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Leonard Tramiel Exclusive Text Interview - Great Commodore & Atari Insight


Adriano Arcade

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4 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Both Battlemorph and Iron Soldier 2 are texture mapped but running better than flat shaded games like Checkered Flag or gouraud shaded games like I War (which has really bad frame rate under high load).

I don't think it was an unreasonable move by Atari to achieve visual improvements for 3D games - the Jaguar could do texture mapping, if balanced right.

 

Hover Strike is quite impressive for a machine that is supposed to be bad at texture mapping. It runs reasobable well if there are not too many objects on screen (on par with Cybermorph I would say).

I blame the game/level designers for the bad frame drops, they cluttered the screen (with objects) with not respect for the technical limitations of the engine/hardware. 

With a better management of object number the game would have been much more playable! What were the playtesters and Atari thinking?

 

For Space War 2000 - I only played the prototype. It is very limited but the graphics are crisp and fluid. Without rendering texture mapped landscapes the HS engine seems to be capable enough to run that game at reasonable speed. 

 

IMO, for many 3d games it does not look like the texture mapping slowed them down massively. The (untextured) prototype of F1 Racer did not look much faster than WTR.

 

Supercross 3D runs faster with no AI racers in game - appearently, the AI code slows down the game massively (similar to AvP).

 

 

 

 

 

I would love for someone (Arcade Attack?) to interview Supercross 3D's coder and get the answer of who exactly pushed for the game to be Texture-Mapped, Tiertex management or Leonard Tramiel? 

 

 

2 conflicting stories out there. 

 

 

As for Hoverstrike, they moved code away from the 68000 to the GPU for the CD version and still only got another 3-5 fps from in, from interviews i saw. 

 

 

Atari really had no idea what a modern Battlezone should be like, if they had, the solid 3D Lynx Battlezone 2000 wouldn't of been hidden. 

 

 

Again there, conflicting stories from Rob Nicholoson and Jim Gregory as to why it was hidden. 

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7 minutes ago, Lostdragon said:

I would love for someone (Arcade Attack?) to interview Supercross 3D's coder and get the answer of who exactly pushed for the game to be Texture-Mapped, Tiertex management or Leonard Tramiel? 

 

 

2 conflicting stories out there. 

 

 

As for Hoverstrike, they moved code away from the 68000 to the GPU for the CD version and still only got another 3-5 fps from in, from interviews i saw. 

 

 

Atari really had no idea what a modern Battlezone should be like, if they had, the solid 3D Lynx Battlezone 2000 wouldn't of been hidden. 

 

 

Again there, conflicting stories from Rob Nicholoson and Jim Gregory as to why it was hidden. 

I don't think the texture mapping is the real issue of Supercross 3D. It's more like an excuse by the developers. So don't expect to hear the "truth" from them.

 

Apperarently, there is something problematic with the AI code of their game, otherwise the frame rate would not slow down 50% with AI racers in play.

 

It does not matter who "pushed" them, Supercross 3D is very flawed in many aspects, not just one.  Without texture mapping, it would have been still a poor product, not competitive by any means, and not doing the system any justice.

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1 hour ago, agradeneu said:

I don't think the texture mapping is the real issue of Supercross 3D. It's more like an excuse by the developers. So don't expect to hear the "truth" from them.

 

Apperarently, there is something problematic with the AI code of their game, otherwise the frame rate would not slow down 50% with AI racers in play.

 

It does not matter who "pushed" them, Supercross 3D is very flawed in many aspects, not just one.  Without texture mapping, it would have been still a poor product, not competitive by any means, and not doing the system any justice.

Going off memory, Missile Command 3D coder Martin Brownlow (?) put forward the notion Leonard Tramiel insisted on having Supercross 3D texture mapped, a claim that went unchallenged until a YT comment appeared where someone disputed it, saying they'd spoken with the games coder and the decision had been that of Tiertex senior management. 

 

I've seen likes of Jim Gregory unfairly blame the Tramiel family for interfering with software, yet fact was Handmade Software inherited the debts of Jim's earlier company, Mr Micro and Martin Hooley blame Leonard, when multiple imagitec Design staff blame Martin and Imagitec producers etc. 

 

 

So it'd be nice to hear from some Jaguar Era Tiertex coders etc. 

 

 

Tramiels have a lot of blame to shoulder, but they shouldn't be used as scapegoats if there were others who made the calls. 

 

 

A making of Hoverstrike /Unconquered Lands would of made for a niche, but interesting feature for likes of Retrogamer Magazine, they've covered far more obscure titles. 

 

Maybe not enough sources willing to discuss both projects as well as limited reader appeal? 

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11 hours ago, Yak said:

I wouldn't've looked into his claims more deeply - at first I bumped into him on Twitter and he said he was basically the AVP guy, and I was polite in a "oh hey fellow Jag veteran" kind of a way and was mildly surprised when he replied like we'd been old mates for 30 years, but didn't think too much about it - until out of the blue he was telling people his old mate had been my gameplay advisor on T2K. That made me go "wtf?" and start to look more closely at the guy, and hoo boy that was a rabbit hole I was not expecting, bloody hell.

