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Brian Colin - Pinball Expo 2023 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2023)·video·54m 11s·analyzed·Oct 21, 2023
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TL;DR

Brian Colin shares his 40-year arcade game design career from Bally Midway through modern era.

Summary

Brian Colin, legendary arcade game designer and artist, recounts his career spanning from Bally Midway (1982) through Game Refuge, covering iconic titles like Rampage, Xenophobe, Spy Hunter, and numerous others. He discusses the creative freedom of the early arcade era, the transition from art to game design, the importance of field testing, and how organizational structure and team dynamics directly impacted game quality and commercial success.

Key Claims

  • At Bally Midway in 1982, management was in a separate building and left the creative team alone, enabling rapid iteration and experimentation

    high confidence · Direct personal account of working conditions at Bally Midway's development facility in early 1980s

  • Rampage broke every earnings record in the country when released

    medium confidence · Colin's claim about game's commercial performance; not independently verified in source

  • Xenophobe was released incomplete due to early test success; management forced release before 75% of planned content was finished

    high confidence · Colin explains management pressure overrode developer objections due to strong test earnings

  • Deathstalker laserdisc game was never released during arcade era; restored and released 30 years later by Doc Mac at Galloping Ghost arcade

    high confidence · Colin explains game sat unfinished for 30 years due to Bally exiting laserdisc industry after NFL game failure

  • General Chaos was EA's highest-earning original title the year it was released

    medium confidence · Colin's claim about Game Refuge's first EA title performance

  • Field testing (arcade placement testing) was superior to modern reporting methods for understanding player preferences

    high confidence · Colin emphasizes this repeatedly as core principle of successful game design

Notable Quotes

  • “No promises. Some of you may have questions. If I don't know the answer, I will completely make something up that dozens of people in the industry will come chasing me down for later.”

    Brian Colin@ 0:00 — Sets humorous tone; indicates willingness to speculate but acknowledges consequences of inaccuracy in tight-knit industry

  • “It has never been anything like a real job, and childhood has never been over.”

    Brian Colin@ 3:52 — Summarizes Colin's philosophy about game design as perpetual creative play rather than corporate work

  • “We made every game on schedule on budget when I was working for bally midway because our friends down in the factory would get laid off if something was late.”

    Brian Colin@ 23:28 — Reveals social accountability mechanism that drove delivery discipline; contrast with modern corporate structures

  • “Brian, we can't. All you can do with this hardware is move a rectangle. What are you going to do with a moving rectangle?”

    Marketing/Sound engineer at Bally Midway (paraphrased)@ 18:14 — Represents conventional thinking that Colin overcame; shows creative solution to hardware limitations

  • “Building collapsing into itself is a moving rectangle. What knocks down buildings but giant monsters?”

    Brian Colin@ 18:26 — Core creative insight that led to Rampage concept; demonstrates thematic problem-solving approach

  • “If the team isn't pulling together, if the team isn't excited, the game may get done. But it's never going to be the kind of game that happens when everybody pulls together.”

Entities

Brian ColinpersonGeorge GomezpersonJeff NaumannpersonSharon PerrypersonNolan BushnellpersonDoc MacpersonBally MidwaycompanyWilliams ElectronicscompanyGame RefugecompanyElectronic Artscompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Manufacturing job security was directly tied to on-time game delivery at Bally Midway; factory workers would be laid off if projects ran late, creating accountability across organization

    high · 'We made every game on schedule on budget when I was working for bally midway because our friends down in the factory would get laid off if something was late.'

  • ?

    event_signal: Rampage marketing campaign involved sending letters to newspapers/TV stations in cities where game cabinets were placed with messaging that town would be 'destroyed'; generated hundreds of articles despite marketing department initial rejection

    medium · 'I went to marketing... send to newspapers and TV stations that your town is about to be destroyed... marketing said no. So I wrote... over a thousand letters that generated hundreds upon hundreds of articles'

  • ?

    community_signal: Field testing (arcade location testing with real players and real money) is presented as superior methodology to modern reporting/analytics for understanding player preferences and game balance

    high · Colin repeatedly emphasizes importance of watching real players: 'You are standing there. You are seeing real people using their real money... What makes them angry? What makes them smile?'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Pigskin arcade game had critical bug introduced immediately before production; game earned well initially then dropped significantly after bug became known in industry; never recovered market share despite bug fix

    high · 'You're going into production next week... introduced a bug in which when somebody bought in, if you bought into a full-player game, the game would play free for the rest of the day... the word in the industry got out that it was, an iffy game'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.162

