tracked every horizontal lines z values...damn i cant think of the name of the technique but it was a bitch to draw everything because you had to sort it, split polys, clip polys and do all that crap which ate up most of the processing time
[21:51] jordangrodecki: Its a video, that was at E3 or something, its just a camera panning though a load of 3d environment
[21:52] *Don*: After that demo we realized we could abuse sprites really well and I'll be Chris Senn has forgotten some of the creatures he designed JUST made out of rings. I think we were going to do a level or set of 'zones' that would have all of these various 'ring creatures'
[21:52] *Don*: hmm i'll have to search for that, i think i still have my 32x dev tools and software somewhere
[21:53] jordangrodecki: I'll have a look, I had it somewhere
[21:54] *Don*: these ring creatures were a unique gameplay concept in that they would look like say a 'stack of rings' or one giant ring and would move like a slinky or roll or whatever, then the cool part was when you hit them, THEY would explode into a bunch of little rings you could collect (so kind of the opposite mechanic of Sonic who explodes all his rings when he gets hit)
[21:54] jordangrodecki: Ooh wow
[21:55] *Don*: we hoped to get all that working and then we started getting into another 'phase' where Sonic was being proposed for the Saturn and we still had no solution for the world Sonic would run around on
[21:55] *Don*: hold...
[21:56] *Don*: we also finally hired the other programmer I needed (Ofer Alon), I was working solo for about 3 months
[21:56] jordangrodecki: Wow, heh
[21:57] *Don*: oh and get this Mark Kupper was a tools guy trying to build a 3D modeller animation program for the artists and he had a friend he worked with from where he graduated in Florida
[21:58] *Don*: He told me this guy was awesome, crazy hard worker and built a Doom level loader and 3D engine that was THREE times faster than doom, used the same wad files and textures, and would let you pitch up and down which doom couldn't do.
[21:58] *Don*: This was Gary McTaggart, are you familiar with his work?
[21:59] jordangrodecki: Glide wrapper?
[21:59] *Don*: We interviewed with him at Sega for doing Sonic and he was incredible the demo was amazing, pure assembly, blazing fast.
[21:59] jordangrodecki: I think
[22:00] jordangrodecki: I see
[22:00] *Don*: Yea he ended up going to 3dfx and was the major creator of Glide, which was the ONLY known 3D engine at the time, DirectX was version 1 or 2, OpenGL didnt even have a 1.0 yet I think, and Glide was a breeze to program and was super fast
[22:00] *Don*: Later he went to radical with Charlie Brown, did some crazy 3d NURB curved surfaces stuff for an FPS game and got shafted by management
[22:01] jordangrodecki: Cool
[22:01] jordangrodecki: Well, not so
[22:01] *Don*: Then he finally ended up at Valve and did some of the more impressive stuff you see in HL2 today.
[22:01] *Don*: not so?
[22:02] jordangrodecki: Getting dumped etc
[22:02] jordangrodecki: *shafted
[22:02] *Don*: Well, we all were clamoring to hire Gary as he would've been ideal, but we kept getting the brush off from management. He was very cheap to hire as well since he had no job before this. 
[22:02] jordangrodecki: Unrelated, but I found that tech demo: http://www.scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fdemos%2Fgroups%2Fhirmu%2Fzyrinx_sega32x_demotape_1995-hirmu.wmv&amp;fileinfo I think you just click one of the FTP urls for a download
[22:03] *Don*: yea i guess they quit, but i think the deal they made with radical was some sort of breach of contract. Either way I think both the company and Gary/Charlie felt screwed
[22:03] *Don*: oh cool thanks, ill def check it out
[22:04] *Don*: So then I had a good contact I worked with at Midway, John Morgan of Super Off-Road fame. I tried to get him to be the lead programmer.
[22:04] jordangrodecki: Cool
[22:04] *Don*: They interviewed him, he LOVED the project and Sonic and they ended up never calling him back. He thought he may have been asking for too much.
[22:04] jordangrodecki: I see
[22:05] *Don*: So we're waiting and waiting...in fact Mark and I and some others would have gentlemen bets about how long it would take ANYTHING to appear after you requested it
[22:05] *Don*: you could request a pencil and it wouldnt show up on your desk till a month or two later
[22:05] jordangrodecki: haha
[22:06] *Don*: So we're clamoring for getting some programming help, I'm the only programmer on this thing... oh yea ill have to tell you about chris ebert at some point (1st lead on this thing)...
