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.