Yak

cheers, glad you like the games! I'm not round here that often but do poke my nose in time to time, seemed appropriate right now with people getting access to t2k via the atari50 collection. I've been gathering stuff for my own archive and there's a fair bit of stuff coming up from my time at Atari, reminding me of some good times and some cool people I knew and worked with there. This is my home workstation, where most of D2K was made. My thoughts looking at it now are mainly "how the hell did we get by with such tiny screens?" (Typing this on my 48 inch 32:9 ultrawide, couldn't live without it now!)

aw man I didn't know John was gone. I checked his FB and it seems he passed mid-2020, and his wife not long after; John had cancer, it seems. Warmed my heart to see that Casey grew up to be such a loving son. Wouldn't've doubted it for a minute, given his parents; John was genuinely one of the kindest people I've met, just an unequivocally gentle and good guy. He deserves a chunk of the glory for T2K coming out as well as it did, too; as a producer he had the skill to guide me well without being too heavy handed about it. RIP John.

Trawling through some old photos for the archive, came across this. That's the D2K team having a celebratory curry on release of the game to manufacturing. (Don't worry I'll only post the picture this once, not every few weeks for the foreseeable future). Look at Lance there gooning for the camera. Still can't believe he's gone, that's just not right

CRL had a short-lived label called "Actual Screenshots", with the idea being that the pictures on the back of the box were, well, actual screenshots from the game. https://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/publishers/games/4668 (unfortunately that page doesn't really show off the aforementioned actual screenshots, but it's interesting to see that even back then people were fed up enough of bullshots to make "actual screenshots" a viable marketing gimmick).

Gosh I never knew Captain Littlegirlsocks got an Oscar as well! Duw duw!

He says he spent 40 years hiding away his "physical gender issues". However, photographs he himself publishes show that there is no visible physical manifestation whatsoever of these gender issues - he just looks like a normal bloke. So if these issues exist, they exist entirely within his pants, and at that point nobody knows or cares about them, so why the need to hide? In fact the only manifestation that we DO see is the weird sock stuff, and that goes back years and years, and is constantly flaunted rather than "hidden away".

The socks thing: apparently it's a statement about gender diversity and of support for people who are different. DEFINITELY NOT A FETISH. Straight from the mouth of Anklesocks Littlegirlsocks. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/janerachelwhittaker_diversity-diversityandinclusion-inclusion-activity-6835960963636711424-nLVo

I was one of the ones making a visit to Atari UK in Slough to pick up a new ST too! In fact Atari's willingness to get machines into the hands of us games devs, compared to Commodore being decidedly aloof about getting us Amigas, is one of the things that led to my being much more predisposed to the ST rather than the Amiga in the 16 bit days. And Jason Kingsley with his face hanging out claiming to have written Star Raiders on the A8? What the actual fuck? What is it with these people and trying to steal other coders' glory? I'd've thought even back then most people would've known that SR was Doug Neubauer's creation but apparently not! I honestly can't imagine the state of mind someone must have to try to claim credit for another's work like that, especially something as utterly classic as A8 Star Raiders. It'd be like me trying to claim I wrote Robotron or something. Jesus.

So in that article he says he's 26, in 1994. And Sam came to collect him from his boring UK life at age 16, so he must have joined Atari before the ST even came out. So how could he have to get one of the first available STs in the UK when he was already living and working in California? How did he also join Rebellion to work on AvP? And why do they seem to be mixing him up with Andy Braybrook who actually did work on those Graftgold games? DOES NOT COMPUTE

