DanOliver

You see the world much differently than I do. To me a person who labors to create a product has a right to sell it. I would not call that person a douche. A person who spends their money for equipment, electric, food, rent, and spends 400-1000 hours of labor has a fundamental right to request some fee. One cent, 5 cents, $1, $5, $30,000 or $1,000,000. Whether or not someone wants to pay that fee is their choice. I don't think the user has any grounds to call that artist a douche just because the artist asks for some fee. If they want to jump up down and pound their fists on the ground like a soiled child just because they don't like the asking price they can do that, its a free country. And thousands of forums across the net have been created just for them to do so...and drive traffic to the web site of course. It's the new online economy, e-Whining. I love it. I also think a "give me everything for free system" isn't going to produce good products. Most people who knock out hits game after game are going to catch on pretty quick, like after their first game, that some people in the world actually value their talent enough to paid something. And that being paid something allows for better equipment and more time to work on their craft and get better. That's appealing to a lot of people. It's the system we have here at least for a little while longer and imo it works pretty well. If you can convince people to produce good games for you for free that's great. That's also our system. If you can convince people to give you a car, pay your cell phone bill, get you the expanded cable package I say good for you. Write a free book so everyone in the world can get everything they want for free. Can't wait. But if you expect people to give you free labor AND you expect to be paid for your labor...that's pretty douchey. AND if you take the product of that free labor and ruin it with a bunch of ads that make the product run like crap half the time...that's full on douche. You all are into games so yeah, champion the cause to make sure game programmers are never paid. Maybe lobby congress and get a law passed. That would be cool, all the games would be free. Betcha they'd be great games too. I have absolutely no idea how game creators deal with this type of attitude. I can't stomach it. Good day.

Good point. Another perspective from one of the dudes doing the work... For me someone saying they like something that's free has less meaning than someone saying they ate PB&J for a week so they could buy my product. Just my opinion but I think it would be it would be better if authors of new games being played on sites using JAVATARI got paid at least 1 cent per play, or 1 cent per 10 plays, or whatever. But that's not the way the net works. Everyone wants free...except for the site owners of course who fill the page with ads to put tons of cash in their pocket. You can bet they want their money. Ray Kassar at least paid programmers something for helping him make a lot of money. Many sites have so many animated ads, sound, popups that the game stalls or jerks unless the the net just happens to have the bandwidth at the time to run the whole mess. Not really how I want my game played. "Oh your game was crap, it kept stalling." I'm on the side of labor. I like what the Activision, Imagic, etc, programmers did and not stand for being door mats. I also think way better games was a direct result. I'm old school. I know these days people expect programmers to work for free and think the programmers should also do whatever anyone says. To me there's zero respect in that kind of system. But it sure is a good system for the Kassar's of the world with web sites posting ads. Free content. And they even have a entire community pushing programmers to produce free content, up load ROMs and pay for servers so the Kassars hardly have to lift a finger. Sweet, sweet system for them. For me, writing games for free so some douche can make money selling Viagra ads is something I would never find acceptable. But that might just be me.

high voltage, I had fun and learned a lot too. Thanks.

