Primal Rage II from Heartbreak to Resurrection: The Journey After Cancellation

get started just want to give everybody a reminder to either silence or skillfully muffle your cellphone's and also reminder to please fill out those surveys that they'll be emailing up to you guys if you like what you've seen it will really help us presenters and it'll help GDC give you more of what you want so thanks we're all coming out to my panel I know you've got a lot of choices I mean in tendo's going on right now and you're automata is going on right now and I'm like wow that's that's a pretty tough crowd to go up yet so thanks for showing up to Fran we rage - so that's what I'll be talking about today I'll be talking about primal rage - a game that was cancelled and never made it to release project cancellation is a developer's greatest fear years of life effort can be destroyed often caused by circumstances beyond our control so perhaps like some of you may have endured it happened to me and it changed my life profoundly however this story takes some twists and turns and has a

different ending than you might expect so I'm Kris tang I'm the senior game designer at indie dev janeshia hit sparks games my current project is a tentative lis titled strike Harbinger a hyper exciting high speed high frame rate spiritual successor to the arcade rail shooter coming out hopefully in the next year for PC arcade and console well I'm not a programmer by trade that's the first game I've done all the gameplay coding systems for so I'm particularly proud of it also our character crossover partner FX unit yuki is a newly developed in the action platformer for the old NEC turbo graphics 16 super CD console format I don't know if anyone remembers that it just went to guess this expressed so it should be available sometime soon I did some additional writing and design on that going way back I have experience working on the Tetris franchise transformers many Capcom games with Street Fighter 3 and Street Fighter Alpha 3 in particular the primal rage games at Atari of course and console titles going back to the Genesis and NES days at Tengen like gauntlet 4 and rampart I also have a competitive gaming

background and a best known for being the Sega world champion as broadcast on the world around the world on MTV in 1994 I'm also 1990 nwc Los Angeles City champion and the Hawaii State Nintendo champion I'm still active in East as a commentator for the tetris world championships going on nine years now and I am the voice of the boom Tetris for Jeff meme that has been going around lately which is kind of an embarrassing story you know about the boom Tetris for Jeff cool yeah if you haven't heard of that it's like there's like a video with like seven million views and at the tetris tournament a couple years ago I kept saying boom Tetris for Jeff and now anytime people see someone make a Tetris they'll comment like boom Tetris for Jeff it's got like 10,000 comments and most of them say boom Tetris for Jeff they made like a t-shirt for it and they're these compilation memes with like screens exploding and stuff it's pretty crazy but yeah that's my voice that's my fault so yeah it's been a pretty crazy run but this story starts off with my life at Atari games so at the Nintendo World

Championships in 1990 I met one of the supervisors at Tengen so that's a console division of Atari games not to be confused with Atari Corp which made the computers on the consoles I began working there a couple of weeks later and started doing odd jobs like QA product evaluations game counseling manual writing and translation I was quite possibly the youngest person ever to regularly work there and I was living my dream at a very early age even back then I had a deep interest in respect for the history of Atari iconic developers like Ed Logue and Earl Vickers who worked on favorites like asteroids gauntlet and 720 degrees roamed the halls I even got to work with some of them back then fanboying about early game developer legends and telling them how much I appreciated their work might have freaked them out I spent my lunch is studying replay and game machine trade magazines on the floor of the executives office immersing myself in the history their Atari resembled a tech city where there is a department for whatever needed to get done wood shop metal shop video lab PCB design

sound studio administration and the cafeteria where the incredible talent and resources there the potential for the future felt limitless there was no other place like it and there was a strong culture there that was all its own some of the friends I've made there are friends for life I consider them like family there's a reason why we still have Atari reunions years after its closure I don't even know if that's a thing at other companies so for me this was a very exciting time everything there had a huge and act on me it's where I grew up I wasn't sure if I fit in due to my age and lifestyle as most devs there back in those days saw games as only a job and they never played them outside of work whereas to me video games were my entire life but I'm glad that things in this industry have changed for the better in this regard and a much higher proportion of people who actually play games and love them are working on them now so not long after I worked started working at Tengen Street Fighter 2 was released in the arcades after work I would go to Sunnyvale golf land which was a ground zero of fighting games where capcom put their games on location test it was the

original site of the Evo tournament series going back to 1996 I want many competitions in this trophy is from the very first official Street Fighter 2 tournament ever held on may 30th 1991 I came in third the karate dude on it's pretty cool too so my expertise didn't go unnoticed by the company Atari wanted to get in on the fighting game craze and it was developing one with robots called cyber storm it was in bad shape with poor gameplay and they put me on the team to try to salvage what was there even though I was able to improve the gameplay considerably the robot the robots that were in the game didn't look cool and they had stiff animations which couldn't be fixed the game was ultimately cancelled but because I didn't like the game it didn't really affect me much however it was the first time I got to innovate a feature it was the first game to have a combo meter fighting game players love to find and perform combos but Atari didn't know much about those mechanics so I devised a feature where if a character was hit and was hit again before the character returned to their ready state a number would count up how many hits and reward

