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?

Reading that Wireframe article: if he was finishing off AvP why would they have been using *prototype* Jaguars? Hardware was well final and stable by then. And again the "beers with Sam Tramiel" thing comes up. Does that mean Sam came over *twice*, once to spirit him away to work for Atari when he was 16, and again when he was toiling to finish off AvP?

Is there any confirmation at all that he worked on any 8-bit titles? To hear him talk about it he ought to have code in a great slew of titles across the Speccy and C64 but I've never seen a genuine example of an 8-bit game he was actually involved in. I'd be genuinely interested to see one.

hey I do Twitter! But it's usually just me telling the weird dream I had the other night, or posting pictures or videos of my sheep. https://t.co/CRBXJpZHvM Nothing that makes me seem particularly awesome

He must have tremendous skill at being able to talk himself up. He does appear to have been able to walk into some plum jobs along the line (assuming there is in fact a kernel of truth in that he worked at MGM, EA and Bullfrog, though not necessarily that he did all he claimed at those places). And yet he doesn't really seem to have produced much of anything in terms of tangible results, AvP apart. At least in gaming, can't speak to the side of things where he was Captain Littlegirlsocks who got his commercial pilot's license at age 20. Somehow he manages to wring these endorsements out of people and convince them he's some kind of genius. It's really peculiar. And harmful, too, if upcoming devs look to him for industry expertise and guidance that just isn't there. I think I find it all specifically weird because the scene he fixates on - Atari in the Jag era - is a place where I actually was, and I knew a lot of the people he talks about, and the story he tells about his central place in it all is so at odds with my actual lived experience that it makes my brain hurt. But yeah, I too wonder how so many journos (and, it seems, business people too) have just bought into it all without checking out the facts. I guess the gift of the gab backed up with a few kernels of truth goes a long way.

Reading through some of his linkedin stuff. There's stuff in there which causes me to question how involved he really was with the coding of AvP. Consider the following statement: "During final testing, CFO of Atari, August (Augie) Ligouri lent my girlfriend and I myself a mobile phone. Off we went to Disneyland as a thank you from Atari. If the phone rang, we would have to return to the office immediately to fix a bug." Now I've been through final test at Sunnyvale. And if you've got critical code in the game, then your ass is going to be in the office for the duration, so that you can respond immediately to the test team and fix whatever they find ASAP. You are absolutely NOT going to be fucking off to Disneyland DURING final test. Tempest wasn't even in "Christmas crunch" and yet by the end of it I was utterly rinsed, couldn't even look at a computer except to play DOOM for a month after. Shit was intense, and exhausting. If they really did send him away during final test... how critical could his code have been?

Not only is the constant, relentless name-dropping annoying in its own right, for someone who claims to have been an integral part of Atari, and presumably therefore knowledgeable about their history as a result, he gets basic details wildly wrong. He claims that Nolan Bushnell "wrote Pong, Breakout and Asteroids". Nobody "wrote" Pong. It's a game based on hardwired logic; it doesn't have a CPU or any ROM so there's no code to get "written". Bushnell instructed Al Alcorn to implement it, almost certainly after having seen Ralph Baer's tennis game on the Odyssey. "Breakout" is also hardwired logic, and even non-Atari-historians know about this because of the famous story of Jobs and Woz, where Woz produced a more efficient hardware design and Jobs didn't share the resultant bonus. That's just common nerd lore. "Asteroids" was written by Ed Logg and Lyle Rains.