This trip down memory lane has reminded me why I never stuck with games too long. Not what happened here, but some other stuff via email. Humans forget the bad and only remember the good. Now that I've been reminded of the downsides I don't see me going back to games. It was a lot more exciting in 1982 when I didn't know crap. I thought it would be too. I thought this community was a little more cohesive. Reading more threads put that idea to bed. Probably too small a user base to find more than a couple of people who would want to play together and who could play together. It seems most people play VCS to play VCS type games. People don't want a role playing FreeCell, they want mind numbing playing. If they want to play MMOG they go to other platforms. For what it's worth here's a core dump of some other vague ideas I wanted to explore that anyone is free to use... Morse code to communicate to the user and the user to communicate to the VCS. On screen text is a problem, voice is a problem. Wondered if morse code could work? Of course there could always be an option for getting around actually learning morse code, and that could be part of the fun. And of course morse code could be very simple at the beginning. Numbers for example would take someone about 2 minutes to learn if they wanted. For some people it would be a pretty cool skill to walk away with after playing a game for a few hundred hours as long as it's fun. Clearly some people would hate just reading "morse code" so that's a problem. Goldfish are more open minded than most humans. Not sure if morse code was ever used in a VCS cart as part of game play. For that market back in 1980 I can't believe a company would allow such a game. No chance of working in the mass market. Tons of levels given 32k ROM. It isn't like a game could have 8x the amount of graphics/levels that a 4k game would have. In a 4k game like 3.5k is used by house keeping cores. So 32k - 3.5k = 28.5k completely free for graphics/audio/level data. 28.5 / 0.5 = 57 times more space for graphics/audio/level data. Of course there would be a larger demand on housekeeping, but not a lot more. Say 50 times more in a single game, used well, it wouldn't even seem like a VCS game. You could afford to blow an entire screen budget for just a few seconds of good game play or transition. Could never afford that in a 4K cart. And you could get people to help design the graphics and levels. I see the graphic designs people have done here for labels...lots of top talent. Saving state...Tell the game you want to save state and it would give you a 2 digit code to write down to enter later. Because every cart is custom made a small app could be written to generate a new cart image everytime so the code algorithm could be changed and codes would be unique for every cart. Codes couldn't be shared. The entire concept of one off carts opens the door to lots of different tricks. I'm not entirely sure how Melody works...but from what I read I wanted to try...2k RAM would make more of page zero RAM available. Placing self modifying kernel code on page zero could be interesting. But what I would have explored a lot more and I know works is generating graphics in RAM. Innerspace was limited to 8 or 10 bytes for this but it worked really well for explosions. And later I did more with this on other platforms. If I could have 100 bytes of page zero RAM I think some great and different graphics are possible, never before seen type stuff. And PLA can be used instead of LDA zeroPage,X, so 1 byte opcode instead of 2 and a register is freed up. I thought PLA was faster tha LDA by X but looked it up and they seem the same. And of course executing on the ARM would be a huge advantage. People talk about the increase graphic abilities a lot which are indeed nice, but to me the type of game logic that could be done in the ARM would be way way ahead of anything else. Would allow for "impossible things" to become possible. The VCS was a fun machine. And I do mean "was" for me.

For I think the third time...wasn't a few posts here...they only confirmed what I'd read in other threads. The killer problem was thinking a game could be designed in a forum. I knew it was a risk, but thought role playing I could kind of simulate a game, evolve a design cheaper in the forum than by writing code. Then I could basically port the game, whatever that became, to the VCS and refine it more. That was pie in the sky thinking. A thread would never be able to stay on track. I'm surprised it broke down so fast, but pretty clear this type of thing isn't remotely possible. And it meshes with what I've seen in all kinds of other forums too, on many subjects. It would have been a lot of fun to do a VCS game...but it's just as much fun to do a lot of other projects too. You can see that as me taking my ball and going home. To me it's just evaluating the viability of a project and deciding whether to do this or that project, which I do a lot. For every project I do there's a bunch I have to skip for lots of different reasons. The "ball going home" thing I get a lot, or my personal fav "you're afraid of success". They never seem to believe that I'm trying help them by not doing their project. That imo they'd be better off finding another programmer, or changing the project. Like in this case, you seem to have a bunch of programmers willing to do this or that kind of game...no reason they can't produce a game you'd like even better than I could produce. They probably understand what's wanted here better than I do. So get them to do the games you want. The opinion door swings both ways. It's not just criticism that has to be taken in context, it's also flattery, reverse psychology, and you name it. If this looked to be some big untapped market then yeah, sure, it'd be worth investing more time looking for a way to make it work. It isn't. If I dug in my heels for every project I ever wanted to do...well I wouldn't writing software today. I have to pick my battles. There was one other small problem that popped up... I was hoping a good game could increase the market for VCS games. There has to be a bunch of people getting to the age where they have more free time and played VCS when they were young. Nostalgic toys are popular and could be even better going forward. But I made a dumb mistake and thought 1980 VCS players were my age and forget to factor in I was 27 then. So really maybe another 15-20 years for that possibility. When I talk about markets I'm talking about end users, not money. If Bill Gates wanted to pay me a $100k to write a VCS game just for him I'd pass. I want products at least some group of people use and like. Makes me proud, like I'm helping out. Money is something that sometimes follows.