the players of the point bonus the game went out contest at Gulf land before it was canceled a few weeks later people noticed that the test versions of Capcom super street fighter 2 started incorporating a similar feature with the same wording right down to the point bonuses that nobody uses anymore I guess I won't be too offended they did end up hiring me later on so while I was working on cyber storm another project started codenamed t-rex I knew the game's programmer and would play on the research Street Fighter 2 in the game room and he had me check out his project after I kicked his ass it evolved into what we now call primal rage and once I was available to work on it full-time I joined their team so I won't go too much into primal rage 1 as it was released and well documented it was a fighting game with dinosaurs and beasts like characters hype my role on the rage one team was gameplay centric I implemented character gameplay collision hit boxes move animation timings AI scripting general game balancing and tuning in the arcades the stop-motion beasts made the game very popular with kids and casual players it

wasn't a huge hit with a fighting game fanatics though there are things I wasn't allowed to fix the special move inputs were not like other games and they were really awkward kids couldn't find the moves so the players that were most interested in playing the game were the least able to enjoy it still the game did very well it was considered the number one arcade game of 1994 and when it came time to port the game to home consoles they went all out more than 10 platforms Super Nintendo Genesis Game Boy game year PlayStation Saturn 32x PC Jaguar 3do video Amiga and even the tiger R zone it sold a million units right off the bat and enjoyed a certain amount of success in a market that was tough and unforgiving and it became a very successful brand for Atari merchandise such as comic books toys novels and apparel were made we were even in talks to have an animated series produced but we turn down offers since we wanted better production companies to be involved otherwise it would have turned out like double dragon the toys were very good so primal rage became one

of the games in the spotlight as video game violence was a new hot-button topic primal rage has this year of gore with characters able to do things like punch each other's brains out and eat the human tribesmen and then there was this golden showers in addition to the blood gore and violence there is an especially infamous finishing move for one of the a play characters urinates under defeated opponent burning their flesh away when angry parents found out it was pulled from some store shelves and the game made its way into the headlines our team took it in stride as I guess any publicity was good publicity back in those days even back in 1994 games were starting to receive updates with new roms to fix problems or add features in the hopes of improving improving the earnings income performance we released at least two updates and planned for a third which would add a boss character since the game didn't have one yet but the success of the game assured the development of a sequel so we decided to skip the version 3 update and the boss character for a full blown primal rage too primal rage made good earnings from kids and casual

players and they played against the computer but that wasn't the kind of coin drop that Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat games were making through competitive play which was a kind of earnings that management wanted if we were to make a sequel so those two ape-like beasts Blizzard and chaos were by far the most played characters even in killer instinct which is another 1994 fighting game less humanoid characters like Rip Torn saberwolf for the least picked despite them being powerful fighting game players just preferred characters that could hit with their arms and legs instead of biting or using their tail since her game was practically all beasts what could be done to make her successful sequel with primal rage brand and the solution was kind of strange that dantana so i recount the day when dennis our producer ran into my cube and proclaimed that he figured out the solution might even Worthen Power Rangers the idea was to have Titan sized human avatars that could morph into a beast form and back players could hit the top row of buttons which are morph the character into beast mode performing a flashy Auto combo sequence and morph back players could

also pick a beast character that could conversely morph into their human form experts could also pick a third meta version that can morph at will but didn't Auto combo this dynamic would make it so that the game was accessible to beginners with the easy super moves for the normal versions but it'd still be deep for experts who could dude man manual combos with the advanced one at first I was like what this is gonna work but I ended up loving the idea because we could have proper human combatants while retaining our theme and maybe got some new cool gameplay mechanics in the process this was a risk that the human characters would not be roll received in a game known for its dinos and beasts and I so here are character designs and here's some concept art that I was able to rescue so some of the only ones out there production are human human characters went in the order that you see here with Ark being the first each human avatar combatant has a corresponding beast God that they are connected to and retain design elements of their sponsoring deity God beasts they're leaders of their tribe chosen to channel their powers here you can see them with their corresponding beast

counterpart in the story necro saw in the game's final boss banishes the beast gods who must then physically manifest themselves so that the tribes avatar granting them special ability and tighten like sides in the process and here's the other characters as in the first primal rage not all player characters are good guys but mix of virtuous and destructive personalities which tend to match their prehistoric beast counterpart Diablos avatar was originally conceived to be a female but the proposed concept was weakened we were lacking a villain ask a male character in the roster so we ended up with the executioner likes engine which worked out really great while we were creating the eight new humanoid Titans we also need to create one new beast got to fill out the roster slash bang the saber-tooth god of combat has a familiar humanoid body type despite being a beast also new was a final boss character in nekross on his story brings together the lore of both primal rage games he's an undead bone dragon being the spawn of an asteroid egg that caused the cataclysms and emergence of the beast characters of the first game now fully matured he

threatens to drain the life force of every living thing on earth and in case you missed it necrosis andhe's Japanese for mr. death now even though they were only in primal rage - as a game both slash fang and neck Rahsaan made it into toy form dead croissant is particularly valuable is worth several hundred dollars sealed in the box like the blood for my collection I have pictured here ditching so images of the primal rage - character designs did end up in some magazines and comics additionally the core story of primal rage - featuring the human avatars was conveyed in the primal rage novelization a fun fact / Banks avatar his full name is actually Xiao Ming Tang Quan which happened as a result of the team being unable to agree on a name it's a mash-up of all the Asian core team members - of the programmers and myself our product manager came came up with it on the fly and while the intent was borderline racist the situation was hilarious and everybody liked it