[22:06] jordangrodecki: Hehe, alright
[22:07] *Don*: Well then Dean Lester says he has this guy from someplace who did a mac game and had an impressive demo and he's from the middle east originally and a Mensa member (we ALWAYS laugh when people claim they're a MENSA genius because it's a joke to get in)
[22:07] jordangrodecki: Dean Lester...is he the one that got fired?
[22:08] jordangrodecki: Oh no
[22:08] jordangrodecki: that was Dean R
[22:08] *Don*: Oh he either fired or quit, but lets just say he managed to piss off almost anyone he had contact with, but it was usually his fault
[22:08] jordangrodecki: haha
[22:08] *Don*: yea not Dean Ruggles, that was Mikes pet peeve he hated him and a couple other guys at the company
[22:09] *Don*: Dean Lester was a little english guy who I thought was fine, just some guy who had to come down hard on people
[22:09] jordangrodecki: According to mike Ruggles just left every day at 4, no matter what was happening
[22:10] *Don*: Later we would find out Roger Hector was such a nice guy (and though there are many jokes about him, I thought he was a real positive influence, just no strong backbone) that he would always find someone to play 'bad cop' so he could always be 'good cop'
[22:10] jordangrodecki: Roger is indeed very nice, he answered alot of questions from our community through me :)
[22:11] *Don*: Yea Ruggles was what you guys would call an uptight prick, very trim, to the point, anal retentive and all that. Not a horrible conversationist, but did give off a 'I'm superior' atitude if he didn't have time for you.
[22:11] jordangrodecki: Ah
[22:12] *Don*: Yea, Roger has some FANTASTIC stories about the Atari days! Ask him about Steve Jobs and you'll be SHOCKED to learn he was the stankiest hippy who was very rude and egocentric at Atari
[22:12] jordangrodecki: Hehe cool. The main thing we learnt from Roger was the Micheal Jackson scandle on Sonic 3
[22:13] *Don*: So anyways! Dean Lester has us interview this guy and I think they flew him in from very far away, like somewhere in the Middle East, can't recall, and he was okay, kind of a square guy and an odd sense of humor. But also kind of a Dean Ruggles attitude, like 'I know what's great and I don't need to explain all of my details to you guys'
[22:14] jordangrodecki: Yea
[22:14] *Don*: yea? haha i remember something but not all the details
[22:14] jordangrodecki: Sorry, I just feel I should say something :P
[22:15] *Don*: Go ahead :).... I'll just ramble on hahaha....So we say 'yea he's not bad, he could do okay and probably get us something decent'
[22:15] jordangrodecki: Whoops, I meant I said yea, and I thought you took it wrongly. Nevermind, continue, I'm stupid :P
[22:15] *Don*: oh ok hahaha
[22:16] *Don*: So all of a sudden the guys is hired and on our doorsteps in like 3 weeks and we're like 'what the fuck happened to Gary, what about John Morgan?'
[22:17] *Don*: They didn't care they said Ofer was very expensive but as far as we could all tell he was literally hired because he came through Dean Lester
[22:17] *Don*: Well Ofer was a VERY rough case, at first he would listen and nod his head to what you were saying then he would just go off and do his own thing
[22:18] *Don*: It was truly laughable, we would literally tell him anything and he would go 'yea ok' and then do the complete opposite
[22:18] *Don*: Luckily (or not) he got along with Chris because Chris had tons of ideas and no way to express them in an interactive way. Chris was REALLY learning the ropes of design.
[22:18] jordangrodecki: Ofer was an awesome programmer, Zbrush is a great program...but he ignores the community now....since some people spammed his forums for the fisheye PC beta, which he is &quot;known&quot; to have, probably one of the only ones that exsists
[22:19] *Don*: Yea I can't deny he has made some really good stuff there, but he really is his own entity that you do not want to be around. Chris got screwed by him more than anyone.
