Classic Game Postmortem: 'Karateka'

[Music] hello hi thank you all for coming it's uh I'm happy to have this chance to do this postmortem now after 40 years uh you may have noticed coming in that there's a little card on your seat uh this is a gift from the fine folks at digital Eclipse who have made a wonderful interactive documentary about the making of katea so that's a steam code so that you can play and interact with this uh uh documentary and if you have uh a smiley face on your card uh there's three smiley faces somewhere in the room then your card is even more special and valuable and um I'll explain what that's going to be but the everything I'm going to talk about keratea you know you can also like delve into the documentary and that's a great kind of parallel supplement uh to this

talk so how many of you like remember 1982 like from your own actual memories okay how many do not uh remember 1982 or weren't born yet more and how many of you didn't raise your hand either time for some some reason we'll talk about that later but um so I was 17 years old I was a freshman in college when I started making katea and I was 20 when it shipped so this is the story of A game development but it's also a growing up story uh I went from a kid to a young adult while trying to make this game and also trying to carry a full course load at college but I'll get to that um at 17 I was already a somewhat seasoned Apple 2 game developer so I want to just take a minute to kind of back up and uh

explain what that experience was um these comic book panels are are from my uh my new graphic novel Memoir uh replay uh this is the project I've been working on for the last three years I won't have time to talk about it today because we're just going to talk about katea but uh this book is available in the GDC bookstore in the North Hall and I'm going to go straight there after this talk and I'll do a book signing U but for now I'm just going to use this book as a convenient source of illustrations of moments in kot's development um this one shows me at age 11 and at age 12 right before the Apple 2 entered my life so as a kid I was more into writing and drawing Comics making animated movies you know I wasn't particularly U technical but um I made money uh drawing caricatures at the local Booth uh the local fair and uh I used that money to buy my first

Apple 2 computer uh our high school in chapaqua New York had uh an AV club which had things like tape decks and uh you know video cameras and so I went there first just because that was where the oddballs hung out like if you weren't on a sports team that was where you went to be safe during lunch hour and uh so you know there was equipment there were kids there who knew more about the equipment than I did and then at a certain moment there was a tier S80 and a Commodore pet and then a friend of mine got the first Apple 2 that I had ever seen which was even more amazing because it could do color so uh I put all my caricature money into uh this purchase of an Apple 2 and when I realized that this was a machine that I could use not just to play games but also to make games which were in effect little interactive animated movies I just put all of my energy into that so these are the art artifacts of my programming environment

uh in 1979 uh of course in those days there was no internet so to learn to program you had to uh just read books articles and magazines like creative Computing were very important there's uh this book by David all with program listing so You' type in the code you know the basic program and then run it and from that kind of learned how basic worked uh now about this time something really mind-blowing I mean of course Space Invaders the same year had arrived in the arcade and that was like the first arcade game that I played that was actually fun you know there was pinball and there were games like tank war sort of alongside the pinball machines in the bowling alley but Space Invaders was a craze because it was addictive and it had thumping bass and uh uh you know it was just immersive it was cinematic uh whereas the computer games at home were kind of beeps and buzzes and blocky but some genius who I only knew as the name on

the screen mhata programmed somehow programmed Space Invaders for the Apple computer so I could play Space Invaders at home and it looked it played just like the arcade game so this uh uh I mean it obviously it blew me away but what I realized was that this game wasn't programmed in basic it was done some other way machine language was uh not you know you couldn't it was hard to find out what that was or how it worked uh it wasn't fully explained in the manual but I realized that to do a fast action arcade game with highrise Graphics like this you know it needed to be done in machine language so I spent uh you a few years got to the point where I could actually program uh and what I did is I programmed my own version of asteroids that was the game that was in the arcades after Space Invaders it was the next craze and I figured Space Invaders had been a best seller and whoever mhata was you know he was probably like you know living in a castle on a mountain top

somewhere and uh so I thought if I could publish my version of asteroids like that would be the next hit and I would be set I would be a a published software author and I actually finished this game and I signed a contract with Hayden Book Company uh publisher of Sargon the best chess game but unfortunately this was around the time that Atari sent letters to software Publishers that were knocking off their arcade games as discs and told them you can't do that anymore so Hayden got feet and never published my asteroids I was disappointed of course but I started programming a new game using everything that I had learned making asteroids and used those skills to program a game that was nothing like asteroids yeah it was a yeah that was my death bounce um and uh meent this was sort of like the the end of my 5-year programming uh self-taught programming apprenticeship because in doing death bounce I mastered page flipping and uh

you know programming an assembly language all the skills that I would need to make katea this was also my first contact with BBN software my favorite publisher uh which I knew about from Reading uh soft talk magazine I saw this ad in soft talk I sent them to floppy disc and uh Doug carlston himself one of the founders of BBN software called me back this was very exciting to me as a freshman in college on the phone in the dorm room rang and it was Doug Carlon on the other end but they didn't want to publish uh death balance they thought it was too similar to asteroids uh but uh Doug sent me a copy of B's latest hit choplifter by Dan gorland how many people here have played that uh yeah okay an amazing incredible game with fast action cinematic scrolling background uh and and a helicopter that that really moved and felt like a helicopter so