I don't know how many mass market produces I've shipped, maybe 15-20. Help start more than a few companies, pitched a lot of ideas. Kind of a requirement for this line of work to not get discouraged by what others say. However, when it's your market talking to you I think it's smart to listen. And like I said, it wasn't just a couple of posts here. I've been reading other threads and got a similar feeling of what kind of games people here wanted. Not really much interest in new stuff, and maybe even some resentment. The only thing that pissed me off was the concept that somehow I couldn't produce a decent sequel to my own games. The hubris blows my mind. But that's part of the market and really no interest in serving that market.

RevEng, it's a tricky thing. For any project I try to be in the ball park but still aim higher than I'm sure I can pull off. Then try and pull it off. That's what makes it fun. 1980 VCS was pretty limiting. Big then meant a new graphics trick. Today, being able to leverage the internet and Melody and how much more we know about games could be used to produce a mind blowing VCS game. I don't think it would be that much actual programming effort given graphics is still a limiting factor. But, that game would different, probably not really what a lot of current players would want. Too small an audience to produce games for sub niches. On a modern platform smalls niches are fine because you're still talking thousands of possible players. But 6-8 weeks of work and maybe 10-20 players like it and the rest hate it because it's not clone of something already cloned a dozen times and you have to listen to that crap...not fun.

Thanks Rom Hunter, but I think the game is inappropriate for this market. All projects I start have to go thru my wife who acts as a kind of manager because to me every project is exciting and I want to do. She does the math. My first pitch, just a VCS game to kick Demon Attack's butt, got shot down. My second pitch was being able to produce follow up carts faster because the power in Melody would allow that and that pitch was in the ball park. Third pitch was if I could get players to help me design a game, in an iterative process, I could make a really good game. A game good enough to cross over to the phone market, not in a huge way, but something. I call it keeping irons in fire. One might hit. Look at Boulder Dash, great game 30 years ago, great game today. So looking at the project in total it was a money maker and I could continue making more VCS and crossovers. That got green lighted. The mistake I made is players can't design games. I already knew this, but a small community with high interest in games, I thought that could be different. Most companies I've worked for the marketing department would survey a boat load of people and ask them what they wanted in a product. You get back all these stereotypical responses. Women want less violence. Men want more action and better graphics. Marketing would give us the stats and say "make what they want". Doesn't work. People weren't saying what they wanted, they were giving opinions of things they've already seen. They don't know what's possible, it's not their job. I can see now exactly how a thread on designing a game would go. MMOG!!! And 9 pages of flame war. Pointless. When I sat down to write Space Cavern in 4 weeks, blowing EPROMs, about 3 days of assembly language experience, and a hardware platform that we hardly knew anything about I'm pretty sure most people didn't a cart would fall of the line in 4 weeks. The Mindlink Product Manager was pretty sure nothing at all could be done in 1 or 2 weeks. Demon Attack couldn't be done. Pitfall couldn't be done. Pitfall II certainly wasn't possible. If the concept for Tempest had been focus tested it would have never been made. After Tempest was out people could then say they wanted games "more like Tempest". I think the axiom remains true. Product development doesn't really have a lot to do with what people currently want. Steve Jobs never surveyed users. He'd say something like "build what they're going to want, not what they want today." I'd have just as much fun making a VCS game that sells 100 copies as I would a Windows app that sells thousands of copies. I love programming and creating products. If all things are even, once the user helping to design is removed, I rather write the Windows app and so would my manager. I know you'll understand. Gave it a shot and it isn't going to work. Moving on time.

stardust4ever, Thanks for your post. I did kind of have a rough idea that the VCS had 128 bytes of RAM and even a vague notion of what a MMOG is because I've being doing it for a little while now. And I did a little research before hand, in this very thread about the market size. Not to worry, my game idea is history.

Supergun, That's why I asked and I'm glad at least someone responded. The scene here is very new to me, not really sure what you all are all about. I don't really want to spend a few months work for nothing, or worst insulting this community. So thanks for saving me that. It's not just your post. I've been reading a lot of other threads since my last post and know the community a little bit better. I kind of came to the same conclusion you stated clearly. So I thank you for that. However, as far as ruining the VentureVision series...you have nooooooo idea what kind of game this next game would have been. None, zero, zip. Couldn't conceive of even a fragment of what this game could have been I know this for a fact because I have nooooooo idea what this game would have been. But you do! You don't trust me to come up with an appropriate game for my own games????? Fell free to cram that. I thought market managers were narrow minded. Glad you like the 1980's games. Glad you liked some old stories. However, with 30 years more programming experience than I had back then and with the new tech like Melody it just wouldn't be possible for me to do yet another 1980 game. I'm not right for the job. I withdraw my game concept. -Dan