[22:20] jordangrodecki: Really? I thought they were still quite good friends
[22:20] *Don*: In all honesty he was the most difficult person I have ever worked with 'hands down!' I've even had people backstabbing me and sabotaging a project who were better and more reasonable that he. It's sad but jaw droppingly true. At least he did find his own niche
[22:21] *Don*: I think their good acquaintances but not friends
[22:21] jordangrodecki: ah
[22:22] jordangrodecki: Unrelated again, but I wish the one level demo of xtreme that some former sega employie sold, came into communtiy hands. Some collecter payed 2500$ for it...but has only shown us pics
[22:22] *Don*: We saw stuff that floored us, he stopped working one day till he got an increase in his salary to six figures, he literally held the project hostage for a week or two. Roger and the management fell for this and gave him a lot
[22:22] jordangrodecki: wow
[22:22] *Don*: Yea, only it's not the Sonic you know and love, it was really incomplete and just a demo
[22:23] *Don*: Its very cool to see the art, but the mechanics aren't there
[22:23] jordangrodecki: I guessed that... unfortunatly
[22:24] *Don*: He even ended up working at home at first one day a week, then two then after I was off he was working for weeks at a time at home! and no one knew how to check on his progress...it was amazing he had the company bent over and no one had a clue what he was doing
[22:24] jordangrodecki: hahaha
[22:24] *Don*: I think what bothered me most though had nothing to do with him and working with Chris Senn was fantastic, chaotic and crazy but truly passionate!
[22:25] *Don*: What killed it for me was the perception and expectations of Sonic
[22:25] jordangrodecki: Chris seems brilliant, he is releasing absolutly everything he has
[22:26] *Don*: Shinobu would tell us and Roger would repeat it that Sonic did not have to be at ALL like the original ones where you had rings, loops and 60fps yet ANYPLACE outside of STI we showed something too would immediately start asking 'where are the rings and what do you collect'? 'Aren't there any loops'? 'How fast can you go?&quot;
[22:27] jordangrodecki: I see
[22:27] *Don*: and we were taking 2d side scroller game into full 3d and they wanted perspective correct textures in a 3d world running at 60fps! This was pure insanity
[22:28] jordangrodecki: I am now beginning to see the politics behind this more than ever, mainly because you seem to have very little bais, and are very honest :P
[22:28] *Don*: And Sega is the only place I've been at where you had to program the most optimized version of your code before they would let you move on to a new programming concept. So yea, I made some really fast code and really optimized stuff, but cmon the 32x was ridiculous
[22:29] *Don*: yea, it's more like watching a movie nowadays, you just laugh at everything, Mark Kupper, Manny and several others are this way too
[22:29] *Don*: So we tried checking out the Saturn and this frickin thing was worse than the stories you hear about PS2 programming these days
[22:30] jordangrodecki: Oh yes, who on earth thought of putting 2 procs in sequence? Stupid idea
[22:31] *Don*: It sounded like a blast but the Saturn is in no way a 3D machine, it was literally a sprite machine where you could distort the sprite polys (no perspective textures) and it couldn't do many at that. So all of your polys are quads, no 3D tools supported that, so many people just duplicated the last vertice and used them as triangles.
[22:31] jordangrodecki: haha
[22:31] *Don*: Heh, yea the 2 procs was in the 32x as well I think, but better in the Saturn, but horrible to get two diff things working on the separate CPU's
[22:32] *Don*: most people used the entire second CPU just to play a background music track or something lame like that
[22:32] *Don*: So the Saturns learning curve was ridiculous
[22:32] jordangrodecki: wow, thats idiotic
[22:33] *Don*: yea. well we got to learning the 'background chip' and then got Chris Coffin hired, I liked him because he had hard core gaming passion and had just previously worked with John Morgan in a startup venture John was doing
[22:34] *Don*: Chris was pretty fun to work with, but he got very paranoid and started making some enemies, he quickly made enemies with Ofer and tried to deny it. Within a few months there was no one who despised Ofer more. Great team spirit eh? hahaha
[22:34] jordangrodecki: Yep
[22:35] *Don*: Oh, and here's another little gem, theres a classic game by Treasure called Gunstar Heroes and it's all about fighting bosses. (They just came out with updated remakes for the GBA I think...and I think most people said they were poor). The original game was amazing, brilliant code, fast clean impressive and all that
[22:36] jordangrodecki: Yes, it was a brill game, recently brought it on ebay infact :P
[22:36] jordangrodecki: The orignal, that is
[22:36] *Don*: Well one level in there has you beating the crap out of a giant screen sized boss with arms and legs you had to bash off. Chris really liked this and saw how they did this trick to make it look like he was running around a big giant room.