It would have been very difficult to do polygonal 3D games on the Panther. The main reason for this, if I am recalling my Panther stuff correctly, is that Panther didn't have a frame buffer in the same way that more conventional machines like the ST and Amiga did. It had only 32k of RAM total, and display RAM was limited to a pair of *line* buffers. The line buffers were filled on a scanline by scanline basis by the OLP (Object List Processor), which read down a list of objects, determined which portions of which objects intersected the current scanline, and copied the relevant slices of those objects to the line buffer. So you couldn't just render a bunch of whole triangles to an offscreen frame buffer then swap buffers when you'd drawn enough. On Panther you were effectively "racing the beam" with the assistance of the OLP; whatever you drew had to complete in a frame. The upshot of this was that it was entirely a sprite-based machine. As well as not having a frame buffer to accumulate a decent amount of triangles in, you also had the limitation that the OLP could only traverse a finite list of objects, since traversal of that list, and rendering into the line buffer of any intersecting objects, had to complete within one scanline's worth of time. The OLP could do scaling of objects, by repeating pixels when drawing into the line buffer, and you would have been able to do Sega-superscaler-style sprite scaling 3D with that; but even if you could, by playing carefully with changing the scale of sprites on a per-scanline basis, have possibly squeezed out some triangles, you would only have been able to draw an extremely limited number of them, and more than a few on a scanline would have caused the OLP to time out and stretch the display. Basically: Panther was a sprite-based machine, designed to generate displays that always completed with a single frame; as such it had no frame buffer, only line buffers, and was therefore entirely unsuitable for polygonal 3D.

Ah I hadn't seen that gamesindustry.biz one, only seen mentions of it. The thing of having to hide his identity just doesn't make any sense. I worked out in California for a few years myself in the mid 1990s, and one of the things I noticed about the Silicon Valley culture at the time was that they really couldn't give a wet slap about your private life, sexual orientation, or preferred gender identity - as long as you could do the work you were admired. I suppose if someone were really publicly embarrassing about that stuff they might get the sack, but if it was just a part of your life and you performed well at your job nobody would bat an eyelid at your orientation or kinks. He says that he wasn't allowed to be credited on a game as Jane because that would reflect negatively on the game. *How* exactly? Have you ever heard of anyone looking at the list of dev credits on a game and going "hell no, not buying that game, there's a GIRL'S NAME in the credits"? It's simply absurd.

Imagine if just a couple of those claims had actually been true, and he changed his name at age 16 then became a Virgin Atlantic 747 captain. You're on the plane flying across the pond. The seatbelt signs go off and: "BONG! This is your Captain speaking, Captain Anklesock Littlegirlsocks here, I'll be looking after you on our transatlantic flight tonight. Now it's going to be around ten hours until we reach our destination, and being in a pressurised cabin at altitude can make your feet swell, so for your comfort I would recommend that you take your shoes off and move around the cabin in just your socks, lovely socks, mmmm. Long socks, short socks, girl socks, boy socks, they are all highly recommended for my in-flight comfort. Actually not really boy socks so much, rather... stockings. And hose. Yes. Mmm. And if you could kind of pull them slightly off the end of your stumps... ERR I mean feet... that would be... fantastic, so very fantastic. So please just relax, kick off your shoes and make myself comfortable and shortly I shall be passing through the cabin to inspect all those lovely lovely socks. Beautiful, exquisite, lovely socks, all floppy and hanging off your limbs, pink socks, blue socks, hundreds and hundreds of socks, holy cow. Thank you. BONG!"

Jesus Tapdancing Christ. I thought I'd reached the bottom of the Jane Whittaker rabbithole but I was wrong. I decided to take a look outside the regular games sites, at some of the more flight sim oriented sites, and there's stuff out there which makes mere claims of programming the ZX81 with his toes whilst in hospital in order to produce and sell a hugely successful game that nobody can find any trace of, or being kept like a pet by the Tramiels, seem like nothing. "Anklesock Littlegirlsocks is a real world 747-400 Captain at a major airline." "this is Anklesock’s real name having been given it at the age of 8. It stuck hard, and that name became legal at the age of 16." "Capt. Jane-Rachel Whittaker, a Virgin Atlantic Airways ATP, with a multi-Boeing rating" and if THAT's not bonkers enough I came across traces of an entity called "Janey" who was a fixture on a very peculiar conspiracy-nut website and some of the claims on there are just... words fail me. Holy cow. Holy cow, ox, yak, wildebeest, holy every single member of the genus Bovidae, the only thing that could surpass it would be if they claimed they were actually called Jane Armstrong and landed on the moon at age 3 after having had one leg amputated and with the stump covered with a little girl's sock. I've only been anywhere near as completely stunned by sheer bananasness that one time at a computer exhibition when I was talking to some guy and he told me he'd written Trip-a-tron on the ST. It's just... wow.