 

I

 

 

I suspect had Whittaker managed to restrain his rampaging ego, he would of not been faced by the degree of investigation and exposure he has. 

 

 

Overplaying your role on Amstrad CPC Flying Shark is very different to taking credit for 30 Graftgold titles. 

 

 

Data Entry on a single Mike Singleton title, is very different to claiming you were mentored by him and Mike invented solid 3D,Texture-Mapping etc

 

Wild Bill Stealey endorsed Whittaker on LinkedIn without looking into Whittaker claims, is horrified now he has. 

 

 

Meeting Sam Tramiel is one thing, to claim the Tramiel family took you to live with them in the USA as a mere teenager, that's just batshit. 

 

Our Atari source said it was evident that when Sam Tramiel met Whittaker and Mike Beaton as part of the AVP team, it was obvious it was their first meeting. 

 

 

To claim H. R Giger as a personal friend, to claim that's you digitized as main character in Dark Seed, when it's clearly Mike Dawson. 

 

Mental Health issues are undoubtedly going to form part of Jane's legal defence, it's obvious fantasy worlds have been created time and time again. 

 

 

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Making $hit up to buff up your CV on the industrial and celebrity scale is quite sad, but for me the most odious thing about their actions is playing the disability, mental, and gender cards. This is below the low, faking stuff like that hurts the genuine causes.

 

But, I've had enough of JW-related shenanigans, tbh. On the positive side, at least this thread has yielded many awesome insights from Mr Minter, such as this one.

On 8/2/2021 at 2:23 AM, Yak said:

Regarding SR, if I were to do a version it'd be in VR. I've got an idea of how I'd like to do it, and it'd be a VR thing, and I'd want to keep it really simple and pure like the original, not go off trying to make another Elite Dangerous or aught. Part of the genius of SR was that they managed to cram such depth into such a tiny fragment of code, and make it so that you could pick it up as a beginner really easily but still have to work at it for months to achieve the top rating in Commander Mission. The accessibility, the emergent complexity of the gameplay, from just a smidgeon of 6502 code - such a masterpiece from Neubauer.

 

Straight from the Yak's mouth, eh ;)  Totally agreed, and stuff like this is the real reason I still research and play old games. It's got nothing to do with nostalgia. I'm just constantly being amazed by how ingenious so many of the early games were (especially 8-bit, and the little-known ones).

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On 8/2/2021 at 11:07 PM, Yak said:

I wish I still had the design doc for that Iain M. Banks/Star Raiders crossover idea. It was basically in the form of a little scifi story of my own. Obviously heavily rooted in the Culture stuff from IMB, God rest him, which I was devouring at the time and absolutely loved. I'm sure it'd make amusing reading today. Goat knows if I'd've actually managed to do it any justice; alas we'll never know since it never got beyond the galactic map and antelope demo stage before Panther got ganked.

 

Post T2K was an odd time, I was doing the VLM stuff and I also ended up getting ill with pneumonia, which led to me actually leaving Wales to go to California to work for Atari, as I thought maybe the change of climate would help me recover; in retrospect not the best move I could have made, for one thing I was never really happy in the US, better climate notwithstanding; I just felt too culturally dislocated, and while I was there my dad died, and I felt terrible being so far from my family at such a time. It just wasn't for me, life in the US, and after a few years I returned to Wales.

 

It also altered my relationship with Atari - as an employee rather than a freelancer I got much more heavily leaned on to do things the way they thought would be best rather than how I actually wanted to do them, and as a result I don't think the things I did as an employee came out how I actually wanted them to. Hence D2K not really being as good a thing IMO than T2K. I was pushed in a wrong direction, and I made the best of it I could, but it wasn't what I'd really wanted to make.

 

They had their own Jag version of Star Raiders in development internally, "Star Raiders 2000" IIRC, I think it was Rob Zdybel doing it. But it never made it to completion, they pushed it towards being texture mapped (I think they wanted to push texture mapping since the Playstation could do it), but the Jag wasn't strong with texture mapping and as a result it looked muddy and ran at a low frame rate. IMO they should have played to the Jag's strengths and done nice gouraud-shaded stuff at a decent clip rather than try to force it to do what it couldn't do well at a bad frame rate.

 

And I don't mean that to reflect badly on Rob Zdybel at all, he was a great coder and a great asset to Atari, just I am sure he was probably being pushed to make things a certain way when perhaps they'd've been better another way.

 

I think Rob Z. worked on the Atari ST Star Raiders too. I remember being quite excited about that when I first saw screenshots of it, thinking it'd be fantastic to play a proper updated version on the ST. And the game was good in many respects, it looked nice, it had more depth, enemy types and such, more intersting galactic map geometry, but then the first time I played it on the ST I got a rating of Star Commander, which rating you had to work for ages to get on the old 8-bit version. It just didn't have the exquisite balance of the original.