that's Denis our producer posing in the main hallway - the rage lab and on the right opposable wire puppet mold pole for / bang that I used to design his moves the game was initially formally initiated as a project on March 1st 1995 for the budget of 2.3 million dollars which were a game in that era was a very large sum we were a team of 20 the largest team in coin-op at the time mostly art animation and programming additional costs associated with stop-motion included the manufacturer of the our matured puppets to be animated specialized stop-motion animators we got these guys from Hollywood they were really great and graphics processing support staff the stop-motion process also added a great deal of time to the schedule which is an art burden a much greater than that of traditional 2d pixel art 3d pre rendering or real-time 3d so this is a rare Polaroid photo that I took out the final are matured production puppets you straight stop-motion for the game back when they were brand-new they have since disintegrated and no longer exist or what's left of them

looks like a t800 the puppets were painted and garish odd colors to be able to do palette swaps and to read well for photography on the right you can see a completed standing ready sequence for the kena character after being animated processed and implemented into the game like on rage 1 my role was gameplay centric now expanded I got to design mostly everything from the ground up character attacks effects hitboxes balancing the CPUs AI and the overall fighting quality implementing AI behaviors as an interesting thing in a fighting game they become like your children you're teaching them how to fight and handle various situations and they take after you when your product is out in the field you really hope that they can fend for themselves and put on a good show sometimes you make one character feel so fun and powerful you then have to go back and make all your siblings just as strong and hope that the whole family ends up being badass and awesome I also wrote lore that story for the universe Bible that our licensees used for our toys comics novels etc I'm super happy I got to write content that ended up on the backs of toys since I was a big fan of stuff

like GI Joe and transformers that had stuff like that because of the high cost and lengthy process of stop-motion animation we had to be sure every frame was one that we wanted or needed move started off as a concept video or sketch which was adapted into a 2d storyboard that could be flipped booked and tweaked once approved our stop-motion animators would bring them to life with the armature puppet moving at one frame at a time to be photographed the photos would then be cleaned up and scaled by her interns in the graphics processing dungeon and only then could they be put in the game so I'll be showing you some videos of this process most of the hand-drawn storyboards let us cut frames and determine whether is good enough for stop-motion so this sequence that you're about to see was not when used in the game but it was the only hand-drawn storyboard that survived to this day that I have so the in-game movie at the end was a closest final animation I could find so sorry about that that's Steve reason burger our production coordinator great guy that's a hand-drawn animation and the

closest sequence in the game I could find that looks like that so it's a pretty involved process and this next video will show many moves from their video sequences or their video references to their final in-game animation note how fast some of these animations got once they are implemented into the gameplay this is a lot of fun [Music] [Applause] [Music]

that's felis he's the Atari IT guy guys just happened to be traded Filipino stick fighting that's good [Music] you don't want to mess with that IT guy [Music] I got to do the basics dude [Music] yeah the cameraman is Luiz he was the storyboard animator great guy to work with totally miss him

cool suicide [Music] then it's our producer hamming it up [Music] applause [Music] [Music] so you might notice that these were all shot all around the company in the cafeteria weight room conference room random empty rooms [ __ ] so yeah we try

to use the blue or green screens if we could but sometimes you would just do it wherever we could to get the job done fast and sometimes stuff got wrecked whoops okay so that was how we got some of our animations that move designs done and as you can see I was pretty into what I was working on I was a huge fan of fighting games and did shoryuken and Hadouken on my friends all the time in real life so creating new moves for fighting games and getting to act them out as part of the job was pretty awesome our game was a product of the time nothing like this would be made now due to the cost because stop-motion talent and necessary infrastructure just wouldn't exist now we had 1,500 to 2,000 frames of animation per character full unique frames as parts of each pose were not reused to save money like other games this quantity was way up from 400 from primal rage 1 per character with the total being even more massive going from 7 characters to 17 lots of memory

so to facilitate the animation custom hardware had to be created along with special routines on the software end the first few frames of animation were stored in ROM and when an animation was called up it would load the remaining frames off the hard drive into RAM for playback this was untested cutting-edge theoretical technology it was hoped that the frames would be loaded fast enough to be displayed in time it was difficult to get it right and it caused graphics glitches when it didn't we were also loading music pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV movies off the drive some of them at the same time so we were getting a lot of use out of it hard drive use and arcade games was rare at this time and the treat the term streaming hadn't even been coined yet the game was ahead of its time in doing things that weren't possible or practical for home conversions it created an experience that you could only get in the arcade but that was a double-edged sword as a home port attempt would not have been up to snuff and that may have caused potential problems for the game's existence going into the future and despite some great things and ideas in motion there are many difficulties that contributed to an eventual cancellation so now we'll take a look at some of those

factors so primal rage was a very ambitious project even by Atari game standards we planned the ship in the summer of 1996 but that schedule slipped to the lengthy stop-motion process and hardware migrations for budget and political reasons management stuck us on Jaguar derivative derivative hardware called Co jag which is underpowered and performed worse than the primal rage one arcade hardware killer instinct had raised the bar for graphics so we had to be competitive trying to run on the inferior Kojak Arbor cost us dearly in time effort and morale a bit later but just in time and arcade variant of the PSX Sony Hardware became available it was capable of quality in 2d and 3d and gave us translucency and effects that look impressive to this very day as well as play field scaling necessary for a fighting game with huge characters though relying on this non internal hardware it may have led to other factors contributing to our cancelation we could now make this a competitive product despite some additional delays as a result of having to migrate again so the process taking something from