that was an inspiration uh and I should mention again soft talk magazine because that was really my window into the industry everything I knew about who was making games or what the companies were it was from my subscription to soft talk and softalk had a bestseller list that they published every month of the top 30 bestselling games so so my dream kind of focused on I want to make a game that's going to get published by brbn and is going to be on the soft talk top 30 like choplifter was at this moment um and at this time I started keeping a journal which is a habit that by the way that I recommend to everybody and it for some reason I kept it up I still keep a journal but um it's interesting to me to look at now because it documents like the whole creation of kotake and of my early games and of course the journal is handwritten what I used for school you know for typing papers and so on was this Smith k and a typewriter the Apple 2 that I had in my dorm room that was taking up the know the entire desk was useless for that because for one thing it had no lower case

letters and and also its memory could hold like the equivalent of about three pages of text so uh this was my development environment and uh this is the first mention of katea that I found in my journal and I did these sketches I had an idea for karota and for another game which I called animated Adventure which I never made the direct inspiration for kateo was a game called swashbuckler uh by Paul Stevenson I don't anybody hear okay here yeah I mean that game had large Sprites and it was probably the first fighting game the first combat game I'd ever seen it wasn't really fully animated it was kind of like alternating between uh key frames poses but I thought if I could do a game like with big Sprites like swashbuckler but have smooth fast animation like choplifter you know and Space Invaders like that was kind of the idea for keratea and at this point the idea was two guys fighting on a mat you know would score blows and earn

points um I've uh in this talk I've taken some excerpts from my journal and put them in uh big type there so you can this sort of what I wrote at the time that journal reminds me that before I could make any game I had to make the tools to make the game you know there was no Photoshop or and anything like that to do Graphics especially like in an Assembly Language there was nothing off the shelf so the first step was to write a program that would let me you know using the up down left and right cursor Keys Turn pixels on and off on the screen to draw shapes like these which I mocked up in my program which I called with great uh imagination draw uh this was my my Graphics utility and eventually I added other functionality to it too to cut out shapes with rectangles and be able to blast those shapes to the screen anywhere and to then play them in order to do animation so that summer I was uh

you know creating the tools anybody recognize the game that I'm playing there on the screen yes from a man who should know yeah yeah Bill budge at inspirational genius his Games Were Somehow so far in advance of everybody else's uh so I record I included this entry in my journal because uh it's interesting like scrolling landscape and storytelling cinematic storytelling are Hallmarks of katea but two months in I considered that and rejected it and here's what I wrote in my journal trying to put mirror fighting in a real life setting would render the game banal even tasteless no karate is karate and it should be played on a blue mat as I originally plannned yeah so I I love having a journal for for many reasons but one is because it

always reminds me that I'm just as articulate and convincing in defending my wrong ideas as my right ones um and and by the way if you're for anybody who wants to read my whole Journal of you know my college Years making carot take and so forth I've published it as a book an ebook and it can be downloaded from my website um so 5 months in uh uh so I'm in school I'm taking a full course load I decided to major in Psychology uh I'm spending more time on my Apple 2 game development than I am on uh my courses so my grades are terrible I'm on the verge of flunking out but even on the Apple 2 I can't find the time to work on katea because I've got these two other projects I'm trying to improve death bounce in response to bbn's publisher feedback and I've taken a gig with a local uh startup from yel computer science department faculty to make a

game to teach kids the alphabet and I'm actually getting paid for that they're going to pay me $3,000 which I I can use to buy computer equipment things like a printer and a dis drive and more memory so uh so I have this project that I'm super excited about I think it's got more potential than anything but I can't find the time to work on it any game developers here think that sounds familiar and I I included this slide because the other thing that I'm perhaps spending even more time doing than working on all of my courses put together is going to the movies uh Yale had undergraduate film societies which you on 16 millimeter film showed movies from the past decades that I was too young to have seen in the first time around and foreign films like this 1982 Hungarian film which uh really impressed me and so I was getting the Cinematic education because I wanted to be a filmmaker too as well as wanting to be a

software developer and I couldn't really decide between these two careers but at Yale at that time it was not possible to major in either of them so I mean there were no courses in game design so I was majoring in Psychology but this is why I had like uh uh it was always hard for me to find the time to move ahead in my development schedule uh so this is a pivotal moment seven months in uh I Revis my vision in in a way that's inspired by choplifter uh the idea is that now there's a story and there's a helicopter this was a modern version of K kind of like a Bruce Lee movie where you would land your helicopter lands on the roof and you have to fight your way into the the bad guys's headquarters and rescue your girlfriend so this is not a screenshot this is a mockup that I did in uh in uh well Drax I should say if anybody reading the journals is confused for after I named the versions of my program draw one draw two draw three for a

