John Van Ryzin

The best part of this thread was the gong show video. Acceptance or denial of simple supply and demand economics is boring.

Yes I am John Van Ryzin, glad you like HERO. You are right, Nintendo controlled the number of released games more than the quality.

This thread is ridiculous. No one is claiming people did not want to play games anymore. Crash was caused by an excessive inventory of low quality games. Nintendo and others fixed it by controlling quality.

Ha! I worked at Activision during the crash. A huge percentage of employees were laid off, and those of us that remained were moved from luxurious office space to a basement under a store.

Oddly my early 3D rendering ambitions led to other work that I should have never accepted. Race Drivin’ and Steel Talons on the SNES. The later is considered one of the worst SNES games ever made by some. But THQ had no quality standards and I was trying to make a living.

I was overly ambitious coding a 3D renderer for the Atari7800. I only achieved it by math tricks that required little CPU time. In the end the game itself was not very good.

Yes I am really John Van Ryzin. Thanks for all the kind words. It is only "digital exclusive" to Atari for a few months. I do not think they have any interest in building cartridges of games made by former Activision employees (for whatever reason).

Wow that sucks, was not expecting to get rich from my H.E.R.O. like game, but I did not think it would get stolen so quickly. Video game business was always hard, constant new technology to learn, lots of business success/failure ups and downs and lots of winner/loser game projects. But getting my game stolen before buyers can even discover it is quite ridiculous. Thinking I should go back to being retired.