Why were Scaling 2D arcade games not brought to Home Systems?

[Lost Dragon]

Ideally some of the best people to try and reach,might be Ex-Core Design staff.

 

Ninja was originally a Saturn lead project, which was sadly canned,but they were talking of using the hardware to great effect.

 

Then there was Swagman,Thunderhawk etc.

 

Also i suggest Millennium, PlayStation Medievil started life as a Saturn title according to them in an interview back in the day.

 

I did pass on the press interviews with Core Design to various sites, a few are here:

 

http://www.core-design.com/interview17.html

 

The Saturn Ninja coverage is worth a read if nothing else.

 

Core having cracked transparency issues etc:

http://www.core-design.com/goodies_ninja_articles.html

Edited September 16, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[00010000]

@Lost Dragon: Lol I'm really feeling you might be the sort that's a better fit to write such an article now; tho I can source around wayback machines and magazine scans, sourced articles online etc. I've got literally zero connections to any developers, let alone the old school ones. Probably wouldn't even know where to start in reaching them tbh.

 

That said I'm definitely interested to see if there's more documented stuff out there which can shed a light on Sony's business practices w/ publishers and the press at the time, but I fear quite a few of those devs would not come forward out of concern over screwing up relations with current Sony. Even guys who've left recently like Andrew House, or people only working w/ them on contract terms like Mark Cerny, would dare delve into that can of worms.

 

Regardless, and while it'd be a very gradual/ongoing thing I'd like to post whatever I can find in some thread, the all of us could just add info to it basically relevant to all that behind-the-scenes stuff from Sony, Sega, the press etc. at the time and then there'll be enough data there someday for someone to write a meaty article on the subject organizing it all together.

 

But who knows, maybe someone'll come up on an old computer being randomly sold on eBay once belonging to a dev or some ex. Next Gen/EGM/GamePro etc. staff with emails on "special benefits" from the house of Crash Bandicoot.

[Lost Dragon]

:-)) I can research, it's a time consuming and often frustrating process, but it often pays off, but write an article?....

 

That's not my area at all.

 

When i've submitted mere email based interviews for sites like Atari Compendium and GTW,the hosts have had to spend a lot of time cleaning them up, correcting my terrible grammar and punctuation and some go the extra mile and source screenshots etc.

 

If your looking at something approaching professional fanzine level, which is what a lot of the filler articles in the likes of RetroGamer Magazine seem to be these days, what the customer doesn't see is the hours the magazine staff have had to spend making them presentable and again, a lot of resources are required.

 

My stuff is a bloody nightmare to try and read, but it's reported as it's found or told to myself.

 

I won't twist anything that pops up and if a comment is speculation it will be reported as speculation.

 

A dedicated thread for those of us who are interested would be best,as it's a niche subject.

 

Regarding chances of finding further info..

 

From my limited personal experience :

 

People can get very nervous at times talking about Sony.

Some very strong NDA's were issued and people reluctant to draw attention to themselves.

 

Also decisions made by project managers etc who still work in the industry can't be made public, no one really wants to throw someone publicly under the bus.

 

As for Core Design,so many people have been utterly superb.

 

Going way beyond what we're really a set of straightforward Q+A emails, one was quite rude initially but softened after time :-))

 

 

Back in the days of ST Gamer, serious efforts were made to contact Jeremy Heath-Smith.

 

I'd interviewed his business partner, Dan Clapson, who gave me the personal email for Jeremy, vouched for me to Jeremy... We never heard anything..

 

Disappointing, but you move on and just had to go from what he told various press at the time.

 

 

I know Luca on Unseen64 made repeated attempts to contact various staff from Core who worked on Saturn and PlayStation titles and basically had the door slammed in his face.

 

He wouldn't go into details, but it does highlight just how difficult it would be to find fresh information if anyone was looking to do a full blown article.

[Lost Dragon]

I do love the bitch fest type quotes from within the industry when people annouced they are dropping Platform A for Platform B.

 

Be it the Saturn for the Playstation.

 

Jaguar for the Playstation (ironically Martin Hooley doesn't seem keen to reiterate his original reasons for moving a Jaguar CD title to Playstation when asked about it now)..

 

Dreamcast for Playstation 2...

 

Playstation 2 for Xbox.

 

The dirt soon starts flying:

 

Anyone remember this?