[22:36] *Don*: It was a illusion that had no real 3d to the room and the rest was rotated sprites
[22:37] jordangrodecki: So THATS where the circular bosses and the giant fang/metal sonic came from!
[22:37] *Don*: So THAT was the beginning of Chris' boss levels was to mimic that
[22:37] *Don*: Yes exactly, and it was truly Chris Coffins idea and we thought, great, perfect, do it. Pop it in and ship it!
[22:37] jordangrodecki: haha!
[22:38] *Don*: It took a LONG time to get it up and running though. Chris and many of us were really learning a lot about 3D and the Saturn was the worst platform to learn it on hahaha
[22:38] jordangrodecki: hehe
[22:39] *Don*: We left him alone and just let him do his thing which was good. I was trying to get Ofer to cooperate and do anything even in the slightest with what we requested and I'm a nice guy, but not that fucking nice hahaha. Ofer would go in his office and not come out, he literally locked his door and would ignore anyone he didnt want to talk to, it was freakin creepy and he was right next to mine.
[22:40] jordangrodecki: Wow
[22:41] *Don*: Well we took a demo over for Tom Kalinski (the really successful Sega president) and a crew of guys to see and they just kept asking for rings and loops and all this old Sonic stuff. I saw Chris Senns' eyes bead up and his jaw go slack and I thought this is just ridiculous. I was killing myself getting all sort of crazy concepts up and going and none of this could do even 10% of what he or others outside STI expected.
[22:42] *Don*: They all wanted what you saw in the Sonic games for the Dreamcast, high speed 3d roaming platformer
[22:42] jordangrodecki: With a dreadful camera? =P
[22:43] *Don*: The best platformer that was competing with us was I think called Bug and another that impressed us was Jazz Jackrabbit (Chris Belinske's first game in the industry who is now famous for ALL of the Unreal game designs)
[22:44] jordangrodecki: Bug! was widely beleived to be the engine for xtreme, I even wrote that in an article I did long ago
[22:44] *Don*: Bug was a horrible platformer that stuck you on a rail and was just very weak compared to the 2d side scrollers of the past
[22:45] *Don*: Heh, we talked about it and thought we should do what they do, but it was just so limiting. We didn't see the real success of a rail game until Crash Bandicoot and that was a groundbreaker....we also thought that was too limiting
[22:45] *Don*: so you see our conception of what we wanted was not even close to reality
[22:45] jordangrodecki: Indeed.... its kind of amazing to learn
[22:47] *Don*: I overheard a conversation with Roger and others in Ofers office one day about some new platform and Saturn killer they were working on. I was bothered that I wasn't part of that conversation and at that point really wanted off of Sonic. I pleaded with Robert Morgan to let me do something original that has no license ties and that Ofer will easily want to take the lead on Sonic and Robert very nicely did just that.
[22:47] jordangrodecki: Ooh cool, and what was that?
[22:49] *Don*: At that point it spins off into Chris Senn and Ofer working on this bizarre cube engine that had severe limitations and Chris Coffin doing his bonus game all on his own. The new platform was the NV1, nVidia's (in fact nVidia was ORIGINALLY spelled nVidea but they changed it after a year because people couldn't spell it right consistently)
[22:49] jordangrodecki: wow
[22:49] jordangrodecki: The NV1 is something we know next to nothing about
[22:49] *Don*: The NV1 was frikin brilliant but only a third as powerful as the 3DFX card. At the time we saw these 3D cards like you see Renderware and Gamebryo or Unreal Editor today...unproven middleware only for hardware.
[22:50] jordangrodecki: I see
[22:50] *Don*: Yea the NV1 could do what I call URBS with is the same thing as NURBS except they have to be uniformally distributed points along the polygon and they are 9 point polygons
[22:51] jordangrodecki: I think I understand...
[22:51] *Don*: The NV1 could do tri's, quad's and 9 point polys that were very clever and drawing near perfect curves. You could do a sphere in 6 polys!!! 