 

Again that's not a slur on Rob Z (his other work is great, 8-bit Missile Command is godly). Just being asked to follow up absolute genius, and in fact to have everyone assume what you make will actually be *better* than absolute genius due to being implemented on a more powerful system, is a really tough call. Hell I bet even if I did do my own homage to original SR, on the best of modern hardware, in VR, to the best of my ability, I highly doubt it'd be as good as original Star Raiders, because original SR is really just that damn good. 

Side note:

 

 

I remember you talking back in 1985 Jeff about your fans having  next to no middle ground, we either really liked your work or we really didn't ?

 

 

Whilst both Defender II on the ST and Defender 2000 on the Jaguar weren't the takes on Defender i personally wanted, C64 Sheep In Space was bloody great ?

 

 

 

 

 

The sound fx especially. 

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I don't know why Atari didn't authorize a Minter collection on Jaguar. Spruce em all up a little, put 'am all out an on cartridge. Maybe say two games on a cart. 

 

Llamatron is batshit crazy and I love it. Enhancing it a little on the Jag for an official release would have been wild.

 

And on PC I love that crazy one but I can't remember the name. It has an ST version but that seems to get mixed reviews.

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In a way I think it's good when stuff *is* a bit divisive, where it elicits a strong response from people, either way, as long as it's not entirely negative due to just being incompetent or aught. It's good and healthy to push at the boundaries a bit, maybe piss a few people off but maybe also really please some others who really get what you're trying to do. I've seen that a few times in my career - the first time I tried any lightsynth stuff I had some reviews where they just moaned about there being no conventional gameplay and what the hell were all these flashing colours, and others where they understood where I was looking and called it the most brilliant thing they'd ever seen. I did that game Space Giraffe back in 2007 where one dude (unfortunately on the official xbox magazine staff, which didn't do me any favours as it was coming out first on xbox) absolutely hated it, and did his very best to sink it entirely, whereas others have had exactly the opposite response (Jon Blow even said he thought it was the best game on the xbox 360). I think it's better to provoke that kind of thing than just get a 7/10 and move on. It's important to try stuff even if it doesn't necessarily work for everybody.

 

It's why I've never been that interested in "AAA" game dev really. That stuff is such high budget and thus high risk that it can't really afford to be divisive, it has to be tailored to return the most money for the considerable investment that goes into it, and having that kind of constraint over it all is something I would find quite stifling. I was offered a path into that sort of stuff when Atari went down, Activision were interested in talking to me, but in the end I just went with the Nuon guys because they were my mates and the work seemed more interesting.

 

To come back around to Jane Whittaker, another thing he goes on about all the time is all his supposed "AAA Chart Topping" work as if that's some kind of badge of honour. To me that's kind of an admission of aspiring to mediocrity in terms of actual game design.

 

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IMO the Jag VLM is the best. I've played with the Xbox one but it was too busy. It seemed to be constantly throwing as much as it could to the screen all the time. Gave it nowhere to go when the music played.

The Jag VLM backed off then exploded when it was appropriate. 

 

But just my opinion. Maybe I'm just partial. 

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1 hour ago, Yak said:

To come back around to Jane Whittaker, another thing he goes on about all the time is all his supposed "AAA Chart Topping" work as if that's some kind of badge of honour. To me that's kind of an admission of aspiring to mediocrity in terms of actual game design.

 

Your games can be described in many, many ways (lol) but "mediocrity" is one word that does not apply.

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7 hours ago, Yak said:

In a way I think it's good when stuff *is* a bit divisive, where it elicits a strong response from people, either way, as long as it's not entirely negative due to just being incompetent or aught. It's good and healthy to push at the boundaries a bit, maybe piss a few people off but maybe also really please some others who really get what you're trying to do. I've seen that a few times in my career - the first time I tried any lightsynth stuff I had some reviews where they just moaned about there being no conventional gameplay and what the hell were all these flashing colours, and others where they understood where I was looking and called it the most brilliant thing they'd ever seen. I did that game Space Giraffe back in 2007 where one dude (unfortunately on the official xbox magazine staff, which didn't do me any favours as it was coming out first on xbox) absolutely hated it, and did his very best to sink it entirely, whereas others have had exactly the opposite response (Jon Blow even said he thought it was the best game on the xbox 360). I think it's better to provoke that kind of thing than just get a 7/10 and move on. It's important to try stuff even if it doesn't necessarily work for everybody.

 

It's why I've never been that interested in "AAA" game dev really. That stuff is such high budget and thus high risk that it can't really afford to be divisive, it has to be tailored to return the most money for the considerable investment that goes into it, and having that kind of constraint over it all is something I would find quite stifling. I was offered a path into that sort of stuff when Atari went down, Activision were interested in talking to me, but in the end I just went with the Nuon guys because they were my mates and the work seemed more interesting.

 

To come back around to Jane Whittaker, another thing he goes on about all the time is all his supposed "AAA Chart Topping" work as if that's some kind of badge of honour. To me that's kind of an admission of aspiring to mediocrity in terms of actual game design.

 

Stuart Campbell aka The Rev Stuart Campbell, was used by Future Publishing to review Defender 2000 for Edge  where he gave it 3/10 and ST Format where he gave it 31%.