0:00
No promises. Some of you may have questions. If I don't know the answer, I will completely make something up that dozens of people in the industry will come chasing me down for later. But they'll be good answers. That's all I can say. Whoops, that's not it. Did I click on the wrong one? This is the wrong one. Doggone it.
0:37
Ah, there we are. Okay, let's try this again. Pretending none of that ever happened, we'll start right off. My name is Brian Colon. I'm a game designer, artist, animator, filmmaker, and that's actually all in the reverse order. My company is Game Refuge, but long before that, I fell into a company that you may have heard of called Bally Midway. And before that, I was a college student making films, and I'm going to get into the film industry. And I made a number of films in high school, and it was great. you know, all your friends show up, you get these things cranked out and you get to college where it costs money and it's 16 millimeter film and you got to send it away and it comes back and you see the mistakes and you got to do it over. So I could draw. So I made some animated films. Won international awards for it. It was great. It was wonderful. And And, oops, what the heck?
1:38
This is obviously going to be, there we go. So in college, I started doing ads for local bars and stuff like that with my, to raise money to make my films. And I would work, you know, and it was a good ad agency. Basically, I worked for beer and peanuts and that kind of stuff. and out of college I saw an ad one day because I'm still making just beer and peanuts doing my advertising work and I saw an ad for the Bally Midway company and they wanted and I'm thinking pinball, cool I'm an artist, I can do that too and they wanted an animator and my international award winning animated film did really well but But why would, oh, I got it. They need someone to paint on the back of black back glasses. I can do that. I go down there. And George Gomez, who's still in the industry, but back then he was kind of the heart and soul of their brand new development group. And he said, no, we need, we saw your film. We want, we need an animator for video games.

Brian Colin@ 28:38 — Direct commentary on how team dynamics and buy-in affect final product quality

  • “I have an acre. Can I get an acre in Silicon Valley with the money you want to give me for, no.”

    Brian Colin@ 32:41 — Lighthearted anecdote about 1990s Silicon Valley real estate costs during EA expansion

  • “I don't care how cartoon violent it is. I don't want street games.”

    Brian Colin@ 33:49 — Shows Colin's deliberate design philosophy about age-appropriate content

    • Rampage
    game
    Xenophobegame
    Spy Huntergame
    Deathstalkergame
    Zwackerygame
    Arch Rivalsgame
    General Chaosgame
    Rampage World Tourgame
    Galloping Ghostcompany
    John Kubikperson
    ?

    design_philosophy: Colin emphasizes that team cohesion, shared excitement, and cooperative problem-solving are essential to creating quality games; Spy Hunter 2 suffered when team members were reluctant participants

    high · Explicit statement: 'If the team isn't pulling together, if the team isn't excited, the game may get done. But it's never going to be the kind of game that happens when everybody pulls together.'

  • $

    market_signal: Colin's career trajectory illustrates the creative decline resulting from corporatization; early wild west era (1982-1988) produced highest-quality, highest-earning games; post-acquisition and formalized structures produced less compelling results

    medium · Implicit throughout narrative; Rampage/Xenophobe/Arch Rivals were major earners during loose management period; later Spy Hunter 2 was 'embarrassment' during middle management era

  • ?

    business_signal: Transition from loose 'wild west' development environment (1982-1984) to increasingly formal management structure (engineering notebooks, approval processes, middle management) correlated with reduced creative output and quality

    high · Colin describes early freedom vs. later corporate procedures: 'Management left us alone' contrasts with 'engineering notebook, every idea you have has to be cross-referenced'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Jeff Naumann and Brian Colin formed Game Refuge after working at Bally Midway/Williams; eventually Game Refuge developed game content for other publishers including EA and new Midway

    high · 'we formed game refuge... we got on a train... and jeff went with me... EA had been asking me to come work for them... what if we just gave you enough money to start your own company?'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Xenophobe was released incomplete; management forced production despite developer objections because early test performance was strong; game was only 75% complete with dozens of planned features unfinished