I have a basic design for my next VCS game and I want to launch it at AtariAge. The working title is Channel 3 and will be developed by VentureVision and be the next game in the VentureVision series. My inspiration for the game came from this community and all the other Atari historical sites and emails I've been reading the past few days. Back in the day we never had a clue about our audience and I'd like to take advantage of being able to communicate with potential players to design this game specifically for them. Involve players into the process even before the game is done. This will be a MMOG VCS game, but light on the "massively". Players will be able to play as a team on either "side". This will not involve connecting the VCS to the net in any way and instead be more like D&D, more manual, more 1980. Players can communicate via phone or over the net. Plan for selling the game... I also wanted to take advantage of 2 other things I didn't have available back in the day. Collectors and Melody carts being one offs. Sell the game for a limited time. Say 1 week. And then maybe 2 week period for shipping and confirmation. But the cart won't play without a code. At a pre-announced date/time the code will be posted so all players can start at the same time. There will be levels to get thru and codes needed to proceed but in between different more standard play type play. As people accomplish goals they will be given codes from the game which they will post or communicate to each other so everyone can get thru together to the next level. First person to post a code will be immortalized for all time. I'll make sure everyone can keep playing until almost everyone is caught up. But some players may just have to be left behind. War is hell. The game will also be playable in single player mode. I think after the initial launch people could chose to set up the same type of thing using a web where they post a launch date/time and a code would be issued, etc. The difference is on the first wave no player will have ever been able to have ever seen the game. A question I have is whether game sales should be limited to a single week? Does anyone think there is any collector value in doing so? I would then like to learn from the first game and tweak another in the series that would be very similar and repeat the launch of the next title. As far as I know nothing like this has been done and I don't know if that seems desirable? Instead of the next version being a huge change, just some small changes, like missions, some new levels. Pre-launch backstory... As part of the game research I would like to start a thread ASAP somewhere on AtariAge in the voice of 2 characters in the game. Members would be encouraged to join in if they wish and post whatever they wanted. Members would use the thread as they wish. The 2 game characters would interact to learn about features people like and don't like in a game and get ideas. I would use this process to design the actual game. I have no idea what direction this would go or whether it would even work. I'm looking for a way to role play in a thread and then use that thread to produce a game. That this thread would in fact be part of the total game experience and the cart only be the end of the "game". People who only played the cart would be playing Channel 3 while people who read and/or took part in the thread AND played the cart would have The Channel 3 Experience, C3E. I expect that thread would last about a year because that's how long it would take to finish my current project. Then cart development would take however long but the thread would continue right up to the cart launch date. I expect development to take a long time because Melody has so much space and my plan would be to use all of it. I would need to limit my time in C3E to I'm thinking 2 hours per week and that limit would be part of the story. But anyone else could post whatever, whenever. Permission... I PM Albert what I'd like to do to make sure it was OK and/or work out details. I have since found the "Forum Guidelines and Rules" and see this would break several rules. The forum is about discussing games and this would be more like role playing, but to me you would be "discussing a game", just in a different way maybe. I also wanted one of the characters to be a bit rude and curse, but having read the forum rules think the cursing probably isn't such a good idea. What do you think? Is this even appropriate for this forum? What forum section could something like this be in? None seemed to jump out at me. Maybe "Contests"? Thanks

I seem to keep ending up there.

Wait a minute...Tempest, is AtariProto your site?

The timeline would be right imo. Ban would have been hired at Apollo say Jun 82. Knocked out Wabbit say Jul-Aug 82. Jumped to Micographic with other Apollo people and had Solar Fox ready by Sept 83. That's impressive in my book. And her port of Solar Fox was well reviewed to boot.

Solar Fox. I found it at AtartProtos.