 

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/world/stf/d2k.htm

 

 

He's also not a fan of Tempest 3000:

 

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/t3k.htm

 

 

Yet clearly is a fan of your work, as seen here:

 

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/giraffe/giraffe3.htm

 

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/world/wired/t2k.htm

 

 

I also remember Retrogamer Magazine incorrectly pricing TxK on Vita and never issuing a correction. 

 

 

The Press can be a fickle thing indeed 

 

 

Going back to Whittaker and this chart topping work.. 

 

 

Even treading carefully through the bovine excrement Whittaker spouts off, some of the titles he falsely claims involvement with, weren't chart toppers by a Longshot. 

 

 

Morpheus (which stayed a C64/128 exclusive) wasn't a mainstream hit for Andrew Braybrook. 

 

 

The ST version of Ranarama was described by Andrew Hewson as an experiment and got a lukewarm reception at review. 

 

 

His actual, confirmed work:

 

Ashes Of The Empire (mere data entry) had a far colder reception than Midwinter 1 and 2, isn't even a Midwinter title, different scenario and environment.. 

 

Jaguar AVP.:Jane will reel off impressive sounding awards, yet not name sources, will never state the 4/10 review it got from Edge magazine, the mauling it got from Gamesmaster TV show reviewers. 

 

Theme Park World on Playstation II, even though Jane will only say Theme Park as he wants association with the ground breaking original, made little impact. 

 

 

Amstrad CPC Flying Shark? give over Jane.. 

 

 

When bullshitting about involvement with Dark Seed, Jane managed to miss an actual industy award Cyberdreams did receive for it. 

 

 

 

Why nobody has said to Jane you keep mentioning your involvement in The Sims, you vaguely state A. I routines, can you please tell us exactly which title you worked on and on what role, as there are countless titles, across PC and Console and nobody at Maxis has ever heard of an Andrew or Jane Whittaker... is beyond me. 

 

 

People lap up the bullshit. 

 

 

A number of websites we contacted to say Jane has played you, here's the proof, rather than pull articles, get very nasty and claim we have an axe to grind with Jane. 

 

 

Steve Turner contacted Retrogamer Magazine over the interview they ran, no public apology, they'll just never use the interview in any future bookzines ?

 

 

 

People need to stop giving Whittaker a platform, stop the podcast and YT interviews, stop blocking comments that calmly prove where and when Whittaker has lied, who's work he's taking credit for. 

 

 

 

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On 8/2/2021 at 11:07 PM, Yak said:

I wish I still had the design doc for that Iain M. Banks/Star Raiders crossover idea. It was basically in the form of a little scifi story of my own. Obviously heavily rooted in the Culture stuff from IMB, God rest him, which I was devouring at the time and absolutely loved. I'm sure it'd make amusing reading today. Goat knows if I'd've actually managed to do it any justice; alas we'll never know since it never got beyond the galactic map and antelope demo stage before Panther got ganked.

 

Post T2K was an odd time, I was doing the VLM stuff and I also ended up getting ill with pneumonia, which led to me actually leaving Wales to go to California to work for Atari, as I thought maybe the change of climate would help me recover; in retrospect not the best move I could have made, for one thing I was never really happy in the US, better climate notwithstanding; I just felt too culturally dislocated, and while I was there my dad died, and I felt terrible being so far from my family at such a time. It just wasn't for me, life in the US, and after a few years I returned to Wales.

 

It also altered my relationship with Atari - as an employee rather than a freelancer I got much more heavily leaned on to do things the way they thought would be best rather than how I actually wanted to do them, and as a result I don't think the things I did as an employee came out how I actually wanted them to. Hence D2K not really being as good a thing IMO than T2K. I was pushed in a wrong direction, and I made the best of it I could, but it wasn't what I'd really wanted to make.

 

They had their own Jag version of Star Raiders in development internally, "Star Raiders 2000" IIRC, I think it was Rob Zdybel doing it. But it never made it to completion, they pushed it towards being texture mapped (I think they wanted to push texture mapping since the Playstation could do it), but the Jag wasn't strong with texture mapping and as a result it looked muddy and ran at a low frame rate. IMO they should have played to the Jag's strengths and done nice gouraud-shaded stuff at a decent clip rather than try to force it to do what it couldn't do well at a bad frame rate.

 

And I don't mean that to reflect badly on Rob Zdybel at all, he was a great coder and a great asset to Atari, just I am sure he was probably being pushed to make things a certain way when perhaps they'd've been better another way.

 

I think Rob Z. worked on the Atari ST Star Raiders too. I remember being quite excited about that when I first saw screenshots of it, thinking it'd be fantastic to play a proper updated version on the ST. And the game was good in many respects, it looked nice, it had more depth, enemy types and such, more intersting galactic map geometry, but then the first time I played it on the ST I got a rating of Star Commander, which rating you had to work for ages to get on the old 8-bit version. It just didn't have the exquisite balance of the original.

 

Again that's not a slur on Rob Z (his other work is great, 8-bit Missile Command is godly). Just being asked to follow up absolute genius, and in fact to have everyone assume what you make will actually be *better* than absolute genius due to being implemented on a more powerful system, is a really tough call. Hell I bet even if I did do my own homage to original SR, on the best of modern hardware, in VR, to the best of my ability, I highly doubt it'd be as good as original Star Raiders, because original SR is really just that damn good. 