    high · Colin explains: 'the game was about three quarters of the way done... management said, let's just release it now'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Colin deliberately chose fantasy/cartoon violence aesthetic for General Chaos rather than realistic street gang setting, due to personal values about age-appropriate content for his own children

    high · 'I have kids. I want my kids playing something that's obviously fantasy. I don't care how cartoon violent it is. I don't want street games.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Bally exited laserdisc game business after NFL game failure (mechanical failure due to needle-based videodisc format causing $4,000 losses per unit); Deathstalker laserdisc game was shelved as result of this strategic retreat

    high · Colin explains: 'management backed gently out of it' after videodisc 'needle. So the first time the game got bumped, it turned into a $4,000 doorstop'

    • 2:49
    And I said, really? People do that? Pac-Man? You need an animator? And he said, yes, and we've seen your thing. We're very impressed. And, you know, I said, you know, I got to warn you because I was not really. I was a pinball guy back in my youth and video games, you know, I played pong. And that was it. So I said, you know, I got to warn you. I have a successful ad agency. I make $300 a month. George is like, I think we can do a little better than that. So before I, and I called a friend. I was actually, and this is one of my award-winning films. But I called her, you know, I got the phone call from George while I was at a wedding. And I turned to my friends around me, and I tried to make a joke out of it. And I choked up. I said, well, that's it. I can't turn that money down. You know, childhood's over. I got a real job.
    3:50
    And man, was I wrong. It has never been anything like a real job, and childhood has never been over. The first thing I fell backwards into was doing the animation for Dis of Tron.
    4:05
    They wanted more realistic stuff, and the programmer on that was really a perfectionist. I mean, if I got one of those circles two pixels off, he's telling me about it. And animated films takes weeks just drawing it, filming it, sending it out, getting it back. Here, I'm doing it in the morning, and I'm seeing it in the game in the afternoon. I was hooked.
    4:36
    Dissotron, there's Bob Dinnerman. Dissotron was something I had seen Pac-Man. This thing is a full 3D, if you know the environmental especially, that full 3D experience. Wow, I'm falling in love with this. I mean, right away I knew I was wrong. And even within weeks of me being there, folks, it was a wild west. It was 1982.
    5:03
    Management was in a separate building. We were in a little cramped building, and they left us alone. So when we're seeing that this one game called Mothership is doing terrible on tests, I did some little cartoony guys. And I said to the programmer, I said, hey, what if we use that?
    5:21
    He, no problem, let's do it, turned it around. It became Cosmic Cruiser. Management liked the little Cosmic Cruiser guy so much, they had an out-of-house thing put him in their new game, Wacko, which actually came out first. So Cosmic Cruiser was my first. And again, that would never happen in corporations today and in the world today. Cosmic Cruiser was probably the first game of mine after Deceptron that was released. But I wasn't the designer on that one. I was just, you know, the artist, but they let me reskin it, which would have been unheard of. I saw a game in a pile of one-sheet game descriptions that we were going through, Sharon, my mentor, the gal who put the bow on Ms. Pac-Man, she's like, yeah, this is where we've got game ideas. I said, why aren't we doing this one? This is like a battle game. This would be so cool. And it's like, it's ants, Brian. They don't want to do it. I said, we'll make them cartoony. So you could see from that was the test header for, because for me, it was everything. As a kid, I always played the risk or these things where you have the little cardboard pieces and you had to set up the board for four hours just to get another three hours of play, and then you're still it's like, we can do it all. We can do it all in a video game. They hired a programmer. I just mentioned it offhand. They hired a programmer. Unfortunately, he left. We got a great two-player game out of it, but out in the arcades, it had to be two players, so it didn't test well enough. It never got released. It was basically two hives of ants fighting over garbage in a garbage dump. It was a lot of fun. But right after that, I'm working on Spy Hunter. I say what right after that. One of the beauty of being an animator and being hired as an animator is you worked on everything. There were two or three or four of us at different times, but I'm doing this on this, and you see he's doing this, and Spy, well, I'm going to back that up real quick. Spy Hunter, we all worked on, we all contributed to the design. The programmer on that was very receptive, and hey, let's add a water rack. Well, we don't, let's redo the whole game again, and the whole second half of Spy Hunter was myself and a buddy of mine that I got hired, and we were all having fun. It was wild west. Management left us alone, and then one day they came in while we're at the end of Spy Hunter and said, here's your engineering notebook. Every idea you have has to be cross-referenced by every other witness in the room, and you have to sign it at the bottom, and you have to put that in so to make sure that Bally knows we own everything that management, corporate's starting to get where they were.