[22:51] jordangrodecki: ah
[22:51] jordangrodecki: Wow
[22:51] *Don*: take a box and pull the middles out of each of the sides and you'd have a sphere, though they would cusp at the edges so you really needed 32, but with 32 polys you could do ANY size sphere and it looked perfect
[22:52] jordangrodecki: aaahh, I understand
[22:52] *Don*: It could also do amazing color lighting, another thing the Saturn couldnt, the Saturn couldn't light for shit and most games have no light in them
[22:52] jordangrodecki: I see
[22:53] *Don*: You could like the 8 ouside points of the 9point poly and light the inside a diff color and get a perfect circle of light, no banding whatsoever
[22:53] jordangrodecki: wow
[22:53] jordangrodecki: Why was this thing never released then?
[22:53] *Don*: Pretty neat stuff...Sega didn't care!... our biggest competitors SegaSoft (very jealous of STI and it's unlimited funding) really didn't care either...everyone just wanted triangles
[22:54] *Don*: oh thats a story in itself, which could've been a MAJOR turning point in rendering and you probably would see very few apps using triangles today if it were not for a couple of fuckups at NVidia
[22:55] jordangrodecki: Oh wow, I must just say now, that you are awesome for doing all this
[22:56] *Don*: So what was happening was that we were informed that Sega was having a Saturn killer machine being built because they knew the Playstation would dominate soon (the Saturn came out and was selling bigger and better for six months and did one of the biggest most amazing selling stunts in the history of games - they came out with the Saturn FOUR MONTHS EARLY and they were on store shelves on the first day of E3 and weren't supposed to be out till that Sept)
[22:57] *Don*: heh, yea I should put up a web page sometime, these are the fun these we like to talk about to others in the industry or when we run into each other
[22:57] *Don*: And theres a sad part to not seeing a game finish so you like to relate what happened even more
[22:58] jordangrodecki: Indeed
[22:59] *Don*: So the NV1 was a prototype to show Sega they could do a great card and a truly revolutionary one for the NV2, Sega literally said many times that all they wanted was a card that could do Virtua Fighter III and that fricking game wasn't even going to be out for six months to a year! The console would have come out within months of the arcade release
[23:00] *Don*: The NVidia guys were truly brilliant, mathematical geniuses and 3DFX courted us heavily but really were just heavy triangle pushers that showed 3D could be done well in hardware
[23:00] jordangrodecki: VF3 was running on the saturn at some point though? Theres a video out there somewhere
[23:00] *Don*: Yea? I know VF2 was phenomenal that was the killer app when saturn came out and it was brilliant. Maybe VFIII came out, but more likely for DreamCst
[23:00] *Don*: Oh here's a couple of other interesting tidbits
[23:01] *Don*: Most people have no clue about this and I was informed by someone at Sega but Sega apparently owned a large stake in NVidia something like 1/3 of there company
[23:01] jordangrodecki: It came for the DC, as VF3tb, there is just a video somewhere
[23:01] *Don*: Ah that makes sense
[23:03] *Don*: The other was seeing Tomb Raider as a prototype that Core or Eidos sent to STI to get our 'opinion' on what we thought of the gameplay and if we were interested in it. Tomb Raider as a demo FLOORED us, truly amazing animation and character movement for the time, not to mention 'locational sound' where the music would play differently depending on your location
[23:03] jordangrodecki: Tomb Raider was ahead of its time
[23:04] *Don*: Most people also have no clue that Sega locked in an exclusive SIX MONTH deal with the Saturn meaning that NO other platform could have a Tomb Raider for six months. It did help sell a lot of Saturns.
[23:04] jordangrodecki: hah, thats why it took 6 months
[23:04] *Don*: Yep
[23:04] jordangrodecki: I also remember seeing some amazing Tomb Raider 2 proto footage on the saturn, I'll try and digg that up
[23:05] *Don*: So the NV2 was to be the killer chip that drove the next gen and Sega didn't give a shit about curved surface polygons. The NV1 DID go out as a PC Card with four Sega games ported to it and a whole bunch of demos. Only the demos showed the curved poly technology that it could do. I wish I still had an NV1 card as I have the code and possible a dev kit for it somewhere
[23:06] *Don*: Here's the story of why nvidia never made it though
[23:06] jordangrodecki: Okie
[23:07] *Don*: We were attempting Sonic very briefly on this NV1 (Ofer was) and I was doing some experimental game prototypes on it. This thing was a BITCH to hookup the graphics pipeline. It was like someone cutting a cable line with thousands of wires and trying to figure out which wire goes with which other one. It was supposed to be flexible but was truly baffling...much like programming the Saturn haha
[23:07] jordangrodecki: haha
[23:08] *Don*: well over the next few months (Sonic went back to the Saturn after a month or so) NVidia was trying to sew up all of these loose ends and make this beast do things that are only NOW this YEAR getting in to games. They are four months behind schedule
[23:08] jordangrodecki: wow
[23:09] *Don*: Sega say, 'look you have to take your design and put this on a chip to see if it will work, if we are going to have a new machine we need to know it will work now so we can have it for christmas'
[23:10] *Don*: well 3DFX bragged about ONE thing that stunned us when we toured their location. They said they paid a million dollars for 'chip verification software' that would nearly guarantee their chip design would work in hardware exactly as it was simulated in software. NVidia, to my knowledge, did not do this!