 

"Jason Rubin (Naughty Dog) believes that there are ways around PlayStation 2's difficulties for

development houses that are willing to put the time and effort into the

system. He suggests that only lazy software companies will give up on the

console in favor of X-Box or Gamecube, and that perhaps PS2 is better off

without them. "If you're a lazy developer, you probably also haven't been a

very good selling developer, that's my opinion," says Rubin. "I'll give you

an example: Oddworld Inhabitants. 'Oh, this is too hard, we can't handle

it!' I mean, these guys have never done 3D before! Who are they to whine? I

mean, they literally have not done 3D before they skipped the training, and

are now jumping to the 3D world. They skipped the whole last generation

effectively, and they're whining. You know, those guys couldn't get it

working on the PS2 and they were trying to use someone else's engine because

they can't even program 3D engines. They did all of these mock-ups in 3D

Studio, which is a pixel engine. None of these systems are pixel engines,

they're all polygons. Not only Nintendo Gamecube and PS2, but also the

X-Box, so it's not going to change for them. But they did get six extra

months to have it come out, so good luck to them. I have a saying around

here I give 70/30 that the game ever comes out, and 30/70 that they make any

other games from now on."

[00010000]

Holy hell that Josh Rubin quote; somehow that is seen as a good thing while Yu Suzuki's Saturn quote is painted as a bad thing. Yeah, the print media bias was real.

Edited September 21, 2018 by 00010000

[Bubsy3000]

I do love the bitch fest type quotes from within the industry when people annouced they are dropping Platform A for Platform B.

 

Be it the Saturn for the Playstation.

 

Jaguar for the Playstation (ironically Martin Hooley doesn't seem keen to reiterate his original reasons for moving a Jaguar CD title to Playstation when asked about it now)..

 

Dreamcast for Playstation 2...

 

Playstation 2 for Xbox.

 

The dirt soon starts flying:

 

Anyone remember this?

 

"Jason Rubin (Naughty Dog) believes that there are ways around PlayStation 2's difficulties for

development houses that are willing to put the time and effort into the

system. He suggests that only lazy software companies will give up on the

console in favor of X-Box or Gamecube, and that perhaps PS2 is better off

without them. "If you're a lazy developer, you probably also haven't been a

very good selling developer, that's my opinion," says Rubin. "I'll give you

an example: Oddworld Inhabitants. 'Oh, this is too hard, we can't handle

it!' I mean, these guys have never done 3D before! Who are they to whine? I

mean, they literally have not done 3D before they skipped the training, and

are now jumping to the 3D world. They skipped the whole last generation

effectively, and they're whining. You know, those guys couldn't get it

working on the PS2 and they were trying to use someone else's engine because

they can't even program 3D engines. They did all of these mock-ups in 3D

Studio, which is a pixel engine. None of these systems are pixel engines,

they're all polygons. Not only Nintendo Gamecube and PS2, but also the

X-Box, so it's not going to change for them. But they did get six extra

months to have it come out, so good luck to them. I have a saying around

here I give 70/30 that the game ever comes out, and 30/70 that they make any

other games from now on."

To be fair the Xbox was basically a PC, so developers could just throw their games on it and only have to worry about optimizing for the custom Nvidia GPU. It was likely the easiest console to develop for out of the 4.

[Lost Dragon]

Last bit from developer trying to convert High Octane to the Saturn:

 

"All I know is

that porting the Hi-octane engine into both machines was a pain (the

original PC engine wasn't completely suited to either machine, mostly

because it was started before we had

seen the docs for either machine), for example we had to drop the textures on the cars on the saturn because the models were made from triangles which the Saturn can't texture map in any useful way.

 

Many companies are designing games for the PC & the 32 bit

consoles, designing for PC & PlayStation is fairly simple, add the saturn to the equation and you have massive problems with:

 

1. How do you use the second processor?

 

2. what do you do with VDP2?

 

3. where the f#ck to we get quad based forward mapping 3d models from?(models are normally triangle based when they come from

3ds/alias/whatever and the Saturn way of doing it wastes memory.

 

4. We'll have to drop gouraud shading because the saturn can't handle it.

 

Despite this we are now writing with the saturn version in mind on most

of our games, but we are not letting it compromise others.

 

If the Saturn was the only machine to work with I'd love to get stuck

into it's assembler and contriving engines that show off VDP2 to full

advantage but it's not.

 

And Bullfrog's Peter Molyneux Peter was suppossed to of said that the PlayStation was his personal favorite, but that "Saturn is an interesting machine and certainly has a lot of little cubby holes that the programmer can play around with, and its multiprocessor environment makes for interesting programming."

Edited September 25, 2018 by Lost Dragon