really big upgrade I incremented the final letter instead of incrementing the number so draw became draxx and then if you read on to the Prince of Persia journals it became Dre and draz so if you ever wondered what that is now you know uh by the way this this Bruce Lee version of Kera had a digital timer that was ticking down you had to U Win before it ended I did ended up not using that in the game but I did use it in Prince of Persia a few years later so I was pretty handy with by now with draxx my software animation package with an installed user base of one but uh when I drew these Sprites and like tried to animate them it came out kind of disappointingly choppy like it it was like as good as swashbuckler maybe but it wasn't it wasn't the smooth animation uh that I was seeing in my mind's eye so it was my dad who

suggested you know why don't you film somebody and uh you know look at the film as a reference and my mom was taking karate lessons at the local dojo and she uh recommended her the karate teacher Dennis uh who agreed to to do the karate moves for me uh so my parents had a super eight camera which I used uh to film Dennis uh doing these the moves in profile that film unfortunately has been lost it's uh I mean I usually try to keep stuff stuff as some some in this room know but uh you know stuff disappears it's kind of a reminder how amazing it is that I have this much stuff left as artifacts of katea but that that super eight film I don't have I do however have the second Super Eight film that I shot a few months later and that's my dad um my dad does not know karate but he's about the same size as my mom so he put on her karate outfit and I asked him to run uh back and forth

in the woods in front of our house in chapaqua he's um there's me directing uh and and because it's uh pixel pixel versions you can't really tell when that character that rotoscope character stops being my dad and starts becoming Dennis uh new works so that's the finished game footage we're seeing there and there's the rotoscoped footage that I used my dad climbing up onto the car became climbing up Cliff there's me in my bathro being the bad guy and uh yeah and there's my sister Emily U standing in for the princess yeah so now you may wonder how did I go from Super Eight film to pixelly animated Sprites the Apple 2 obviously had no video in it also had no Super Eight input so max fler the guy who created popey actually had invented something called the verdos scope and 1915 he used it later to make a really

cool animated cartoon of Superman and rotoscope is basically just taking liveaction frames and uh tracing over them you know frame by frame to create the animation so I thought I could do the same thing if I could uh just find a way to trace the frames somehow into the Apple 2 and uh there was no scanner there was nothing like that but there was a tool that I thought I could adapt to this it was a graphics tablet called the wrer has anyone here ever seen what yep yep I'm seeing hands ah GBC is amazing there's hardly a room on the planet where I would have seen hands go up there uh the verse writer was already old in 1983 I think it shipped in 1980 and uh the Apple 2 had these two potentiometers uh that were the game paddle input used to play games like I it was perfect for Space Invaders but if you the makers of the vers writer had the Insight that if you used those

potentiometers you know for a kind of a Pantagraph you would return two values from 0 to 255 that could then be transferred into X and Y coordinates and Roberto Williams had used this to create the graphics for her higher R Adventures so I used my ABC's uh earnings to buy myself a vers writer and I used it to uh trace the tracing of the of the film frames and that this is a frame from replay where I've kind of redrawn that anybody remember the mola this is what we used to it was for home movie editing of Super Eight film you know cutting and hot splicing uh so I just used the screen uh of the mola to trace with a pencil on little squares of Vellum each frame actually each third frame of Animation to get uh six frames per second which I hoped would be enough

and and there that's uh that was the process the next step of course was to trace the tracings uh with the vers writer so this was kind of like an an experiment that required a lot of upfront investment and expenditure I hoped it would work but uh you know until it was done I didn't really know for sure uh so my journal records that kind of Eureka moment when after the labor ious uh three-step process of filming getting the film developed tracing tracing the tracing and then in Drax pixel by pixel cutting out these rectangles and then animating them just to see if it would look like uh motion it did and I mean there was uh Dennis you know doing his punches and kicks it was magical so uh that was like a very satisfying moment and a huge relief the next question though was I I mean these

frames were they were very rough in scribbling that had been one of the questions in my mind like would the Versa writer work for things that were so small because like Roberto Williams drawings were pretty big and filled the whole screen here we're really down to the you know character that's 40 pixels high so so would it um would it still you know would be clear enough and would it look still look lifelike after I had traced it and cleaned it up to make it kind of a clean computer character or with that illusion of life just disappear again very happy with the result it uh it still looked good and there's the cleaned up character and I was of course studying psychology at the time so this was also interesting to me in terms of like just how our minds construct the illusion of movement like when we're watching a movie uh how we somehow imagine that the action is continuous and imagine that something is real even though it isn't so uh yeah here's this journal entry which

as usual I was a year off in my time estimate but I thought I was going to finish kica that summer 1983 the summer that I Return of the Jedi was released and and cost me at least one day of uh development time uh at this point this is during summer vacation I changed katea from Modern to Medieval Japan inspired partly by these woodblock prints by Hokusai which had really strong simple compositions I mean beautiful in their own right almost like comic book frames but also I thought you know would it adapt well to the simple Graphics of the Apple 2 there you see my scribble sketches you starting to block out uh you know the various moments in the game and this is a mockup of the first uh the first gate this is not a screenshot this is a I've just drawn it in draxx first to see what it's going to look like and you can notice at the top of the screen there's