    8:10
    I don't know that you can see those, but things like the Rush Hour Avenger classification doll, de tour de force i got start key and clutch dukes of tron we had a ball with those books the first day we came up with about 50 of the worst names you know hershey highway um and then we've never used them again they never they all got put away they never got used again that was for a while it was called battle scars and that was a concept art that i did for battle scars but it eventually fortunately the marketing department decided to call it spy hunter which was the right name oh sorry uh and then the other thing about as uh in those early days no one was a designer you're an animator you're a programmer you're a sound engineer you're a mechanical engineer we were all coming up with the ideas but no one was a designer so we had to hide our initials in the cabinet art. So if you ever look at a spy hunter, that engine is a Leon engine because Tom Leon and mine are BC missiles that are coming out of the thing. That was the water rack on the sit down, the back header. We call them header. Everybody in the industry calls them marquees. But at Bally, we call them headers. That was because of the water rack we came up with. All right. Nuff on Spyhunter. Moving along. Working on everything. Demolition Derby. Fun game. Four-player upright and then a four-player cocktail.
    9:43
    First game I ever worked on, it was Sharon and Jeff Naumann, a programmer, working on that. He started around the same time I did.
    9:52
    And it was just a nice, very simple, as they were back then. Hardware was not much. Very simple, very fun. and I helped out on that, although mainly what I did on this game was the girls because that was just a little more fun to me to work on than cars. I gravitate more towards the human form, especially human form that looks like that.
    10:19
    Next game I worked on, Jeff wanted to do a tank game, and I said, okay, let's do it. Let's make it comic. We came up with things like, okay, the players can be cooperative, or they can fight against each other, or they can fight against the AI, which would try and kill them both. So that was kind of new. And I still love that ant rate idea. So I said, let's make it so that you're controlling two vehicles, not just one. You can run from the tank. You can run over to the helicopter. So that did very well. We did it upright in a cocktail. Well, I say cocktail. It was four feet tall, but of that as well, and that was Sarge. And again, yes, there are truths to the rumors that in between rounds, our tank girl in a test version, Jeff and I had a dip switch for just ourselves that made it into the first run.
    11:17
    But actually, no, forget that. It's a total fake lie. Don't mention it to anybody. But if they have a Sarge, go look for it.
    11:27
    Swackery was a milestone for me for a couple of reasons. I used a big character by combining sprites. I did a Dungeons & Dragons game. I worked with Tracy Hickman up at TSR, the guys who were doing Dungeons & Dragons. Came up with this game where you scroll off one way, you come in another way. It's your swinging swords, your casting spells, your finding things and figuring out where to use them elsewhere. I had a ball with that. and that header up there is a remake that I did for Doc Mac at the Galloping Ghost. The original didn't have that cartoony wizard up there, but later we redid it. But that was Zwackery, and the really cool thing for me about Zwackery is they never called anybody designers, as I told you.
    12:15
    They're showing Nolan Bushnell through the offices. It was around the time we were starting to deal stuff with guys on the West Coast, And that was a typical write-up in those days. Write-ups were game design documents were cocktail napkins as often as anything else. They're showing Nolan Bush, now this is about to go out on test. We're all the way done with the game.
    12:39
    And management comes in, and this is our new game, Swackery. And this is the designer, Brian Coleman. I ran out and changed my business cards very necessary. It was delightful.
    12:56
    Oh, shoot. Hit the wrong button again. Where's my mouse? Let's go there. Okay. And then, of course, then Nolan made an offhand comment. Hey, you know what you could do with this? Is this? No! So every head on every cubicle on the floor looked up to see what was Brian yelling at Nolan Bushnell about now. He was great. We talked about it. And basically I said this game is almost on test And with your clout management is going to make me start all over He like I explain it to him Don worry He was wonderful So that was Zwackery and Zwackery was my first game as an official designer The next one, they wanted a track and field feel game. So we came up with something where you're a giant pterodactyl running across the ground eating watermelons. Then you leap into the air, and then you've got to flap to stay in the air. And on your back is a boomerang-throwing, half-naked, fur-clad cavewoman who's throwing boomerangs at these, and you're shooting watermelon seeds at giant, invisible, killer bees.