[23:11] *Don*: NVidia rushed and rushed, then finally printed a chip (and this by the way was directly told to me from a huge NVidia employee Michael Hara who I believe is still there in a very high position today!)
[23:11] *Don*: They turned on the chip
[23:11] *Don*: Black
[23:11] *Don*: Just Black
[23:12] *Don*: tapped it, checked controls, flipped switches...
[23:12] *Don*: nope...just a black screen
[23:12] *Don*: Sega dropped them on the spot and the whole NVidia platform
[23:12] *Don*: Actually I think it took two weeks till it went around or got to me
[23:14] *Don*: The sad part for me was I had developed a really cool UFO game prototype that Michael Hara says he still remembers to this day (I had inteviewed there about 3 years later and said that was the only demo done with their curved surfaces that was a real game)
[23:14] jordangrodecki: Ooh, cool
[23:14] jordangrodecki: Just to note: I probably have about 15 mins left online, and I don't want to cutout midstory
[23:15] *Don*: I had even floored a group of Japanese execs from SOJ (first time they came out to SOA) who were supposed to be stone faced and never crack a smile. When I presented the UFO game to them they were stoned faced until I turned on a TV with my demo and they could play it, they were smiling motherfuckers and couldn't believe they could play with it. They were like little kids.
[23:16] jordangrodecki: Awesome
[23:16] *Don*: After they dropped the NVidia I think I gave up on Sega. They had 'green-lighted' the whole UFO project, but two weeks later they werent going with NVidia and only had the Saturn
[23:17] *Don*: I thought 'oh well, there goes that game', but they said they 'loved the UFO game, do it for the Saturn'. I just shook my head. They had no idea how hard it would be to even do a crappy version of it on the Saturn.
[23:17] jordangrodecki: Hehehe
[23:17] *Don*: The UFO demo had not only curved surfaces but deformable mesh terrain, real-time scorch marks and up to 32 dynamic lights. 
[23:18] jordangrodecki: wow, it was powerfull then
[23:18] *Don*: It was a sad loss, and only Destroy all Humans would come within the same concept (though that game is a primitive silly version of it)
[23:19] jordangrodecki: The UFO parts of DaH were fun
[23:19] *Don*: yea it was, I have videotape of it, because I couldn't keep the video card, so I still have good footage of it
[23:19] jordangrodecki: The UFO game, or DaH?
[23:19] *Don*: yea i really like the physics in the game, but the gameplay was really tired and shallow
[23:20] *Don*: The UFO game, I have footage of, I need to transfer it to digital or something, ah well...some day!
[23:20] *Don*: hahaha
[23:20] jordangrodecki: That would be cool indeed
[23:20] *Don*: So there was some interesting Sonic stuff that happened while I branched off and then quit Sega around June, but I'll save that for next time. 
[23:21] jordangrodecki: Alright then, just one last thing. Its a question I hate to ask, but EVERYONE in the community forces me to say it: Do you have much left from sega?
[23:22] *Don*: I have some stuff, but its all code or demos that run on a particular card or piece of hardware that may not be available these days. I never grabbed much from Sonic X-treme because I had little involvement once we started on the Saturn
[23:23] *Don*: I probably have code or a demo or two from Sonic 32x
[23:23] *Don*: The funniest one had to be Chris Eberts, it was just a line of about ten polygons that the camera could fly over on the 32x. It took him TEN months to do that! Sad...very sad
[23:24] jordangrodecki: Hehe
[23:24] *Don*: I doubt I have any drawings, though I do have a classic Sonic marketing billboard thing. Manny is a good guy to talk to as well, he snaked a framed version of Sonic 3 that I had in my office for a long time.