concept to eventual implementation in the game was too lengthy mostly due to graphics processing time it took months to get a character playable and that made my job that much harder since the whole game had to play as a ghost play well as a cohesive work puppet design and manufacture lead time made character pre-visualization impossible people to this day sometimes feel that the human characters look a bit freakish or ugly and to be honest he didn't look quite how I would have wanted but by the time the ball was rolling nothing could be done a physical model for graphics meant absolute commitment what her characters have looked better with or cooler with smaller heads and more realistic proportions we had no way of knowing but this doesn't take away from the beautiful results of stop-motion animation it's just at the time expense and a built-in ability to pivot was simply the nature of the beast no pun intended we never had a basic but polished vertical slice of the game for example a single-player bubble character fighting themselves one background with a few moves and effects running solid

and looking good while we knew what we were shooting for we were never able to demonstrate that to decision-making entity and that made it much more likely for a plug to be pulled before we were looking representative of our final form the technical hurdles such as harddrive streaming also contributed to instability and a general glitchy look during development the game went on field test before characters are completed or balanced and they lacked their finishing moves slips ins schedule may have been the cause but showing a game before it's ready can ruin his chances for success Capcom fighting games of that era our tests on tests were indistinguishable from their finished product on the other hand primal rage 2 went on and test when it was still buggy incomplete and unoptimized and it earned purely on test as a result kind of unfair so aside from our schedule slipping and other production issues there is a major event that happened right in the middle of our project in March of 1996 Atari games was sold to WMS there the parent company of Williams Midway the makers of Mortal Kombat any manufacturers of

killer instinct so nothing to take away from the great creators that they had there but the management people that owned them ended up buying us there are other bidders in contention such as Nolan Bushnell but unfortunately we were bought by our direct competition despite being told that things would be business as usual a restructuring and reduction and force followed entire departments and longtime positions going back to the 70s were eliminated the family which had existed since the beginning of the video game industry was being disassembled the loss of morale was apocalyptic even those who weren't laid off started to leave when they saw the writing on the wall skipping ahead this led to the closure of the company in the next six years went ahead existed for 25 previously the amount of history and legacy destroyed caused by this event is immeasurable so for us primal rage is a brand 8 into mortal combat which was highly successful for WMS the new management's commitment was put to the test when we asked what characters from Mortal Kombat we could use due to the merger and our request was outright

refused despite a history of sharri characters within their own coin-op products and then them having used mortal kombat actors to promote Nintendo's killer instinct I don't think they wanted our product to be released no matter how good or profitable it would have been they felt as though we were bought only to be gutted then eliminated like Leyland and trade West who WMS had purchased before us and there was no trace left of them I didn't think our project was in danger though since primal rage was such a straw ran with licensing deals in process I continue to work very hard as I knew we were entering the homestretch at some point I was told to dial it back to wait to hear back from management just in case things went south but being young and stubborn I did not and secretly worked late into the night and didn't care if I was told not to I wanted to see her game become the best it could be because I envisioned players around the world having a blast with it but that was not to be the game was cancelled within a couple of work with a couple of work weeks left in the year we were given a chance to wrap things up for the project would be mothballed team members

were encouraged to join other projects to avoid being laid off so a special meeting was announced on the day we were we sent off our distributor milestone for national fuel testing this was likely the first version that had mostly stable complete characters with some fatalities yes probably the version that's out in the wild right now at that meeting on December 5th 1996 our project was officially canceled checking the dates as a parent that the decision was made long before the milestone had them seen that meant we pretty much never had a chance it would have been very difficult to produce a straight to home conversion of the game consoles of the time could barely pull off and accept acceptable primal rage won and it wouldn't be until a decade later with a PlayStation 3 his hard drive installs that a proper primal rage - could be made with the time I had left I kept working hard and polished things up to the very end I didn't know any other way of operating and I'm not even sure if I went home I remember the last day when we were all in the lab and I was hammering on things into the last second and my latch my last batch of edits

almost didn't get in and now I wonder to this day if the final lab version is out there somewhere waiting to be discovered so cancellation for a game feels like non-existence for it you can't convey the art of gameplay through pictures or video it must be experienced I was probably more devastated than I realized and I was still in disbelief I think subconsciously I was preparing to deal with the loss in some way so that I can move forward I came back after the holidays and had to face the reality that the game was not going to be released I did not join another team despite there being another fighting game project I could have gone to I sort of chose to be laid off and even though I was very loyal to Atari games as a core ideal it wasn't really the same company anymore not after WMS had taken over I packed up my desk preserving what I could and said my goodbyes our producer arranged for me to have a primal reach to prototype cabinets set aside for me so I could come and pick it up at some point but that would prove to be a bit difficult so how did I deal with what happened how did I move forward helpless

crushing heartbreak and despair was about to overcome me and it seemed that all was lost by some miracle I had a job lined up at Capcom Japan while primal reach to was my life in so many ways working at Capcom was also a dream they made the games I already loved and the problems I had trying to get a quality game made at Atari would be a non-issue at Capcom who back in 1997 still knew how to make great fighting games when I left Atari I intended to come back and visit get more of my stuff that was left with co-workers and friends including that primal rage - arcade cabinet and a turbo duel when dev kit which was worth a lot of money now but I didn't they had a reunion that same year in 1997 I didn't even go out of sight out of mind working at Capcom Japan was a perfect job to help me forget what had happened giving me a sense of advancement and purpose I was living my dream of working on games that players truly loved