    14:15
    Didn't do all that well. I'm not sure. Perhaps it was just a little too far out there. Also, we were counting on the fact that we needed more art. That's why the bees were invisible, except at very close ranges. And management said, no, let's see how it tests without it. So that one never happened. You'll never play that game. Some of these games, but test versions that weren't released, are at Gallop and Ghost, though. I donated all my old test kits. And around that same time, sorry, I have to pause. Around that same time, laser disc games are coming out, and Astron Belt was terrible. It was papier-mâché mountains with a little rocket flying over it. And I'm a filmmaker. I said, we can do this. So I went to head of engineering. I said, look, I can make a film that's a kind of choose-your-own-adventure, live action. I can do this for next to nothing. And to my amazement, okay.
    15:19
    They didn't pay for actors. They paid for film and equipment. and by putting an ad out in the paper literally in the Chicago Sun-Times that said vampires wanted no experience necessary, we had hundreds show up that we, oh, and that's Sharon Perry. She doesn't look quite as good there. That's the girl that my mentor when I first got hired, a Bally Midway artist, and she put the bow on Ms. Pac-Man, I think I said before. So this thing, we worked on it for about three months in a building, we were able to get a building real cheap downtown because it was slated for destruction it was a 13 story former insane asylum with electricity but no heat in the literally still to this day coldest February on record we were in there shooting one day and one of my student assistants that I work in cheap. Cut. Wait a minute. Wait, that's my job. What do you mean cut? He's like, Brian, it's snowing. I said, I know it's snowing. We're inside. He's like, Brian, it's snowing.
    16:35
    It turns out, and I look up, and it was in this building. Our breath from condensation is freezing on the ceiling. As soon as we click on the hot lights up top, it melts, starts falling to the and it was so freaking cold, it turned back into snow on the way down. If you play Deathstalker, well, anyway, it didn't get released. By the time we got done, management had got out of the Laserdisc industry because, as some of you may remember, they did a game called NFL, but to save money, they did it on a Videodisc rather than a Laserdisc. And a Videodisc has a needle. So the first time the game got bumped, it turned into a $4,000 doorstop. And so they backed gently out of it. And so this sat in the can for 30 years until Doc Mac over at the Gallup and Go said, you've still got the film? It's like, yeah. He's going, let's restore it. It's like, well, it was never a game. He's like, Brian, you're still making games. So it came out about five years ago. Doc Mac sold them as arcade games, and he also has it on Steam now. So, okay, I'm going to move on from that to the one that everybody, what I'm best known for is Rampage. Rampage was a game that I was at a trade show, saw a bunch of stuff with animating backgrounds and big characters. I want to do that. Why can't we do that? So marketing guy and a sound engineer and Sharon and I are in a room, and they've all been there longer than me. And it's like, Brian, we can't. It's like, Brian, we can't. Brian, all you can do with this hardware is move a rectangle. What are you going to do with a moving rectangle?
    18:26
    Looked at Sharon and said, okay, building collapsing into itself is a moving rectangle. What knocks down buildings but giant monsters? Went and pulled Jeff Nauman, who I've worked with several times before, in and said, how? Can we do this? Yep, yep, yep, yep. We got it. First line of the design document, which we were actually typing by that point because management was a little more advanced. Oh, and by the way, side note, the humans in this, that's Brian at the top, my wife, Ray, in the middle, and Jeff Nauman at the bottom.
    19:02
    And we took it to our boss, and of course he said no. So I went over his head, you know, went up to the head of engineering who was nice enough to give me the money for the other thing. Oh, and that's the design team back in the day.
    19:18
    Mikey Bartlow, Sharon Barr-Perry, Jim Belt, Jeff Nauman, and I. So I took it to the head of engineering who gave me the money. He's like, oh, I love it. Great. Yeah, no, this is fun. This is hysterical, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we've got to change everything because you can't be the bad guy. You can't eat people. You can't fight the cops. So I went to the top three guys, Dave Morosky and Hank Ross and Stan Jrocky. And no, no, no. Jeff and I started on it anyway. There it is, psychology of a rampage, or why this is next year's number one game. I mean, we knew.
    19:52