a a map I actually programmed this map to show you how close you were to the Palace um uh get to that later but you know these features that took a few minutes to dry and Drax actually took then weeks or months to implement so to get that gate into the screen I had into the game I had to uh break it down into rectangles because to cut out the whole gate as one rectangle would have been super slow to draw that huge rectangle so I made as few rectangles as and a small as possible and even so it really slows down the game once that gate comes on screen uh this uh I mean the Apple 2 was you it was 40 40 bytes across each bite was seven pixels and the high bit would flip between you know purple and blue or green and orange uh the odd-numbered bits were one color the even numbered bits were another color so just the simple things like moving an object on the screen required a lot of tricks things like you know look you know page flipping

look up tables it was uh yeah took time this journal entry I kept too because it reminded me how often I played games while blasting music you know on the record player and that just like somehow added the Cinematic excitement that I was experiencing in my mind playing choplifter with Raiders of the Lost dark soundtrack just made it so much better and uh the next day I decided to put music into katea um using the Apple had a built-in speaker and uh was had helpfully included a routine for playing music in the Apple 2 red book um yeah yeah so a year after I submitted death bounce to bder bend and had been working on it it uh I finally dropped it the uh and you know Kota became my full-time Focus I uh you don't have time to do the full death bounce post today but uh but with

a card on your seat you can actually uh play in digital eclipse's uh making of Kota you can also play Death bounce in all its various builds see how it evolved and to the point where I abandoned it and Mike MAA has actually finished death bounce and and updated it so that you can play it and enjoy it uh so I'm very I feel Vindicated that after 40 years death Bounce has finally been published so summer 83 I didn't finish the game as I had hoped but key elements were already in place it's a series of guard fights going towards a palace and uh at this point the map ended here at the entrance to the Palace then there's one room you enter the palace you fight the bad guy there's the princess you win um and I uh I added something that I mean today we would call them cutscenes but I just to kind of keep the game from

being visually monotonous after each Victory the game would cut to the uh to the villain and and show him sending out the next guard and and also show the the princess increasingly enthusiastic and hopeful um and this of course is not a screenshot but a draxx mockup I had to cut out these pieces and put them into the game and you can see my little scribble storyboard up at the top the uh overall like the game started out the game design started out much more complicated and uh progressively got simpler in the course of development originally I had uh different kinds of kicks different kinds of punches lows would do different amounts of damage depending on various factors and also you could turn around and fight from one side to the other and pass I had all these ideas which partly because they were so difficult to implement but also just because as the game became sort of more cinematic and more of a story story like doing a detailed authentic karate

simulator became less and less uh a focus and also the controls I wanted it all to fit onto one two button Joys stick u a lot fewer buttons than we have on today's controllers uh on this slide I put the word Alpha because I think that's the point the game was at now that's the word we would use today and uh of course back then didn't have those stages of preconception production Alpha data I just called it finishing and uh the sled uh nothing to do with games but it was at this point that you know just you know from being in college and going to films I saw kurosa was Seven Samurai for the first time and it blew me away it became my favorite film and about the same time I got this big book of Disney Animation which was a wonderful story told by Disney animators early Disney animators about how they

had developed these techniques and you know how they had experimented uh sort of to to invent what we now call you know the technology and the Art of Animation this was so inspiring to me and I thought well you know computer games are also an art form in their infancy like animation was for these guys and like silent film was 80 years before so all you know all these things you know that got discovered and added are still waiting to be discovered and added for computer games so obviously with the Apple 2 I couldn't do anything like you know the beauty you know the emotional power of a Kurosawa film or a Disney animated movie but it it at least it sort of set the bar it created the intention and within what I could do I wanted to try to get some emotion and human feeling into katea and and this inspiration this influence arrived at a point when the game was already at Alpha but certain elements were still malleable and so I could still change things and still kind of scale up my ambitions notably for the storytelling

aspects of the game uh this was uh I Christmas break always vacations were a chance to work on the game and get a lot done in a short time because at school there were too many distractions uh the role of my friends and family as sounding boards you know and the and input just I can't overestimate it it's it was so many of the great ideas in katea came from people I was showing them a build of the game and they would say oh why don't you do this and uh in this case uh you know I was showing the game to my dad and uh I don't remember exactly how he commented but after you know I realized that uh all the arcade games that were super addictive like asteroids and Space Invaders and Pac-Man had a conflict of interest as in asteroids you know you've got whether it's asteroids or Pac-Man you've got a job to do like clearing the screen of rocks or eating all the little dots but then there's also something that adds suspense like the Flying