Found a few quotes from those Atari pushed into texture mapping their titles. 

 

 

Lee B. WORLD TOUR RACING:

 

 

As for totally turning the texture mapping off, no you can't, and I wish 
you could. As with any racing game it plays better with a higher frame 
rate, so why does it have so much texture mapping? In a single word, Atari.

 

[JEO] Any other secrets hidden in there?

 

[LB] Unlikely, but as I said above, I did various things, and I still don't 
know exactly which build Telegames released.

[JEO] How fast do you think WTR would run if all t-mapping was shut off?

[LB] 30fps, the same as Ridge Racer.

[JEO] Weren't you tempted to put in a code that would do this?

[LB] Yes, but Atari wanted texture mapping with everything. They felt that 
they had to take on the competition in the graphics stakes, even though the 
machine couldn't do it.

I did have a design for a new rendering system that would have been quite a 
bit faster than WTR. Basically it was a lot cleaner and more elegant and 
used all of the best techniques whilst only introducing a few restrictions.

One of the things that degraded performance in WTR wasn't the speed of the 
polygon renderer, it was the GPU overlay manager-- lots of chunks of code 
were being swapped in and out of the small 4K of memory within that chip 
during the game and that was something I really wanted to tidy up.

 

Martin Brownlow MISSILE  COMMAND 3D:

 

The frame rate is good, but a bit on the slow side.  What happened?

[MB] Blame Atari... "Oh, and texture this, texture that, texture the other."
"But textures are at least 8x slower than flat shaded" says I.  "Actually,"
says Atari, "they're at least 22x slower, but we want them anyway".  You saw
how the motorcycle game (Supercross 3D --Ed.) game came out - really slow -
that's because they gave in to Atari and textured everything, which the Jag
just can't handle"

 

 

These Join ATD talking to Edge about Atari wanting Battlemorph fully texture mapped and instead they simply used textures sparingly... 

 

 

And Martin Hooley of Imagitec Design telling the UK Press at the time Jaguar Freelancer 2120 had been moved to the much more capable Playstation, after Atari went into complete and utter mental mode, wanting the Jaguar version texture mapped with loads of lighting effects, so it could compete against Playstation titles. 

 

 

#Martin later changed the story to it being canned as obvious Jaguar CD would fail at retail, they'd never recoup investment on Freelancer and Space Junk. 

 

Shaun McClure blamed the games producer.. 

 

Andrew Seed the Jag CD not being as flexible as the PC CD etc.. 

 

Atari Corp documents present another side as well, but confirm imagitec took delivery of Doom Engine. 

 

 

Freelancer is a mess in itself. 

 

 

But there's a steady list of titles presented that Atari seemed to want altered just to be seen competing with rival systems, even though they knew the hardware wasn't up to it. 

 

 

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9 hours ago, Yak said:

 

To come back around to Jane Whittaker, another thing he goes on about all the time is all his supposed "AAA Chart Topping" work as if that's some kind of badge of honour. To me that's kind of an admission of aspiring to mediocrity in terms of actual game design.

 

I'm not a Twitter user but how the hell does shite like this get a free pass? 

 

 

 

 
 
Replying to
having done a number of commercial ST titles, I cannot recommend enough the Devpac assembler from HiSoft. Just a fantastic product (Andy who wrote it now works with the Visual studio team at MS). I also found the Sybex guide to Programming the 68000 a really handy reference book.
 
 
 
 
WHAT commercial ST Games? 
 
Steve Turner confirmed Whittaker wasn't even at Graftgold by time they were doing ST Projects. 
 
 
Whittaker listed Ashes Of The Empire as ST, yet it only came out on PC and Amiga... 
 
 
The biggest question a lot of us had when looking into Whittaker history, was just what he'd been doing in the 'dead' periods between Jobs. 
 
He can be found doing bit work at Maelstrom, Mirage etc, but on Amiga titles. 
 
His lies about MicroProse Flight Sims relate to the Amiga. 
 
Why do people take these claims at face value, why is nobody asking Jane for specific titles???? 
 
How's he going to explain the sudden silence on his cross platform AVP spirtual sucsessor he was hyping since April:
 
This weekend been working on environment design for the sequel for my AvP code, #ProjectXenomorph. Numerous indoor and outdoor locations planned and written up over the last few days. #gamedev #avp #Aliens #RETROGAMING
 
 
 
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oh good lord, Rev Stu, I remember him! He once told me his contribution to game dev had been far superior to mine because he did some work on a data disk for an Amiga football game. Used to be if you so much as mentioned his name he'd appear in a puff of vitriol to heap opprobrium upon everybody in the vicinity. *looks around nervously*

 

Last I heard of him he was running a typically vocal Scottish Nationalist website (he lives in Bath). Can't blame him for that mind, or the Scots for wanting out of the union and back to Europe really.

 

But yes, quite an interesting character, and his writing can be genuinely entertaining if you can get past the vitriol.