however I did miss being intimately involved with a design of a single game as much as I was was primal rage - while he contributed to many Capcom games proudly their fighting games would probably still be ok without my help at least in 97 Atari actually needed me and I kind of missed that I'm not sure if this happens naturally in the process of moving on but my memories and perception of everything that I had been involved at at Atari had began to erode I treated it as if had been a bad relationship with a bad breakup I remember I began to remember primal rage - as being this horrible ugly buggy mess a terrible game that I didn't want anybody to see something I should be ashamed of for its failure to be released and I think that's had a lot to do with the game being in such a bad state for so long up until the very end and that's the impression that stuck with me perhaps this was some way of coping to devalue my memory of it to make it easier to forget in these years I didn't talk much about primal rage - and tried to avoid the subject so a couple of years later there

was another fighting game at in at Atari that was under development they had gone through various incarnations until its final form 10th degree and it was finally competitive with Capcom fighting games in terms of art style and gameplay friends of mine formerly of Capcom were actually in charge of the design but I learned too that that it too had been cancelled it was a little vindicating since in my mind I felt since it was better than primal rage - in some ways might have been more deserving of release and since it can that's like well well what hope that my game have right so my supervisor at Capcom and I went to Atari to see if there's any way we could salvage the project but nothing became of it I didn't think to try and get my remaining belongings like my peril rage - machine or maybe rescue some of its assets which is something I kind of regret now as it was probably my last chance after the cancellation of countless projects in February 2003 with less than 30 employees remaining Atari games then known as Midway Games West was closed at the home where I grew up along with its

history and what remained of primal rage - was gone forever I mistakenly believed that would always be around and I could always go back whenever I wanted but time happens and the world changes whenever there is a company closure the history and resources that are lost or destroyed this is immeasurable especially for a company that had been sent standing for so long I further pushed back the memories I had of working there and the joy that I felt being a part of it I felt the same helpless crushing despair I felt when my project was cancelled but the next time they had a reunion I definitely went and I would never miss another one again years passed and time marched on relentlessly in the post 2000 era arcades began to die and production of new arcade games flowed as they fell out of style as an era of emulated arcade games began and while most of them would become playable on computers through emulation primal rage - did not with a special custom hardware on unorthodox graphics delivery methods that made sense but later I found out what from one of the

programmers that they had booby-trapped the code to prevent bootlegging and reverse engineering the lack of emulation meant that it would remain unplayed by the public it's fate to be forgotten I continue to feel rather just associated with primal rage and started although it started bothering me that I didn't go back to pick up my rage to prototype arcade machine the prototype arcade machine the period at California extreme a retro arcade show here in the Bay Area in the early 2000s but either the buttons or monitor didn't work and that made me super sad when I saw this as either an act of information charity or maybe like leaving flowers on a grave I left a primal rage - official move list that I had made for the distributors and duct-taped it to the cabinet pictures of this flyer would circulate on the internet thereafter adding to the game's mystique sometime in the mid-2000s out of curiosity I did a random web search to see if anything on primal rage - it ever surfaced hoping to find something along the lines of emulation progress but I didn't find what I expected this is how I found out about a website called deviantART and what would later be come - known as rule

34 apparently there were prepare more rage to out there an oddly fan art and fanfiction advocacy of it existed particularly of the female characters though I was slightly horrified I was I marvelled that enough people cared about from what little there was out there to be fans of these otherwise non-existent characters so more time passed and as such things that become old become new and cool again through nostalgia the kids that had grown up with primal rage in the arcades and in their homes we're now remembering the game with fondness despite its flaws so at conventions in gaming Expos I started to talk to fans about primal rage alongside things like Street Fighter and Tetris also around this time YouTube started to become a thing allowing people to share their nostalgia views and playthroughs on all games in 2013 a video called primal rage - forgotten legend appeared this shared information that was known about primal rage - at the time like the game's teasers that appeared in comics and magazines the broken state of the emulation and some prototype footage the

views and comments revealed that there was some desire to see it revived for whatever reason I still felt the game with this wretched thing that should remain buried so I dismissed it and chose not to take part in the discussion and then everything changed the galloping ghosts arcade in Brookfield Illinois acquired a primal rage - prototype board and put it on a cabinet on their arcade floor and now stood on YouTube on June 21st 2014 for the uninitiated the galloping ghosts arcade is one of the best and most notable arcades in the world housing 700 plus arcade games with a new game released on their floor every Monday but prior to this I never heard of the place before the arcade live-streamed primal rage - on twitch for the next few days for all the world to see I learned about the game being there and I watched the stream the game looked better than I had remembered it to be I was also taken aback by the positive things people were saying about the game and how great they thought it played I ended up interacting with the people of the arcade through the twitch chat and some of them some of the things that I knew about the game through like how do you pick the secret

characters by holding up on the select boxes even though my memories were still fuzzy I watched the stream through its entire run fixated on my unseen work and those who are experiencing it for the first time I started to realize that maybe I had forgotten that at the very end of the project maybe the game didn't look so bad after all so this was a mostly complete multi-million dollar triple-a game from over 15 years ago from out of nowhere was suddenly unleashed into the internet era for most games one could Google look Google up an FAQ or watch a playthrough on YouTube but nothing of the sort existed for primal rage - its secrets were fresh real and ripe for discovery those that were playing it were excitedly uncovering the game special moves combos and finishers as they went and the world watched along via stream as they were being discovered in real time the arcade staff and players knew their stuff about fighting games and as I watched them play and enjoy it my perception of primal rage too began to change one could say that this is when my healing truly began and primal rage