Saucer in asteroids can arrive at any moment and then you have to react to that Kara didn't have that it was just a series of fights so the idea that I came up with to add that was the hawk that the villain would have a hawk on his shoulder and then so you're ready for the next guard you're gearing up for the fight but then the hawk can arrive at any time and you sort of have to be ready for it and then the uh you know every good game design needs a trade-off you know there can't be a dominant strategy that if you just do this you'll win and in katea it was the two stances you know the fighting stance or the standing stance so the idea that if you're standing you can run faster but You're vulnerable but if you're in fighting stance you're protected but then it'll take you twice as long to cross the territory you have to end up fight twice as many guards that was my version of the asteroids Flying Saucer uh then uh another idea that came out of silent films cross cutting that is if you stop

running uh instead of just holding on the screen with nothing happening the game would cut away to show The Next Guard running towards you and would cut back and forth and there was a silent film by DW Griffith uh which had you know the hero is running towards uh you know the waterfall his his girlfriend is has been I think tied to an Ice Flow by the villain it's floating towards the waterfall so it's cutting back and forth between these two things with faster and faster Rhythm as he's trying trying to save her and uh so I thought well I mean cross cutting had to be tried for the first time in silent films like in the early films like there was no guarantee that that would work like wouldn't you know the audience be like what happened to the hero like where why are wait we're in a different place what's going on if you look at the really early silent films they have no cross cutting they just all happen in one place so you know try that for games as well and again there was the question like will it be frustrating or confusing for the player to suddenly have their controllable character disappear from

the screen and they're looking at something else will it be frustrating disorienting but it worked and the thing that made it work was having a different footstep sound for the hero running and for the guards coming because once those two different pitch footsteps was added suddenly it became clear and it worked and uh it worked uh so well that uh well I'll get to that later the talking about sound my dad uh volunteered to compose the music for the game and he's a psychologist but he's also a really talented classical pianist and he suggested the light Motif approach which if you you know films like Star Wars have it also operas like Vagner ring of the neong where you have a theme for the hero a a theme for the villain and a theme for you know A love theme and then the music kind of tells the story of of the game as well as the visuals uh when uh when limitation by the way was that you could only play one note at

a time with the Apple T speaker and uh because it took all of the computer's processor power to play a note at the desired pitch it's basically just having longer pauses before toggling that memory location it meant that the animation on the screen had to be frozen while the note was playing so the Cinematic animations of the game were all kind of character striking a pose and then playing a few notes and then you could animate and then play another arpeggio that's how we had to do it uh so it was at this point that I illuminated the map which uh had taken so much work to program but the cross cutting worked so well that didn't need it and actually it was better without it because there was a certain suspense of like feel like you feel like you're gaining a lot of ground it must be getting close to the palace and you can see that the cross cutting is going quicker it's taking the guards less time to reach you but you don't know exactly how much you have left to go so and I also like to eliminate things like meters and uh you know numbers you inventory anything on the

screen that kind of detracts from the composition again I was really inspired by the hooku size wood block prints and the more like I wanted Cara to have like a really strong simple clean look so that somebody could walk into the room and even if they weren't playing would look at it and go oh and kind of be drawn to the screen so the map had to go uh another really important element that I added at this point fairly late and again I think it was my dad who was watching it and saying I can't tell who's winning watching you fight and realized that it's the sound alone wasn't enough so I added these what today would be called uh GUI but I just put these comic book Stars you know on top of the uh you the animation to show when a blow landed and it was like orange or blue depending on which character it hit so that helped make the fights a lot more readable you could also see where you'd gotten hit like if it was you know in the head or in the middle and uh also my

journal reminds me at this point I decided to change the title of the game and to call it black belt that didn't last too long but so uh these are the frames of the climbing up Cliff that I filmed uh my dad you know with the car and so you can sort of see how it went from the sketch the storyboard sketch to the super eight to the tracings to the Sprites and uh the digital Eclipse product has a a wonderful feature called the rotoscope theater where you can actually like overlay these layers and you can try see this animation in different ways and play with it yourself so kind of get a feeling of what that rotoscope process was like in an interactive way uh another late but really important change until then until now I've been using the same animations for the hero and the enemies they were all the same and it

was actually the same shapes just mirrored but because it takes a certain amount certain number of milliseconds uh for the brain to see what's happening on the screen to register that and then for you know you have to send the you my dad as a you know who was actually writing an article on motor processes at the time explained to me that it takes a certain amount of time for the you know the signal to reach your hand you have to press the button and then the computer has to take that button press and decide that the next trame of Animation is going to be different and by the time all of that has happened you're already dead so to even things up I had the guards just play exactly the same moves as the hero but at half speed and that suddenly made it a game suddenly you could actually you had enough time to see what the enemy was doing and react fast enough to change your next move like oh he's hitting me I'm going to back up or he's vulnerable now I'm going to kick so now for the first time again so late in development Cara became more than just button

mashing yeah I mean it's the always the Dilemma the game is late it's already taken longer than I ever planned for it to do but there's so much still to do and only now that the game is coming into Focus I can see what what are the touches that could really make it better but again but it's it's already late uh sometimes you know features get cut and by the way the hawk is something that at this point I still hadn't implemented I was still debating in my journal that I might have to cut the hawk it's just going to be too much work there's no time to put it in but the game needs it here's one feature that I left in even though looking back it's completely optional when you back up all the way to the left and you fall off the cliff like I needed to do those frames of Animation to fall off the cliff and I needed to mask it against the cliff why did I do that it changed the gaml not at