[23:25] *Don*: I also had a couple of collector Sonic pins that were only given to team members and my damn wife lost them because they were pinned to her jacket
[23:25] jordangrodecki: Damn :/
[23:25] *Don*: I also have a Sega Sports jacket I won for being the best at a Virtua Fighter 2 contest (really funny story there!)
[23:26] *Don*: And Dave Sanner (did the Ooze and may have been involved with later stages of Sonic) won the Daytona contest and got a cool black jean Sega jacket
[23:26] *Don*: My wife has a Sonic doll you could buy at the time for $10
[23:26] *Don*: Little things here and there
[23:26] *Don*: I have an official SEGA mug
[23:26] jordangrodecki: cool
[23:27] *Don*: and ad official STI gold on black mug
[23:27] *Don*: Oh and an STI jacket I still wear today, because they made the sleeves extra long just for me, Robert Morgan got those for everyone at STI
[23:28] *Don*: Yea, I'll have to dig up my old Sega stuff, it would be fun to get a dev kit up and running again...ah but who has the time!
[23:28] jordangrodecki: Just one other thing: I have a very technical friend who is into rom hacking and the like (he even backported tails into Sonic 2 as an playable character) He said he would like to ask you some more technical questions about the 32x etc, he can ask them though me or seperatly. Would that be alright with you?
[23:29] jordangrodecki: maybe it was sonic 1 now I htink about it
[23:29] jordangrodecki: Yeah, he ported Tails from Sonic 2 to sonic 1
[23:30] *Don*: Yea thats, I don't know how much I'll remember but I loved the fuck out of that SH2 chip Hitachi developed, I was the technical guru for that chip and presented at one of the Sega DevCons...I have some original coder docs for the Genesis, the Saturn and the Japan 3D library for the Saturn. Those are fun to look at
[23:30] *Don*: Thats amazing though (the tails thing). I was thoroughly amazed when Sonic and Knuckles came out and you could plug Sonic 2 or 3 into it and play through the game as Knuckles
[23:31] *Don*: Unbelievable engineering!
[23:31] jordangrodecki: Indeed. I think he also worked out the method by how that was done
[23:31] *Don*: I also have a video of Rock the Rock from MTv when we did a huge Sega Sonic and Knuckles contest on Alcatraz island...boy thats a story hahaha ... and yes Daisy Fuentes was really hot ;) hahaha
[23:32] jordangrodecki: Basically a small ROM chip called skupmem or something that recognizes if a correct checksum cart is in, and then patches it with that rom
[23:32] jordangrodecki: And I have that video too, it was released to the community a couple months back
[23:32] *Don*: Yea I think I had some disassembler for the 32X so if you were hardcore you could actually disasseble the code to some degree
[23:32] jordangrodecki: Well...he has done that
[23:33] jordangrodecki: He is seriously crazy
[23:33] jordangrodecki: He created a Knuckles Chaotix art compresser that BEATS segas own
[23:33] *Don*: Oh, then you won't see me in the video I don't believe, but the do a couple of closeups on Mark Kupper when they had us cheer like maniacs and boy does he look like a dork hahaha we teased the hell out of him on that! haha
[23:34] *Don*: Yea? cool, tell the bastard to get a job in games already we need real programmers like him, not these cheap college grads that don't know dick about games or even what assembler is! haha
[23:35] jordangrodecki: I will do. Thing is, he is 15 (a year older than me, I had to admit it sometime, I hope it doesn't put you off), and lives in poland, where there isn't much of a games industyr
[23:37] *Don*: Yea a lot of infamous games programmers started at that age or earlier! Some around 12. It doesn't put me off at all in fact it gives me hope that there are just as dedicated programmers today as there were in the early days. Believe it or not he could get a job with those skills. He could probably BS that he's 18 or just join in an appretice fashion. 
[23:37] jordangrodecki: haha, sorry to cut you off but I reaaally must go now, I have school in what, 7 and a half hours :P
[23:37] *Don*: He could try some of the contract opportunities on gamasutra or form his own group and just make games
[23:37] *Don*: yep ok, good luck with that! School....yuck...hahaha
[23:37] jordangrodecki: Haha, seeya
[23:38] *Don*: k later[/quote:867a4c8e8b]