two main news headlines I got covered on all the major sites joystick otaku polygon Destructoid this I did not expect and especially the meaning of this that that primal rage too exists it's kind of nice after all that happened after the word got out players began to travel to the arcade just to see and play the rare prototype game Doc Mac the owner of the galloping ghosts arcade and its related businesses mentioned players coming in from around the world and a couple who hitchhiked their way across the country to come and play primal rage - so pilgrimages were actually a thing oops but this would only be the beginning of something even more amazing the galloping ghosts arcade while already specializing in rare games now fully realize the impact of making something unique and historic available games that never saw the light of day now had a potential home where they could be maintained protected and most importantly made available for people to play and enjoy many other prototypes would then be put onto the arcade floor including beavis and butt-head fries the

cat bio freaks and the infamous tattoo assassins galloping ghosts also began to actively collaborate with creators who had unreleased games restoring them and sometimes even finishing them to make them playable by the public Jeff Lee of Qbert Fame worked with them to put Argost and arena on the show floor or they arcade floor and Brian Colin who made rampage worked with them to produce Deathstalker The Spectre files which was a cancelled laserdisc game its footage was shot in the 80s so they had to convert it to digital and the entire game was redone in a modern engine so now you can go to the game and play it as an arcade machine but you can also order the full arc heating unit from them and purchase one so it's definitely a significant effort and Purdue in preserving games that would otherwise be lost forever on March 28th 2015 I was invited out to the galloping ghosts arcade for their developers day event and finally got to play a fully functional primal reach to arcade game something I hadn't been able to do for what felt like an eternity and likewise from watching out on the stream it was better than my mind had pictured it after all those years what was even more

amazing though was finally seeing the arcade itself so filled with great games in history you won't find anywhere else and meeting the incredible people who could make a place like that possible on their planet hollywood-style developer VIP autographed picture wall at least in this photo my photo appears underneath Ed Boon The Mortal Kombat guy among other other legends it's pretty cool so I didn't know this trading card existed until last November when I was being inducted into the International videogame Hall of Fame in Iowa and someone came up to me for an autograph and he showed me this card and it mentions me being reunited with primal rage too so when I went back to the galloping ghosts arcade the next day I was like hey no one told told me they made a card for this and then Pete Hahn the primal rage high score world record champ who was actually works there I was like oh yeah do you want some so I have a few of these to give away to you guys if you can find me after the presentation so that might have wrapped up the story quite nicely but then the unimaginable happened in 2017 primal

rage to finally became playable through emulation longtime efforts being made by YouTube user grunt Dilla 94 progressed significantly and in March of 2017 he released a modified version of name called MAME for Rage 2 that allows existing primal rage to romps out in the wild to be playable while emulation isn't 100% perfect yet and there are glitches and crashes it had more than the minimum that fans had hoped for in some ways the emulated game runs better than the actual hardware at loading data with an emulation is faster than that of a 1996 IDE hard drive interface that we didn't get to optimize leading the better frame rates and were consistent animation a game ahead of its time that's able to scale up to the future for better performance is interesting indeed with the game now able to be played by the masses it would now have YouTube videos and streams on twitch exposing it to again to a new audience and boom primal rage to blows up in the news again maybe more people cared about the game that I thought but my favorite

article to come out of all this was the Engadget 127 teens hottest new fighting game going from working your ass off on a game that never got to exist to have it become 27 teens hottest new fighting game 20 years later even if it's said in jest that's a beast God to your level of indication I was completely floored but the real payoff and what really healed me as a game developer after having their dreams cancelled so long ago was getting to see players play the game and enjoy it so there are a couple of videos here fair warning there's some colorful language but for some reason seeing people react this way to something you've created is really quite satisfying as you'll both see I also cleared it so they said it was okay yes this is that galloping ghosts in 2014 when they were finding things in real time Oh oh [ __ ] yeah I did a fatality yeah

that's not a little kid by the way he's a grown man Oh fatality we got a new one [Music] well there we go holy [ __ ] fatality [Music] oh [ __ ] fatality did you guys see that did anyone see that please and this is for 2017 your best friends play oh my god are there fatalities there are

fatalities any idea that was awesome I think Jase enough now with the weird God am I am i blizzard yeah yeah yeah I'm Blizzard right so and then oh my god Matt you're so strong holy [ __ ] realize the true the Hobbit dinosaur well you're a savior to a tiger that's cool turned into slash BAM yes against a bunch of dinos yeah new stage you fought them like a bunch of rotting carcasses oh yeah he's got a lot he's got he goes he goes ham ok unclear what what's what's strong yet oh oh why didn't this win the fan vote it erode I don't because people just don't know what's quality yeah that's true wait [ __ ] do that that's nuts yeah big combo he's got a TV yeah yeah

and I remember he has that I say that in an alternate reality where this did come out primal rage would have been a franchise that was super good so yeah and it's nekros on own a cross on my god oh my god that's the best yeah I finally got to see people enjoy the game and that was like an incredible feeling and a real gift so years of just not knowing what it would have been like if you had people play it suddenly having people play it was the thing so after people finally got to enjoy it and maybe take a look back and look at it with new eyes