all it would have been so easy to just block the player there and say no you can't fall off the cliff but uh I I mean I thought it was logical I thought it was funny and I always feel that every chance to use an existing game mechanic in a new way like makes the game like richer and more coherent and and is valuable and in this case one of the ktic had so few game mechanics and one of them is moving from left to right so if you move too far to the left well it it was a anyway I was determined to keep this the falling off the cliff in and I did the text prologue was also a ridiculous amount of work to program because inspired obviously by Star Wars I I was reading George Lucas's uh biography at the time it's probably what I was reading 40 years ago today in March 1984 uh according to my journal where I mentioned in that book uh but that text prologue which I

thought set the you know gave such a cinematic feel I had to copy and you know re copy and paste each line of pixels and redraw it one line up which is why it has that sort of choppy feel and it it's kind of slow um but you know I thought I thought the scrolling was you know kind of gave it a certain gravitas so I took the time to do that uh [Music] [Applause] anybody in this room uh have yeah sorry if this triggers traumatic childhood memories it's uh I have this sketch where I you know

first drew the puzzle and what's is I I actually considered several different options there was one that was more forgiving and uh one that was even more brutal where you actually had to Bow which that was impossible so I took that one out which I thought was kind of a shame because there was really no use for the Bowing mechanic in the game it's just kind of a nice uh optional thing but has no real function but uh I mean it's harsh because you have to start over from the beginning of the game after having fought and won all those battles could say it's a little unfair but I thought it was logical because you know the princess has been waiting in the cell in the enemy's Palace and suddenly the door gets kicked down and some guy in a karate suit walks up to her in fighting stance what's she G to do of course she's going to defend herself so and the game has so few controls that switching between fighting stance and uh standing stance is one so I wanted to use it

I did find the memory to add the hawk uh at this point as this dra screenshot shows me the hawk was purple um I wanted to use more colors but any Apple 2 programmers here will immediately understand why that made my life a misery and and created all kinds of ugliness it's it's that high bit you know it was just better for the whole game to be orange and blue with no green and no purple uh so this is the version uh this is the point at which I put the game on a floppy disc and sent it to broderbund there's the cover letter uh I also submitted it simultaneously to Electronic Arts uh they actually didn't answer if they had my life would have branched in a way I can't even fathom everything would have been different but uh this is me with my mom and my other sister Linda before I left for California uh where at my cousin's High School graduation I was 19 and I would

say this is the moment where my childhood ends and my life as a adult software developer begins because this is when I took the plane to broderbund uh and uh yeah I mean I'm going to talk more about Jun Lauren are you here by any chance um Jee Portwood and Lauren Elliot were um uh bbn's first game I guess you could call them today you'd call them game designers because they were at B but they were not programmers and uh they weren't responsible for developing a game and yet their input was creative uh this is where I met Danny gorland the creator of uh choplifter this is a screenshot from his next game airheart which he was in the course of developing and which he showed me so you can imagine like what what this meant to me

to meet these people who I had seen in the pages of soft talk magazine I had seen their names on title screens now I was actually meeting them and they were talking to me like uh normal people I was completely Star Struck uh one of the first things that happened was that the other programmers at bban kind of took me out for beer and pizza and they just told me how I'd missed the Golden Age how things had been so awesome a few years before you know when when BN was a small company that cared about quality and cared about its employees and now it was just a big Corporation it was all about profits and uh so this is the 1981 article that I'd read about BBN that made me want to work with him in the first place so by 1984 you know that first round of programmers felt that you know those days were gone uh I I wrote in my journal you know after I got back from that beer and pizza night yeah it was inevitable computers aren't just for hackers and hobbyists anymore they're for the mass

market so uh for anyone here who feels like you were just born too late and you missed the golden age uh don't worry there will come a time when you'll talk about the game development Adventures you're having now and uh and people will react the way that you're reacting now to this the rubber room is where Gan and Lauren uh kind of I mean Jee was a former Disney animator and they had skills beyond anything that I had ever seen before Lauren animated a uh a Lepard a running leaping Le leopard that was going to be another enemy in the game sort of to add to the villain's Menagerie the's like okay he's got a hawk he's also got a leopard um and Jean drew that that was his first draft of the palace that's at the beginning of the game um the rubber room was a room that I basically I was stuck or just wanted to chat or whatever I could always walk in and bounce I ideas off of them and so many of the you know that

the role of game designer didn't exist yet and the role of editorial didn't exist yet but they were really a step towards that and they had so much influence on so many BBN games including katea I mean as literally the the castle on the title screen as you see it so my main job that summer was to add uh two more levels so that in on the top you see my submission version where the game ends you know right after you enter the there's just a room you fight the bad guy game over and then the bottom version where that room turns into a whole Corridor you have to fight a whole another series of guards there's that uh gate trap at the end I'm sorry about that and then uh down below there's another series of rooms and a dungeon before you get to the princess and uh I also should mention that that summer Karate Kid came out it was playing in theaters it was a huge hit everybody was talking about karate karate was in the zeitgeist and I was terrified that once again I've missed the boat and my game is going to there's