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10 hours ago, Yak said:

oh good lord, Rev Stu, I remember him! He once told me his contribution to game dev had been far superior to mine because he did some work on a data disk for an Amiga football game. Used to be if you so much as mentioned his name he'd appear in a puff of vitriol to heap opprobrium upon everybody in the vicinity. *looks around nervously*

 

Last I heard of him he was running a typically vocal Scottish Nationalist website (he lives in Bath). Can't blame him for that mind, or the Scots for wanting out of the union and back to Europe really.

 

But yes, quite an interesting character, and his writing can be genuinely entertaining if you can get past the vitriol.

A very strange one for sure, followed and enjoyed a lot of his writings over the years and he's never been one to hide his dislike of a title. 

 

 

His Retrogamer Magazine era of writing was one of the most bizzare i had ever encountered, his hatred for Kick Off was almost legendary, yet they gave him the gig of writing the Definite Guide to the series ?

 

 

He also did the Definite Guide to Defender.... 

 

 

But it it was his Definite Guide to the Metal Slug series and the ahem, 'discussion' about whether the games Mummies were Zombies, that broke out on a forum at the time, that i will always picture him for. 

 

 

Pure venom and he even created a sock puppet account on the Metal Slug fan forum in order to keep the bile and vitriol flowing. 

 

 

He was in the news back along:

 

 

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/pro-independence-blogger-wings-over-scotland-loses-court-appeal-against-dugdale-2865911

 

 

Leaving his politics aside, as you say, if you dig past the vitriol, he's a very passionate and entertaining writer and i would much rather read an article of his, even if I found myself in complete disagreement with it, than some of the dry and tedious based articles the magazine featured. 

 

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10 hours ago, Yak said:

*looks around nervously*

S'funny...he's still around on the Spectrum Computing forums. I've never heard about him before then, but what you guys say makes sense: seems like a person who can fly off the handle on even the slightest excuse. Mind you, in my nearly ~2 years there I've never seen him totally Hulk out, only bare his teeth few times, so perhaps he has calmed down in general.

 

Apart from that, definitely an interesting character, and I do actually appreciate reviewers with strong opinions, even when I might disagree with them. And I do quite often...I mean, he's the guy who picked Deathchase as #1 for Your Sinclair Top 100 ZX Spectrum games list. I absolutely love Metal Slug too, but let's keep it on the hush hush :D

He can be also quite knowledgeable and helpful: he designed a "trophy" for my HSC competition there and was quite nice about it.

 

As for press being fickle in general, well, I don't see why not...on principle they shouldn't just give out accolades based on somebody's rep. There are many celebrated devs and codeshops who released stronger and weaker games during their careers. For the last 2 years or so I've been playing through the entire early-Eighties 8-bit micro game libraries, and it's fun to see Yak's mark on all of the different patforms. I like some of these games a lot, some less so, so if I was a reviewer I'd probably mention that too.  But they always have plenty of character and originality, and that aways scores big with me, even if the gameplay itself might not be my cup of tea.

 

I think the biggest surprise for me was seeing "Llamasoft" on 1982 ZX Spectrum's "Bomber" and thinking, "whoa, wonder what crazy stuff did he do with this template" - dunno, expecting flying llamas or some such - and then seeing it's a perfectly normal Air Attack clone. That was...unusual :) Though, I guess maybe it was some "quick cash" job, seeing as this idea was very popular at the time and must've been rather easy to knock out?

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7 hours ago, youxia said:

S'funny...he's still around on the Spectrum Computing forums. I've never heard about him before then, but what you guys say makes sense: seems like a person who can fly off the handle on even the slightest excuse. Mind you, in my nearly ~2 years there I've never seen him totally Hulk out, only bare his teeth few times, so perhaps he has calmed down in general.

 

Apart from that, definitely an interesting character, and I do actually appreciate reviewers with strong opinions, even when I might disagree with them. And I do quite often...I mean, he's the guy who picked Deathchase as #1 for Your Sinclair Top 100 ZX Spectrum games list. I absolutely love Metal Slug too, but let's keep it on the hush hush :D

He can be also quite knowledgeable and helpful: he designed a "trophy" for my HSC competition there and was quite nice about it.

 

As for press being fickle in general, well, I don't see why not...on principle they shouldn't just give out accolades based on somebody's rep. There are many celebrated devs and codeshops who released stronger and weaker games during their careers. For the last 2 years or so I've been playing through the entire early-Eighties 8-bit micro game libraries, and it's fun to see Yak's mark on all of the different patforms. I like some of these games a lot, some less so, so if I was a reviewer I'd probably mention that too.  But they always have plenty of character and originality, and that aways scores big with me, even if the gameplay itself might not be my cup of tea.

 

I think the biggest surprise for me was seeing "Llamasoft" on 1982 ZX Spectrum's "Bomber" and thinking, "whoa, wonder what crazy stuff did he do with this template" - dunno, expecting flying llamas or some such - and then seeing it's a perfectly normal Air Attack clone. That was...unusual :) Though, I guess maybe it was some "quick cash" job, seeing as this idea was very popular at the time and must've been rather easy to knock out?