in one sense is a demon that haunted me for a while but in order for me to learn it's something I had to face so seeing humans in DINO or seeing humans and their dino game is somehow offensive to some primal rage fans I mean I get it I love the beast too but they are still in the game and this game wouldn't have been made at all without the humans so if new players are able to pick up the game and they could do it easily because they have familiar humanoid characters I still feel that were justified in the decision to include the humans even now players often comment positively about the impressive animation I appreciate the aspect of this project more and more now as the animation makes the game unique and it's helped at the age visually very well when other games of the era have not I remembered this game is a broken terrible mess but new players playing the game we're saying how complete and polished it felt despite being an incomplete prototype I still think it's a bag of Horrors in that regard because it never went through any balanced testing whatsoever it was just my best guesses but then

they'll say how it was more complete and finished than Street Fighter 5 and then I got a high-five them one thing I do get smug about is how people say the game plays so much better than primal rage one dine remind myself that's how I tried to get primal rage one to play and I wasn't allowed to and then I got sad again so nothing's really changed there in the twenty or so years of fighting game evolution and the rise of eSports people who know their stuff discuss primal rage - using modern fighting game design terminologies and dissect it as if it were made today I feel so vindicated those players say that primal rage - still holds up as a well made fun fighting game and that's one of the key things that changed how I felt about the project and why I can look at it positively now so what can we learn about all that's happened here let's take a look at what I learned and maybe that can apply to other situations so having an impressive polished vertical vertical slice as early as possible as a must looking and being viable is really the best defense against cancellation and all it's good place to be at in your project if you

have a piece of your game that's playable fun and cool and increases everybody's morale and armsie was something that you show off and be confident about even in the face of someone above you who makes decisions I should have taken what was going on in the company by out more seriously even though I wasn't in the immediate layoffs the shockwaves caused major disruptions in Morelos this day I believe that if the company wasn't sold off primal rage 2 would have been released but you know after all is said and done I think I'm kind of okay with how things played out in the end I wish I had been more appreciative and encouraging of my teammates there are things that happened since the cancellation that helped me heal now but I'm not so sure about the others on the project whether they know or care especially since some of those like our main stop-motion animator Pete client had passed pretty soon after the project was over I wish there was a way that I could bring the reassurance I have now back in time to make the work more of a joy to those involved no matter what the outcome would have been I did what I could but it's never enough you can never preserve enough history if something's certain to be trashed if

you're not there to protect it anymore try to save it if you can't take it with you take a picture make a record tell someone who can protect it or save it company buyouts and closures need to be done more responsibly maybe more steps need to be taken so digital history can be preserved by those that can do something about it before it's all thrown in a dumpster to be never seen again I especially didn't take enough photos of project and especially people digital cameras weren't a thing yet so that's an excuse but it's still not an excuse the random motion caption capture video is that you saw here are absolutely precious to me and are one of the key pieces of history that I have the reactions to the to those little bits that I've shown a bit have had a huge response from fans and allow a better story of our development to be told also getting to see my friends and co-workers and the building I used to call home that's priceless I regret not checking in and keeping ties with my remaining coworkers I think more preservation would have been possible had I been better about this also huge regrets not going back for my primal rage to machine I think that failure on on that end multiplied my negativity about the game

due to the added loss and the fact that the company closed so soon after I realized I had shut out a lot of the pain and in order to move on and in order to survive but you can only do that for so long sometimes you have to go back and fight your demons or make amends to have a better closure it's not always possible and sometimes crazy stuff has to happen first but once you actually get over things in a positive way you'll be better for it so what went right and what am I glad that I did and what would I do again if I had the chance maintaining my work ethic even when all seemed lost even if others told me not to this was a happy coincidence and that I was so young and motivated and that everything mattered it so much to me I really knew no other way and that's just pretty much stayed the same ever since a lot of the quality of the gameplay came from best guesses and long lonely hours to do it so the game never actually went the full test or preliminary balancing so always do your best and there won't be a chance for regret releasing pieces of primal rage to in the form of toys comics books etc a trail for fans to follow if there's enough pieces of the

game out there to generate interest and make people look for answers years later those people may help to revive or maybe even rebuild your cancelled game at some point in the future preserving what I could documents art and data glad I did that something may be important someday so a tip for you time travelers out there trying to get a 20 megabyte mailbox off of all like any kind of large file off of a computer from the early 90s prior to the invention of invention of USB is no trivial task be prepared reaching out and being being encouraging of your fans and projects by establishing a friendly and positive dialogue with your fan community they understand the hard work that went into these games and have knowledge and respect for it by appreciating their air efforts whether it's making YouTube videos or working on emulators or things of that nature it could drive forward a future for a product that might not otherwise have one what else is the YouTube revolution absolutely made what happened with

primal rage twos emulation possible it's where it all happened a dialogue was started and then findings were posted and I got people excited and efforts were encouraged community motivation is a powerful tool even my interactions there have had a positive effect where whether they are intentional or not and I can't say how amazing the galloping ghost arcade is for them to invest so much effort into restoring games and providing a place where people can play rare and unreleased works but there are many organizations like this whether it's an arcade a museum a yearly convention or events that host them these are invaluable resources for players and developers so even if they aren't helping to preserve or revive your works considering contributing to their efforts so they may continue operating finally some of us are in here in this room today to find out about gaming history and learn from it for that to happen knowledge has to be shared and this is especially important for canceled games and endangered knowledge this is why I love GDC and have been attending for so long and I'm happy to finally be able to give back a little bit of that so if you have a story whether you share it with other professionals or fans of your work