Don't know any of those. Apollo hired a bunch of people just before I left. One was an ex-air traffic controller from the 81 strike. I assume he did Final Approach. Squoosh, Looks pretty darn good to me. While Googling around I saw Wabbit. I see the programmer credited is Tran Ban, who if I have the right person, is a Vietnamese woman. I Google some more to try and confirm that but didn't find much. I'll use the name Ban for the woman I'm thinking of and hope I have it right. Any Facebook users out there might be able to get more info? Our office faced the parking lot and we could see interviewees parking and walking up. Ban was extremely attractive and when she walked by there was a rush into Ed's office begging him to hire her. And we kept walking by his office trying to crack him up. It's not like we required any experience anyways. If you could spell 6502 you were in. But I think there was little expectation Ban would become a game designer because she was not a nerd in any sense of the word. Ban came up with a game idea really fast, the only one in the new group I remember doing so. It was an extremely intense concept. Made Night Trap look like a bedtime story for kids. 20 years ahead of its time and way too intense for the VCS. And she was explaining it like it was a picnic at the beach. So pretty quick the stereotype started to fall. Lots of people mailed game ideas to Apollo which we looked thru. The idea for Wabbit came from two completely different letters from different people. It was freaky because both ideas were almost the same. Ban was given the Wabbit idea and her idea I assume was placed into a time capsule and removed years later, toned down and became Grand Theft Auto. Wabbit looks impressive to me considering zero experience and the state of Apollo at the time which must have been a mad house with all the new people and platforms. The player graphic is really good, and female, which also makes me think Ban is the woman I'm thinking of. In the letters the players were male farmers I believe. And she went on to do 5200 stuff. Not too many VCS games were done by women so that's pretty cool...if I have it right.

Thanks. I assume I did the sound. The Product Manager was very active on the development and he could have gone out and found an audio engineer, had them do the audio and just handed me some files and so I wouldn't remember if something like that happened. I was not into audio. I could do somethings, but I wasn't good at audio. If there's any music in Telepathy I'd be pretty sure that would have been done by someone else. I don't believe I ever created any music myself. Don't think I'd have a clue how to. I don't know if this is common knowledge or not but most game programmers I met back then were either into audio or visual arts. I forget where but several us were sitting around shooting the breeze and someone said something about playing an instrument and someone else said that they also play an instrument. Pretty soon we realized everyone there played a musical instrument or been a painter. I remember it being a little freaky and us all being surprised. We kind of wondered if that was why we all did games. Never heard of it until now.

I don't remember Snowplow but Sunrise Software does ring a bell. Seems like I remember seeing their booth at Jan 1983 CES. Small booth like ours. But I Googled their logo and that's not what I remember. I remember a multi-colored rainbow type sunrise. But I could be completely mistaken. Googled Terry Grantham who's name sounded familiar and found that Sunrise was connected to VSS which was ex-Apollo people. VSS was started Nov 1982 so they could have been at CES. I think I remember Terry from Apollo. If Sunrise was at 1983 CES that would put 3 booths related to Apollo employees. Apollo, VSS/Sunrise and VentureVision. This may seem strange but there were no reunions.

I'd say yes, having recently re-read some material. Robert Hesler the head of the company wrote all the back story and he tied all 3 games together. But each game was created first and then the back story was added. The idea for Innerspace was developed while I was working on Rescue. And Solar Defense was totally Robert Weatherby's creation. But there could be a quadrilogy...or more

Thanks for the link. That timeline seems to mesh. Nintendo ready to roll mid 83. Tramiel takes over Atari July 84 so Nintendo would be looking for titles for the 85 launch N American. The meeting I saw must have happened July or Aug because we were all in Monterey by early Sept. My guess is they would have been looking for Atari programmers to do the conversions because if it was just licenses they were after I assume Tramiel would have been happy to sell licenses all day long. He had no plans for them. I don't know NES very well at all, but I don't know of any Atari games ported to NES at least in 85. Now I'm wondering if the reason programmers were marched thru the meeting was to just show Nintendo that Tramiel hadn't fired every programmer. Basically we would have been meat on the hoof. And that might also explain why Tramiel had kept some VCS programmers around for a little while. Just in case they could make some money off of them.

Do you have any links about this stalling thing. Be an interesting read. I wouldn't say the Tramiels were stalling. I assume they wouldn't have cared at all if Nintendo did anything in games. Pre and Post Tramiel were two entirely different companies. They had less than zero interest in games. For example they owned all these titles and I don't remember anyone ever suggesting we should port anything to the ST for the release. They just didn't see value in software, Apple did. Just before I left Atari I'd written a kind of Finder rip off for the ST and a Switcher with the help of the OS guys. Tramiels thought GEM was as good as Mac. Good luck with that. Loved the ST, but thought it deserved better software. Thanks.

