Of all the folks I spoke to for the Playstation retrospective that Techland’s going to be rolling out over the next couple of days, Ted Price had to be the most unassuming. Not that the other people are blowhards, but it’s just that Ted Price doesn’t have the kind of name recognition that, say, a David Jaffe has to deal with. The head of Insomniac Studios seems to want it that way and only tends to pop up when announcements like new cross-platform IP need to get made. Don’t let Price’s humility fool you, though. The achievements of his studio have been impressive and varied: the clever kids’ franchise Spyro the Dragon, the hilarious and inventive Ratchet & Clank games and the grim severity of the Resistance first-person shooters.
Even though other platforms beckon in the future, Price found his biggest success on the Playstation. Find out how the former corporate drone turned his passion into a profession.
Evan: I’ve been asking folks to start off with their pre-professional gamer biography, so let’s hear about yours. When did you really start to get into video games? When did you want to pursue it as a career? And what kind of consoles and games have stuck out to you before you started working in the industry?
Ted: OK. So, I’ve always been a gamer, I think from the day I first played Pong at a friend’s house when I was five years old to now. I’ve played as many games as I can. And when I was about eight, nine years old, my parents bought a Atari 2600 for my sister and me and we used to play for hours in our living room.
When I was about 10, my dad bought an Apple II E for the house, and, at that point I was convinced that I was going to be making video games for a living. I was programming in BASIC and not getting very far. But the allure of creating game worlds was almost impossible for me to resist. And I continued playing games up until I went to college. At that point, I stopped when I was a freshman. When I was a sophomore, I believe the NES came out. My roommates got an NES for our room, and all of a sudden I was bitten again. And we would just play [The Legend of] Zelda and Metroid for hours. I didn’t seriously consider video game development as a career, because I had my sights set on other things. However…
Evan: What were you majoring in?
Ted: I was an English major.
Evan: OK. That’s funny.
Ted: Yeah. And after I graduated from college I ended up being the financial controller for a medical start-up company. But, I realized fairly quickly that medicine wasn’t a field about which I was passionate. I’d actually gotten into the job through sort of a fluke. Suddenly, I started thinking again about video games and why I loved them. And in early 1994, I officially incorporated Insomniac Games and started the company. Because, at that time, the 3DO had come out. Up until 1994, it was difficult for anybody who considered themselves a garage developer to get into the industry because the expenses for developing for cartridges, cartridge based systems, were prohibitively high. And with the advent of disk-based systems like the 3DO, suddenly doors were opened to a much larger segment of potential game developers. I was one of those people who decided hey, it’s time to start developing games.
Evan: And the thing about the cartridges from a manufacturing perspective, everything was proprietary so it wasn’t like you could access that channel terribly easily. Is that what I’m sensing from you?
Ted: My understanding was that the inventory itself was so expensive that it was difficult for developers to make any kind of money in the industry. Margins were slim. The risk was high. And once the industry moved away from those terribly expensive cartridges, especially at the end of the cartridge era, because at that time, I think with the additional memory that was being inserted into cartridges, it was crazy expensive. When the industry moved away from that to CD-ROMS, which I think at the time cost maybe $3 each to produce, it was suddenly a more viable opportunity for, I’ll say it again, garage developers. And I was one.
Evan: So, when you incorporated Insomniac in 1994, it was you and who else?
Ted: Well, it started with me in a 10 by 10 office with a 3DO workstation and a PC, trying to program our first game, and working on the design at the same time. I realized very quickly by the summer I needed real help and was fortunate to run into a guy named Al Hastings, who was also attending my former alma mater and he agreed to come out to California where I was living at the time and join Insomniac. And he and I put together the demo for our first game, Disruptor, in about a month. And at that time we literally drove up and down the coast of California and into other states looking for any publisher who was willing to take a chance on two guys who knew nothing about game development. And it was great.
It was a fantastic experience because we learned what rejection was all about. I mean we got rejected everywhere. [Laughter] And we were pretty proud of our demo. I mean what Al had done technologically was amazing for a month of work. He was doing all the coding. I was just providing graphics and sound. And we ended up signing a deal with Universal Interactive Studios, which had just been started up at the time, and interestingly had also signed a deal with Naughty Dog back in ‘94. And as soon as we did that deal, we brought on Al Hasting’s brother, Brian Hastings. And Al and Brian are partners in Insomniac. We’re all three partners in the company. And we began creating Disruptor, our first game, which we eventually released in 1996.
Evan: You know what’s interesting is that I spoke to David Jaffe, and he talks about his path throughout the industry. And he started out in testing. And he’s saying the same kind of things as you are where nobody taught game design. You had to kind of learn it as you went. And for him the path was testing, and for you it was kind of trial and error. Were you able in college to keep your programming skills up to the point where you felt confident to start up a company? Like, how did you build your skill set in those early years?
Ted: I was probably more skilled on the financial side than I was at either programming, art, or design. Mostly because that’s what I’d been doing after college. Just focusing on business plans, performance projections, those kind of things. I was interested in really learning much more about the game development process at the same time we were building the company. For me, it was just something fun to do. The challenge for all three of us was that, since none of us had any actual game development experience, it really was trial and error, and we made a lot of mistakes along the way. And some of them were close to fatal mistakes.
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.