It's Been a Wild Ride

[brianfargo]

My first game.

My first exposure to video games was like many others, in the arcades and eventually onto home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey, a machine so primitive that you had to pretend to have the cursor follow the lines. And If you wanted a theme such as a  haunted house or a roulette wheel, you would put a Mylar overlay on your TV that would use static electricity to hold it up.  “Back in my day, we didn’t even have color for our game systems”, shouts the old man.

I had no idea how the game magically appeared on the screen until I started to gain access to computers.

The first computer I ever had access to was an old mainframe called a PDP-11, this was in the day before there were monitors. Every command and piece of feedback was printed out and you backed up your code using paper tape, a technology similar to the tickertape that went back to the 19th century. I remember how amazed I was when they brought a CRT/Monitor in and I no longer had to print every command. Gaining access to the PDP-11 could only be done at nights and on weekends at my high school through permission of the school. It was a great opportunity to meet a group of guys that were much smarter than me, a lesson that would serve me well.

I was very fortunate that my parents could afford to buy me an Apple II computers in the late 70’s, this is when the light bulb really went off in my head that I could learn how to program and eventually make games. I spent every waking hour I could playing games and learning how to code.

After playing enough games, I decided that I would set off to do it myself. I decided to make a graphic adventure since it was one of the few genres I could program, BASIC was not a problem but my 6502 Assembly coding was not up to par. In fact, I needed one piece of code called a recursive fill that would quickly fill in the enclosed blank areas with a color. The only way I was going to get that done was to pester the hell out of my friend Randy Walsh, one of the guys I met in the PDP-11 rooms. I had no money so I had to just beg him for 6 months straight until he did it. Once his part was completed, I was able to finish the rest and hand duplicate 500 copies of the game “The Demon’s Forge”. It was a very amateurish effort by a high school kid but it was critical in all the lessons it taught me.

I took my first game to completion and learned about the need for marketing, I was off to the races.

 * Below is an ad for the game. I only had a few hundred dollars for package art so I had to buy a finished piece and this was the only fantasy work I was able to find. While it captured the mood, there were no guys flying on great eagles or women to rescue. I was teased quite a bit about this. My favorite bullet point from the back of the packages was “16 entirely different colors”. The word “entirely” really made the concept pop in my teenage mind.

[brianfargo]

I say Sabataage.

This story goes back to the early 90’s when Interplay was creating games based on the Star Trek license, a license I was very proud to have gotten and a series I really enjoyed working on. I remember the naysayers questioning whether a 25 year old license would still sell but we were all Star Trek fans and felt passionate about it. One of my highlights during this time was meeting Gene Roddenberry himself at the Paramount commissary.

Working with celebrities was often scary as they had strong personalities and they were normally integral to the experience, we certainly didn’t want to ship a game with only a few of the actors voices. One of the stronger personalities we dealt with was Mr. Shatner, he was the captain after all.

We are in the studio this day and Mr. Shatner is reading some lines about “Sabotaging” the engines, only he pronounces it “Sabataage” and our audio director (A link is below to provide bits of the exchange) made the mistake of telling Mr. Shatner how to say the line. Apparently it’s one thing to let an actor know you want more energy, louder, softer etc but you do not say the line for them. Well this irritates Mr. Shatner and he says “ahhh Please don’t tell me how to do it.. it sickens me” and “You say Sabotage, I say Sabataage”. It was a tense moment but our audio guy put his tail between his legs and finished up the session.

Several days later I get a call from my contact at Universal pictures and he tells me that Howard Stern has just played this hilarious bit with Shatner ripping into one of my guys; it turns out the audio engineer at the studio shared the tape and it went wide. Now I’m thinking, this isn’t funny at all, I want to keep making Star Trek games and I’m petrified that Shatner will find out and blame us. Thankfully he never hears it or mentions it to us, I’m assuming case closed.

But then several years later and I’m watching the movie Mystery Men with Ben Stiller and there is a short exchange about how to say a name and I hear the line “Please don’t correct me, it sickens me.” I sat up right away in the theater thinking that it was awful close but not right on the nose. But then some scenes later the group is leaving the bar having a throwaway conversation and I hear the lines “You say sabotage, I say sabataage”. Now I knew it was no coincidence and bigger than I realized.

Another contribution to pop culture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-Rd6blM5LA&feature=youtu.be

[brianfargo]

He’s Nobody!

In the mid 90's MCA/Universal pictures bought a minority interest into Interplay and made me to the "go to" guy for many of their game initiative meetings. It was a time in my life that I will never forget; lunches with Lew Wasserman, visits with Steven Spielberg at his Amblin studio and at our Irvine offices and pitch meetings from William Shatner. And I was invited to more Hollywood events and openings than I can remember.

One such opening was the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland back in 1995. It was a VIP opening with George Lucas and the A list stars.  People were lined up for blocks to grab a peek at which new celebrity would cross the into the area. Finally it was my turn to flash my VIP pass and stride in, just as I did, I heard some girls shouting "Who is that?" and after a short pause, one of them shouts back "Oh.. he's nobody."

Obviously they were not familiar with Battle Chess!

Me and Lew Wasserman in the mid 80′s.