someone may learn something or become inspired to so project cancellations are usually stuck in past tense something bad that can't be changed work wasted that will never be seen but this story ends a bit differently and I've made a video that shows some personal resolution as a result of primal rage 2's revivals and how it ties them to the present and the future a Witcher versus the Beast of Mana killer instinct versus pride so I didn't work on The Witcher 3 but I thought this reference to primal rage clearly in the context of 1994 since it also mentions killer instinct was really interesting it made me think all these years an ad shoved primal rage games so far back into my mind that I never did anything like this I never connected what I did later to what I did before kind of like a lost opportunity so maybe I should change that because eventually I did get over my shame I learned to be proud of my work I learned to be proud of my work

and why is it showing my powerpoint on the video hold on a second okay so all these years and I finally got over my shame I learned to be proud of my work cancelled or not and now maybe I don't mind mentioning primal rage every now and then even here in this last project I did something on because you know it's a prehistoric level and it kind of fits so I go back to the galloping ghosts arcade every now and then every year thankful for their efforts I was able to donate some cool primal rage stuff to their living museum of all things primal rage their prototypes didn't have a bezel and control panel as the game got canceled while it's working on them so now I'm working on with the arcade to get them done assembling art and other lost resource I've since found to finish the cabinet and make their machine truly complete but that's not all it turns out they're interested in what I was doing next my current game project the tentatively titled strike Harbinger was first

unveiled at the galloping ghosts arcade they will be helping us to produce the eventual arcade version all three leads on our team including myself our ex Atari games creators and with that you want to carry on the hopes and dreams of where we want to game for as bizarre as it sounds my current team and project might not be where we are today at primal rage do not been cancelled and despite the hardships along the way and led to many other things that were good maybe primal rage to will be a part of everything I do now and maybe this phone dragon boss came from out of an aspirate egg or maybe it isn't so that might have been the end of the story but this story kept writing itself even after my talk out of pro my god accepted at GDC so now you get the

special surprise ending at the end of 2017 youtube user green geode who is on the forefront of research efforts regarding primal rage to choose data and the inner workings of the game posted this video I did not ask him to make this nor did I contact him and we have to quote myself I can tell this was not representative of how far we came because talent slide is still super broken and it really bugs me the crazy slide can be fun too the broken state but it makes the whole game look unfinished flaw so it seems that there's still a desire to see primal rage to completed some day and what you see here are the very first efforts towards continued development of primal rage - going into the future by way of patching the game with various fixes which someday may even be used to update the arcade machine at galloping ghosts the only thing that's going to get cancelled now is the apocalypse someone noticing my conversation on YouTube resulted in a buck bug thanks for a two-decade old game so you never know what good it can

do to share a bit of history and to discuss your stories - I look forward to further interactions with these passionate fans at least in an advisory role to maybe see it get closer to where it would have been had it not been cancelled I feel fortunate that by twists of fate one of the most devastating things that happened in my life was eventually turned into something positive cancellation did not have to mean non-existence I can only hope that others of you with a cancel project or bought out company may also find a way towards a better outcome sometimes you can't fight fate but you can roll with the punches and make the best of a situation it may take years or in my case decades but never give up hope learn from your experiences good or bad project released or project cancelled a win code I wrote for the character review and Street Fighter sums it up quite nicely whether we win or lose all of our battles make us stronger here's some contact info and resources if you want to find out more about what's going on with primal rage - going into the future or for myself for that matter please support these primal rage - youtubers this story wouldn't have

been possible without them and if there's time I can take quest so please approach the microphone hi this is more of a comment than a question so I'm going back about 17 years now I've been preserving unreleased games over the Internet and it's involved about five figures of lost money on my part is involved fighting a lot of collectors who want to like hoard these things away and they're like goblin treasure hoards and you know it's evolved a lot likes kind of stalkery emails to developers and things like that and to see this talk at GDC has been just really gratifying for my work over all these years I'm really happy to hear it like they're they're people that hoard this stuff and then there's also people like galloping ghosts who actually want to put them out for people to play and I think that's great like right a places like that can live and the games get to live too so I just wanted to thank you and thank you an

emotional moment and thank you for any efforts that you do to preserve games I didn't have anything to do with this one but thank you very much you're welcome hi given the resurgence that primal rage to had on the Internet is do you think there's any possibility of future installments in the series so I guess I ask get asked that a lot a lot of it has to do with who owns the IP now which is probably Warner Brothers because they bought everything that Atari games had for a while they brought out a version of gauntlet if they want to do an official one then they would have to find a developer and do it if they wanted to reach out to me I'm busy right now but I can advise them there has been some interest a lot of fans contacted me and yeah I've been kind of like thinking well what would a spiritual successor be like so you know if the IP goes up for sale again I might you know take a look at that so that might be official but otherwise Warner Brothers is kind of in their hands as they own it now okay thank you you're welcome

any other questions okay have you been in contact with any of the sort of dumpster diver II Atari collectors who might have assets that you're missing for this game hmm I'm in contact with some people that do have a lot of the Atari stuff actually the owner of Atari games comm has a lot of the stuff and he has been doing some things to preserve it he's been sharing his photos some of the photos were actually from ones that he had posted okay so there they're out there I don't need to introduce you that okay yeah I know Scott okay yeah he's the one who I put the flyer up on his machine yeah oh nice see it all it all works out thanks if there's any other questions that y'all can come up here and grab a card if you want

[Applause] you