going to be another Apple 2 karate game first and nobody's going to care about this one so that sort of added to my sense of pressure to finish the game uh so this was interesting this was one of the things that I learned at bbnd uh meeting real programmers for the first time uh who explained to me like better ways to do things that I'd never thought of before the lookup table so simple instead of calculating the position of every pixel you just create a table of 192 values because there's only 192 vertical lines on the screen and uh then you just look up the one you want that lets you animate much faster because it's faster to look up than to calculate and uh Roland uh just you know for amusement said you know you can invert that table and then everything will play Upside Down we did it it worked and so we were looking at this upside down game and thought h kind of fun so we went into Doug's office and showed him this version and said look we

can put this on the bside of the disc so that if anybody like accidentally puts the disc into the drive upside down it'll be playing upside down but they won't know what they did and they'll be like what what is and they'll you know the something with the computer and so they'll end up calling tech support and then bman tech support can say well sir uh have you checked the disc because maybe maybe and the disc is upside down in the drive and so they okay thank you that fixed it and and who knows maybe then they would just go on thinking that that's the way software works we didn't really think Doug would agree to do it because you know as the CEO I mean he has to be aware of profits and uh the cost of goods increased because this meant that you know discs were duplicated on an assembly lines so somebody had to actually flip the dis over manually and press another button to you know put the to record uh data on

the B side of the disc which normally was empty so yeah we never thought he would agree but he did for some reason and uh yeah another late change of the strength bars became discret triangles and again this was another step in the direction of Simplicity because I had this whole system of you know if you do this this s the enemy is doing that the blow does more damage or less damage but all that calculation I finally realized it's not adding to the player's enjoyment what does add to the enjoyment is a feeling of suspense that you know okay I'm one hit away if I hit him once I win but I'm or if you're down to one hit if he hits me once I'm dead so that suspense was more valuable than the you know the subtleties of karate fighting it's uh you know there's so many Forks in the road you know in a development over two or three years is every choice you make you know there's always reasons on

both sides but ultimately in R fact I can see that I was just making the choices that would take this away from being a karate simulation and more towards being a kind of interactive movie at some point you kind of realize what's the strongest thing about the game what you like what's the thing that you should just double down on and uh for Kara it was that so package design at at in those days they still consulted programmers about you things like box copy and uh you know how the game was going to be presented or maybe it was just me I don't know I just kind of like annoyed the marketing people by wanting to be involved in this process but uh there's an early box sketch uh as you can see clearly inspired by the Star Wars movie posters and the Box copy which again I didn't like the marketing Department's version so I kept uh you know trying to rewrite it and we yeah so by the time the game was finished at

some point the summer ended I had to go back to to school nobody thought I would most of the broderbund other programmers had either gone there straight out of high school you know and some of them actually had not finished high school because they got a programming job and that seemed more important so I think everybody kind of thought ah When September Comes Around he's going to stay but for some reason I was determined to go back and finish University and so I did although the game was not finished so the touches the copy protection all that stuff had to do remotely mailing discs back and forth and here here's a note from Roland Guston the the Wizard who did the copy protection for all the Verns games copy protection was like putting a frame on a painting it meant that of course every disc was crackable but trying to make it uncrackable or more difficult to crack it was like this uh this sort of a fun competition between Roland and the Pirates you who would then call him you know from Sweden or where whever to to exal in the cleverness that they had

found in defeating his copy protection me mechanisms so it was it was deathly serious and also good fun what I I want to see a GDC classic copy protection postmortem and and I want to hear Roland talk about that the leopard uh tragically I once I was back at school I I decided we had to cut it it just couldn't make it at the game it broke everyone's heart including mine it was already animated Lauren did a beautiful job uh this was echoed 19 years later when we had to cut the sand Griffin from Prince of Persia the sounds of time in order to ship by Christmas the you know the villain's uh biggest monster biggest uh pet that you never get to fight the final box art uh was beautiful painting done by Thomas Black Shear who I recently found out thanks to Twitter is an incredible artist he has an amazing body of work he shows at museums and uh the this uh the original painting is at the strong Museum of play in Rochester I was really lucky to have

an artist of this caliber uh do the art for katea and uh that note in the midd it was Jee Portwood who sent me the comp by mail of course it goes without no need to repeat there was no internet so everything was was done by mail so when the game shipped I was uh it was kind of remote and kind of abstract to me because I I was told like I knew that it was in stores but there were no computer stores you know on campus I'd gotten one shrink R copy in the mail so uh you know I was kind of just waiting to hear like are people playing it do they like it occasionally like uh I would get some mail from bbnd with a you know you know a little note saying oh here's here's a review or something like that so I was kind of waiting and uh Koto was not a hit out of the gate I think maybe we shipped too late or something but uh you know my journal entry you know I'm kind of woring thinking ah darn it it's not it's not

selling well by the way the this was about the time that I upgraded my Smith Corona Portable typewriter to to a Mac 128k Mac which Apple had a special deal with colleges uh for a student discount so this was right about the time that computers Max started to appear outside of my own dorm dorm room there was now a room in the basement which had Macs and printers so you could actually use them to to write papers and so forth uh uh down the hall was David po who was one of the other first people to have a Mac and I remember we would we would exchange discs fonts things like that uh vaa cook uh did the ports to the Commodore 64 and Amiga so for anyone who played those versions and is curious about the differences with the Apple 2 version uh the digital Eclipse making of katea has uh interviews with vaa and and those versions which really go into detail about the capabilities of those machines and the kind of the artisanal