Found the Metal Slug incident :

 

 

 

http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/retro-gamer-magazines-terrible-metal-slug-feature-reviewed.183516/

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On 8/4/2021 at 2:15 AM, Lostdragon said:

As for Hoverstrike, they moved code away from the 68000 to the GPU for the CD version and still only got another 3-5 fps from in, from interviews i saw. 

The HS UL code is available. I had it and lost it at one time. One time in IRC about a decade ago or so I believe it was crazy ace Tursi and some others Gorf,  jagmod? It's been a while but they found its basically the same inefficient renderer in the Hoverr and render package with some tweaks. It's not really a second generation anything. Eric Smith wrote all these and had no time for complete rewrites. He was amazingly overworked. 

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I'm just happy there are people still who remember T2K fondly and enjoyed it back in the day. I have a lot of fond memories of that time myself, it was interesting to be working on brand new hardware and great (and rather scary) to be trusted with updating such a classic arcade gem. Good times.

 

Regarding Bomber on the Speccy, yeah it wasn't much of a game really, although there *is* a weird bit of back story to it, although it takes place more on the VIC 20 than the Speccy. Before I settled down to make all "machine code" games on the Vic, I did some games in BASIC, just to learn my way round the machine. Simple little things like DEFLEX and Rox and a version of Space Zap and a version of Breakout; the kind of things everybody did really, this was before Llamasoft really got started and before I had much confidence to start doing anything more than just what everyone else was doing. Some of these little games got sold via DK Tronics in a game pack (they had previously sold some of the things I'd done on the ZX81).

 

It was also the time of the Falklands war. Now I was a bit of a hippy and definitely not in favour of the conflict (I lived a few miles from Greenham Common where there was a US air base with cruise missiles, and right next door to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, where my dad worked; when I lay in bed at night I could hear the ticking of the criticality alarms). One of the simple games that everybody did in BASIC back then was "city bomber", a rather gruesome idea when you think about it, with a plane that literally has to wipe out an entire city so it can land safely. It's already a pretty diodgy concept, but it's also a piece of piss to implement even in just BASIC so it was popular for people to code.

 

There was a load of jingoistic nonsense in the tabloids at the time about the "Argies", and so I basically made a version of city bomber that was a pisstake of that, the city buildings all had Argentine flags on top, the plane was a 'Vulcan bomber' and if you managed to land it played "Rule Britannia". I called it "Bomb Buenos Aires". It was certainly in bad taste but I really didn't think anyone would take it as anything other than a pisstake. Then one day it got reported on enthusiastically in one of the Tory broadsheets of the day and I thought enough was enough and immediately reverted it to just plain old city bomber.

 

This was also around the time the speccy came out and like with the VIC I did a couple of fairly simple BASIC games just to have a fiddle with the machine, including a version of this city bomber, a Deflex game and Headbanger's Heaven. Really they were just done to get a toe hold on the new machine and show a bit of willing in the early days, I certainly didn't think I was going to make a lot of money out of a version of city bomber in BASIC (even if people did get away with selling any old crap back in those stone age days). The Vic and eventually the C64 ended up taking up most of my attention anyway and it was only me coding so I never ended up really doing a great deal on the Speccy, I just didn't have time. And it was only later and with more experience that I gained the confidence to do more original stuff than just the same old BASIC hacks and rubbish arcade versions that most people were doing.

 

Lol at that Neo Geo thread. Yup that's classic Rev. And good lord there's 50 pages of it. Haha :D

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Gee, it sure would be interesting if a "Llamasoft Collection" were released on the Nintendo Switch.  Cough cough.  Cough.

 

I was skimming through Michael Current's Atari history page and I was curious -- did the Tramiels get any sort of board membership with JTS after the reverse merger, or did they just "cash out" as best they could?  I never remember hearing much about things after the reverse merger, other than it became an Atari liquidation very quickly.

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12 hours ago, JagChris said:

The HS UL code is available. I had it and lost it at one time. One time in IRC about a decade ago or so I believe it was crazy ace Tursi and some others Gorf,  jagmod? It's been a while but they found its basically the same inefficient renderer in the Hoverr and render package with some tweaks. It's not really a second generation anything. Eric Smith wrote all these and had no time for complete rewrites. He was amazingly overworked. 

Always found it an curious choice of title for Atari to do a special edition version of, given how the cartridge version had been received at review and the CD version suffered the same polarized reviews at the hands of the European and US Press. 

 

 

When  you had the scant resources Atari had in terms of talented coding teams and individuals, they were always going to find themselves in demand. 

 

 

 

One of the issues of Next Generation magazine, now pulled from Archive. Org, in it's letters page, responding to a reader asking why the actual in-game shots of 3DO M2 Power Crystal, looked so poor compared to the fake, mock up shots on the same page, pointed out the title was never going to be a Zelda 64 Killer, because Perceptions weren't Nintendo and lacked the vast pool of talent they had available. 

 

 

Sadly it seems Jane Whittaker doesn't want people now seeing the Preview of Power Crystal both Edge and Next Generation magazine ran, complete with details of other titles Perception were supposedly working on and Jane has never mentioned since. 