I've been wracking my brains to try to recall if I ever did meet him in Sunnyvale. Certainly not while I was there doing demos on the prototype Jag, and certainly not when I was in final test for T2K. I *do* remember going out to lunch one time with a British guy who I *think* might have been involved with AvP, but honestly the most memorable thing from that encounter that I definitely recall was that it was the first time I'd ever been to a place selling "submarine sandwiches" and I think they thought me a bit weird for having mine with just turkey meat and no embellishments at all. That would have been during the time I was out there working on VLM for the Jag CD, so June 1994 IIRC. When I was in Sunnyvale I didn't really tend to have lunch anyway, as usually I'd be staying at the Sundowner motel just off Mathilda avenue, about a 20 minute walk from Atari on Borregas Avenue. I used to enjoy the walk to and from the motel and the office, getting my head ready for the day's work or relaxing afterwards and having a cig on the way back, listening to my CD walkman. I'd usually have breakfast in the motel dining area in the morning and then dinner in the evening at Cattlemans, the bar/grill attached to the Sundowner. Then as often as not a skinful at the bar and a couple of tokes in the car park if Mark the piano player happened to be holding that night. Good times. I have fond memories of those days, but if Whittaker was present at all I'm afraid he left no impression. I do remember Kal's though, it was a decent burger place further up Mathilda past the Sunnyvale mall, and yes, it is indeed still going to this day, Jane's not wrong about that. Can't remember if I ever did go there with Atari (going out for lunch with the guys wasn't much a thing for me, usually a cig outside the back door of Borregas was midday sustenance enough for me). But when in the autumn of 1994 I moved out to California to become an Atari employee, for the first couple of months before I found my own place to rent, I stayed in the apartment complex directly opposite Kal's, and used to go in there for more often than was probably healthy; it surely was a good burger place, and I am pleased to see it is still going! Sad that Cattlemans is gone though, although the building remains, as does the Sundowner. It is a Greek restaurant now, if you look on Street View. If I were richer and we weren't in the midst of a pandemic, though, I'd go and stay at the Sundowner for old times' sake, just for a few days. I'd be missing the bar and Mark and a crafty one skinner in the car park of an evening though. I bought my 3DO at Sunnyvale mall. Given the whole 3D0DEAD thing I felt a little disloyal doing so

heh, I've occasionally passed by here before but usually just to see if the AtariAge Pervert is still going or to check out any cool homebrews. I did buy a Harmony cart earlier this year which is rather cool. I'd've never have imagined the weird rabbit hole I fell down that brought me to posting in this thread, though; it's such a weird story you couldn't make it up! (Unless you were Jane Whittaker of course).

This is from the site where he'd had his hands and feet blown off by an IED and worked in counterterrorism. https://littlesocknews.forumotion.com/t337-sock-saturday-and-sunday-socks-celebrations-for-egypt You just want to tell him to put a sock in it about his fetish but that wouldn't work....

I'm pretty sure the "Chief Hopping Officer" thing is nothing whatsoever to do with Bill Gates and more likely a way for him to refer to his predilection for jamming both legs into one giant sock and hopping round Tescos (he's referred to doing exactly that in his twitter). He seems incapable of keeping his sock fetish out of every damn thing he does.

This one is one of my favourites. Highlights: "Jane has held senior management and board roles at Atari (11 yrs), MGM (5 yrs), and EA (14 yrs)." 11 YEARS at Atari? How, exactly? "At XR Games, Jane’s title will be Chief Hopping Officer. The title was coined initially by Microsoft founder Bill Gates to spotlight Whittaker’s wide-ranging expertise and ability to simultaneously hop between roles in a corporate environment" What the actual fuck. Chief Hopping Officer my hairy arse. "Jane has a long history in VR, including managing the VR team at Atari, developing titles such as the VR version of Alien VS Predator for the Atari Jaguar and is regarded as a lead visionary in 3D technology." I've been in VR dev since Oculus DK1 and haven't seen a single thing from this "lead visionary". There never was a VR version of AvP on the Jaguar. More waffle about boards of directors and investment funds. From what I can see the only reason people get added to boards of directors is so companies can say "look at these important people on our board!" Do they ever actually *do* anything? https://www.newswire.com/news/games-industry-legend-jane-whittaker-joins-xr-games-20154185

I suppose he was including Wolfenstein and omitting DOOM in his claim of being second ever FPS despite DOOM blatantly being out months before AvP. Or he's ignoring Wolfenstein and only counting DOOM. Or something like that. It makes me vexed, the constant little lies and embellishments that he uses to big up his own achievements. You just want to yell at him to shut the fuck up and tell the damn truth for once, let AvP stand on its own merits, it doesn't need to be supported by a neverending piss-stream of weak, fake accolades from the guy who did some of the 68k programming on it. Yeah I can find no 8-bit trace of him despite a good rummage, besides some magazine stuff. Makes you wonder how he walked into the job at Rebellion in the first place - was he even then claiming to have co-founded Graftgold and worked on 40 odd 8-bit titles? Wouldn't they have asked for proof?