There were times where I thought we weren’t going to survive past the next week because we had missed a deadline or what we had planned was just way out of scope, and we wouldn’t have been able to deliver. We were very fortunate, in my opinion, to work with Mark Cerny, who at the time was the executive producer for Universal Interactive Studios. He’s a guy–even though he’s only a few years older than I am–who had been in the industry for a long time. And he knew more than anybody I had ever met when it came to game design, game technology and game production. He, in many ways, was my mentor and helped me understand how to prioritize better in terms of production. He also helped all of us understand what good game design is.
Evan: What was an example of something that you might have been proud of, from that era of your development career?
Ted: I’d say surviving. Really. I mean surviving the first couple years was very difficult because we were working with a brand new publisher. We were working on our very first game ever. We were trying to push the technology of 3D out to its limits and working with a very small team. So we had a lot of strikes against us from day one and we managed to deliver a game that, even though it didn’t sell a whole lot of copies, received some really positive critical acclaim, and that was with about five guys on the team. And so, once we actually shipped that game, it was one of the best days, I think, of all of our lives.
Evan: So how long did the relationship with Universal continue?
Ted: It continued through three more games after Disruptor. Spyro the Dragon, Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage! and Spyro 3, which is Year of the Dragon. And that game, Spyro 3, was shipped in 2000. At that point, we had also been working closely with Sony, because Sony was publishing the Spyro games. Universal had become the licensor and had abdicated its marketing and distribution responsibilities to Sony. So, the irony was even though we weren’t contracted with Sony, we were working much more closely with the Sony producers than we were anyone at Universal.
Evan: So, when did you first hear about the Playstation? Were you skeptical? What did you think about the possibilities? Because Sony had heretofore not been in the video game business whatsoever. So what were your initial thoughts about the machine and the company?
Ted: Well the first time we saw the Playstation was in 1994 when we were on our whirlwind tour trying to sell Disruptor. We actually went to Sony and got a chance to check out a Playstation 1 prototype, and were really impressed with what they were pulling off. I remember seeing a dinosaur demo where they were showing a 3D dinosaur on the screen. And I thought that, other than in movies, I had never ever seen anything like it before.
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However, the console itself hadn’t been released yet. And since we had already signed a dev agreement with 3DO, we just assumed that we needed to continue on with 3DO. The irony was that a year later, after we had built a fairly significant portion of the game, 3DO essentially tanked, and we had to make a shift to the Playstation 1 because we knew that we wouldn’t be able to release the game on the 3DO and sell any copies. The console was going to fail.
And so at the time, Al Hastings rewrote our engine to work with the Playstation 1, and he did it really fast. He’s one of the best engineers in the industry. He performs miracles all the time and this was one of them. And that was the start of our Playstation experience. And it’s been a very good experience.