 

#The article even missed one we found out about whilst talking to various ex-Perception staff, they had started on a Red Arrows title before the company went bankrupt. 

 

 

The more Jane attempts to delete the past, to suit the current version of history Jane wants to present, the worse the situation for Jane gets. 

 

 

People still have the old Gamestm interview, Previews of Power Crystal, Jane's own original website can be found using wayback machine. 

 

Jane's old newsgroup posts, all time and date stamped, still out there. 

 

 

Interviews with Alive, Pocket magazine. 

 

 

Getting a single Mastercast TV video pulled in the UK, a few old magazine scans removed from an archive site, won't do Jane any favours. 

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10 hours ago, Yak said:

I'm just happy there are people still who remember T2K fondly and enjoyed it back in the day. I have a lot of fond memories of that time myself, it was interesting to be working on brand new hardware and great (and rather scary) to be trusted with updating such a classic arcade gem. Good times.

 

Regarding Bomber on the Speccy, yeah it wasn't much of a game really, although there *is* a weird bit of back story to it, although it takes place more on the VIC 20 than the Speccy. Before I settled down to make all "machine code" games on the Vic, I did some games in BASIC, just to learn my way round the machine. Simple little things like DEFLEX and Rox and a version of Space Zap and a version of Breakout; the kind of things everybody did really, this was before Llamasoft really got started and before I had much confidence to start doing anything more than just what everyone else was doing. Some of these little games got sold via DK Tronics in a game pack (they had previously sold some of the things I'd done on the ZX81).

 

It was also the time of the Falklands war. Now I was a bit of a hippy and definitely not in favour of the conflict (I lived a few miles from Greenham Common where there was a US air base with cruise missiles, and right next door to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, where my dad worked; when I lay in bed at night I could hear the ticking of the criticality alarms). One of the simple games that everybody did in BASIC back then was "city bomber", a rather gruesome idea when you think about it, with a plane that literally has to wipe out an entire city so it can land safely. It's already a pretty diodgy concept, but it's also a piece of piss to implement even in just BASIC so it was popular for people to code.

 

There was a load of jingoistic nonsense in the tabloids at the time about the "Argies", and so I basically made a version of city bomber that was a pisstake of that, the city buildings all had Argentine flags on top, the plane was a 'Vulcan bomber' and if you managed to land it played "Rule Britannia". I called it "Bomb Buenos Aires". It was certainly in bad taste but I really didn't think anyone would take it as anything other than a pisstake. Then one day it got reported on enthusiastically in one of the Tory broadsheets of the day and I thought enough was enough and immediately reverted it to just plain old city bomber.

 

This was also around the time the speccy came out and like with the VIC I did a couple of fairly simple BASIC games just to have a fiddle with the machine, including a version of this city bomber, a Deflex game and Headbanger's Heaven. Really they were just done to get a toe hold on the new machine and show a bit of willing in the early days, I certainly didn't think I was going to make a lot of money out of a version of city bomber in BASIC (even if people did get away with selling any old crap back in those stone age days). The Vic and eventually the C64 ended up taking up most of my attention anyway and it was only me coding so I never ended up really doing a great deal on the Speccy, I just didn't have time. And it was only later and with more experience that I gained the confidence to do more original stuff than just the same old BASIC hacks and rubbish arcade versions that most people were doing.

 

Lol at that Neo Geo thread. Yup that's classic Rev. And good lord there's 50 pages of it. Haha :D

I can't remember the reason you gave for not looking to do anything on the Amstrad CPC. 

 

Don't think it was lack of hardware sprites ?

 

 

Yep, Classic Rev, Dog with a bone situation there. 

 

He certainly made RG forum a far more lively place than the sterile husk it turned into a few years back. 

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With just me coding I really couldn't address all the 8-bit systems, that's all. I was equally fluent in 6502 and z80, having learned on a PET then spent a couple of years with the early ZX machines before getting my Vic 20. But I really found my 8-bit stride on the C64 and I stuck with that (apart from a couple of excursions onto the a8). I enjoyed working on a succession of new games rather than doing one and then having to spend a while doing a bunch of ports. There were a handful of ports done by other people but nothing that really took off outside the c64 really. So, minor excursions to the a8 and the c16/plus 4 aside, I pretty much sat on the c64 till the Atari ST came out.

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12 hours ago, Yak said:

With just me coding I really couldn't address all the 8-bit systems, that's all. I was equally fluent in 6502 and z80, having learned on a PET then spent a couple of years with the early ZX machines before getting my Vic 20. But I really found my 8-bit stride on the C64 and I stuck with that (apart from a couple of excursions onto the a8). I enjoyed working on a succession of new games rather than doing one and then having to spend a while doing a bunch of ports. There were a handful of ports done by other people but nothing that really took off outside the c64 really. So, minor excursions to the a8 and the c16/plus 4 aside, I pretty much sat on the c64 till the Atari ST came out.

I was meaning to ask, how did Revenge II on the ST end up in the hands of Icon Designs for Mastertronic? 

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