choices and craft needed to basically remake the game for a different machine that had different uh strengths and weaknesses one of the strengths of both the Atari and commodore was that you could play real music with chords not just one note at a time and so my dad reorchestrated the music to take advantage of that uh so uh yeah so I got my first letters from players from people who had played katea and you know gave me feedback and of course before Twitter and the internet that meant that the person had to put the letter in an envelope put a stamp on the envelope and mail it to bband who would then mail it to me at college and one of the first uh letters I got was from John Romero uh asking some technical questions about the page flipping and so forth uh and I kept this you know along with my other letters but I didn't you know decades went by I didn't look back and then I met John for the first time

at a at GDC in an elevator and his first words to me were ah I sent you a letter in [Music] 1985 and uh so when I got home I looked at the I I still had the letter and uh sure enough you with the this wonderful uh header font and everything it was the second second fan letter I ever got so John says I answered him I I hope I did I'm glad but I may maybe someday he'll find whatever I wrote back uh soft talk by now sadly had gone out of business a few months earlier so I never K had never made it until the soft talk top 30 but billboard magazine had started tracking software bestsellers so uh uh in April 1985 I got the amazing news that uh kateo was the number one selling game my high school dream had been realized that's how I became a published Game author uh and this is where my making of

katea Journal ends and becomes the making of Prince of Persia which is another story so if you need to run my website has the info more info behind the scenes about making katea video and uh my graphic novel replay as well which I'm now going to I think we have a few minutes for questions and then I'm going to head down to the GDC bookstore uh and uh start at one I'll be signing uh replay my graphic novel Memoir this is the project that's consumed my last 3 years just as fully as making katea consumed me 40 years ago it's uh it's it's my Memoir of making games in the form of a graphic novel and it's also the story of my family uh including my dad his childhood Adventures as a refugee uh in World War II long before he composed the music for katea so um oh and I have to mention if the little card that you found on your

seat when you sat down has a smiley face on it you have a free copy of Replay waiting for you at the GDC bookstore so uh [Applause] and thank thank you thank thank you all for coming and uh uh yeah I think we can take a few questions um yep over here uh well I I I think I think it I think it worked I think K launched me into the Video Game World just just as I was hoping it's rare that we make a plan and it actually comes

true yeah um thank you for a very interesting talk um I'm I'm really inspired by your journaling skills as well do you have any tips or after so many years of journaling um how you can keep it up over the years and anything else yeah I think the key is that uh to make it a habit habits are so powerful you know like you get the habit of picking up your guitar and strumming a few chords every day at the end of 10 years you're an amazing guitarist you know I I developed the habit of sketching like just drawing what I see around me at like cafes and game developers conferences and somehow I learned to draw and like ended up drawing this graphic novel with the the journal I just developed the Habit that at the end of every day I would just write a few lines and once it becomes a habit it's harder to not do it than it is to do it cuz and habits can be negative like you know reaching for that you know whether it's the box of

chocolate chip cookies that you pick up at the grocery store on your way home or you know that fourth espresso uh but journaling is a really positive habit that I've you know I'm really grateful to have uh to have started it so early I have a question um since it is GDC I feel like the technical question is warranted this is before hit boxes or hurt boxes or anything so how were you actually calculating cont like what made you decide okay this aspect of the Sprite is the hit and this is the her boox like what were you doing to calculate all the interactions well the Apple 2 had no concept of a Sprite right exactly so they're just pixels on the screen so it's really up to the programmer in this case I had like I was tracking the uh you know the distance you know the X and Y coordinates of the player and the enemy so I could tell how how far apart they were and I knew what frame of Animation each one of them was on so I could say Okay so this Frame like if you're fully extended and a kick and you're this close to the other character and they're not in one of

these three poses that would qualify as a Dodge then it qualifies as a hit therefore Branch into the hit reaction cool and then of course like as to what is the hit reaction again it's code so I could say well if you're in this position like if you're in the midst of punching then it cancels your punch but if you're already this far then your blow is going to land as well but all of that was sort of hand tuned and and uh you know know hand made basically uh you know Mike actually asked at one point when he was doing the uh the chaker remaster that's in the digital Eclipse game how exactly did the uh enemy logic work and I can't quite remember but it basically came down to three variables that I just sort of tweaked to give each guard a different personality and and like you really have to look at the 6502 code to appreciate like what those numbers were doing that's cool thank you okay I think uh I think now is uh probably a good time

to to wrap it up I'm I'm goingon to it's going to take probably a few minutes to walk over to the North Hall I hope some of you will come if and uh if you have somewhere to be and you can't come to the the signning maybe we'll run into each other later uh if you if you enjoy graphic novels or if you're you know curious please check it out and if you hate graphic novels and have no interest but you feel a little bit guilty for having pirated katea in your childhood and you just want to support my current creative efforts then you know there's copies at the GDC bookstore thank you [Music]