Maybe VisionVision should be the game title?

You'd have to check with Robert Weatherby about Solar Defence. The rights to Innerspace are owned by Imagic as far as I know. I sure don't have any rights. Rescue Terra I, no idea. I don't own it. Since I don't have any ownership of any of these I give my full permission to use them as you like. And you can borrow my neighbor's car too anytime you like. Tonight I was working on a story treatment for a new game that involves tying at least Rescue Terra I and Innerspace together. I'd been reading the box and manual and see there was a common theme. So I'll keep that going. I'm also wanting to work in a lot the history I've learned here and in the community the past few days. Kind of an insiders game since all potential players seem to know a lot about game history. Easter egg city, but easter eggs as part of game play. Reading the old boxes was like seeing a picture of myself from 1983 sporting a mullet...not fun to see. But it started to grow on me. Those 1980 campy story lines were part of the VCS I kind of like now. I'm going to use VentureVision as the company name. The trademark was abandoned in 1984 and not in use so I'm picking up the common law trademark on it until a suit tells me to stop.

As far as I remember some of us were ushered into the conference room and there was a mess of equipment all over the table including the box shaped NES. The shape of the unit, the specs they said and that the people there were from Japan is the only reason I even think this was Nintendo. I don't remember anyone telling me it was Nintendo. This happened like 7 or 8 pm at this building on the 2nd floor. I remember it being dark outside. The other programmers may have been more interested and played some games. I wasn't interested even a little. I figured video games were done forever. I'd make a great fortune teller. The other programmers I can remember who were probably there were Jim Eisenstein, Matt Householder, Dave Staugas and maybe Dave Getreu and Landon Dyer. So they might have more info. The Tramiel boys were all there so it was a high level meeting. I hardly ever saw Sam or Gary. To me what it looked like is they'd been in a meeting for a long time and this was the end, no one was sitting. Seemed like they just brought us in as a kind of a courtesy to Nintendo or whoever this was. You know, feign interest. The Japanese back then were way into a certain social procedures. I don't think the Tramiels were interested even a little bit because they didn't want anything to do with games. But this was too big a company to blow off. We were asked a few questions in the hall when we were ushered back out "What'd you think" was about as in depth as it got and they didn't seem interested in our answers. That was that. I don't have any memory of reading or someone saying this was Nintendo. But I've always thought it was Nintendo. I don't remember any programmers talking about it later. We were focused on the ST. Yes I remember the contest. Pretty sure Bob Hesler, who started VentureVision and was in charge came up with the idea to promote the game. He was a serious game player, VCS and Intellivision (I think), and played the heck out of Rescue Terra I. OK, so I'd been researching tonight for a new game and was looking thru my RTI box and there was one of the contest fliers. I just read it and it's a lot more involved than I'd remembered. I thought it was just a whoever had some set high score first would collect the prize. I'd forgotten (conveniently) there was suppose to a drawing and flying people around, etc. My memory is Bob saying something like "don't worry, no one is ever going to reach Terra I" in response to his partner not wanting to do the contest. It couldn't have been a week later and we got a few screen photos of people at Terra I. Bob was real quiet. You have to know that this money was coming right out of Bob's pocket and Bob was no millionaire by any means. Until now I'd always hoped that first photo was paid as the winner. But now looking at the rules, there was no drawing, no flying of anyone to Dallas, no local competition. I know Bob would have loved for the game to have sold well enough to have had the contest. He was/is very honest as was his partner. So now I'd have to consider the contest a sham I'm ashamed to say. We were off by maybe 2 weeks. Had 10,000 sold which would have been maybe $50k clear, enough for the contest. You hear about entrepreneurs and I've met many. But these two guys were the real deal. Put it all on the line. And they pulled a lot off. They had zero experience in this type of stuff and they were getting press, suppliers, manufacturing, got us to CES. If I wanted to spin it I could say there weren't enough entries. I only saw 2 I believe and the contest needed at least 4. But that would be spinning it imo.

I had to go to Wikipedia to remember Lister's name and saw they're still producing the series. It's been many years since I've seen it. I'm sure going to look for it though. At Go during a lay off I cut out a cardboard H and stuck it to my forehead. You're right of course about taking money out of the equation changes things.