    And by an amazing coincidence, the top three were fired the next week. And the new guy coming in, a guy named Maury Furchin, who came from retail, who turned around the Montgomery Wards retail store, if you're old enough to remember that, sent out a memo and says, don't worry, everybody's job is safe. We're going to do things as normal. You know, I'm coming in. I start Monday. I've got an open-door policy.
    20:19
    You can guess who is waiting outside his door at 859 his first day. The first meeting was with me. He green-lighted it, and the rest, as they say, is history. That game broke every earnings record in the country. and then marketing, marketing was kind of fun because it's like we put, if you remember the game, we put cities' names all over the country. I went to marketing. I said, now, what we can do is send to newspapers and TV stations that your town is about to be destroyed. And, of course, marketing said no. So I wrote back in the days when writing was still licking stamps, well not thousands but over a thousand letters that generated hundreds upon hundreds of articles around the country so um we had a ball with it it was a great game uh we we had fun and it got ported to lots and lots of home systems back in the day um yeah and then these are a little newer things that people continually ask me to do commissions or I do them for other stuff. And my very next game was Xenophobe. Xenophobe had the greatest cabinet I've ever had the pleasure of putting a game in. That was our cabinet guy, John Kubik. Three-player game, but you each had your own little horizontal screen and you could all spread out to destroy all the aliens in a spaceship before it blew up. And like Zwackery, you could find things and put them here and put them there and they would let you turn things off and turn the timer off or increase stuff and blow stuff up early. Unfortunately, and this is a sad story, if you come up by my booth today and we can look at the shadow boxes that Artivision puts out, it's actually got elements in there that you won't ever find in the game because the game was about three quarters of the way done. There were still dozens of things that had to happen. It made so much money on its early test that management said, let's just release it now.
    22:30
    And it was a new programmer working on it with me, and he wasn't willing to fight for it because he wanted to be a pinball. Here's a pinball note for all the pinball expo. He wanted to be a pinball designer or pinball programmer. So it just went out as is. but yeah if you ever look at the rom set you will see a lot of cool stuff like space suits and well anyway fun stuff again a lot of bad puns there's a lot of characters in this game to choose from all of them are bad puns i i take full responsibility for every bad pun you're ever going to see in any game of mine okay um venusian army knife there okay and again xenophobe had a lot of points and oh this brings me up to the best thing about the arcade games that you don't get anywhere anymore is field testing now this is at a recent trade show but basically there was nothing better we stay we made every game on schedule on budget when i was working for bally midway because our friends down in the you know down in the factory would get laid off if something was late. So literally, you know, we got it out there. We got it on test and test was the best. You are standing there. You are seeing real people using their real money, putting it in. What makes them angry? What makes them smile? What makes them put in that next quarter? What can we do to make you put it in faster? There was nothing better than standing in a dark room watching little children. No, there's got to be a better way to say that. just to watch the smiles on the players faces was wonderful after the arcade days were over and we formed our own company we're doing games for EA and 3DO and American Laser and but reports don't do it this was the best time which I'm so glad to see that arcades are crawling back now, free play or not, this is what I want to see as a game developer. I want to see the look on their faces. Okay, Deathstalker. I'm bringing that back up now because, oh, well, I already mentioned Doc Mac had me do it. It came back. He tells me that is the number one game in his arcade every day of the week, 365 days a year, because people get on it in the morning and they play till closing. And again, these are still testing pictures. And part of that is, I'm so glad it happened this way, because if I had released it back when it did, it played way too long. It would have never made the money, not on a quarter. I would have had to charge a buck, which back then nobody would have touched. It would have never got released. At least this way, He actually built the game. He released them as an arcade game. It's available on Steam. And it's, I mean, as a filmmaker and a, you know, screenwriter and all that good stuff, it's terrible. It is just awful. But it's awful in a kind of mystery science theater sort of way so that you are looking at it going, oh, yeah, you know, bad puns. You know, the main bad guy is Count Yurchikunsky. And, of course, his nemesis who lives in Der Hatchet Manor, the lunatic asylum it all happens in. You're looking for Buffy McGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock fans know who that is. So Buffy McGuffin you're looking for. You're a private detective. And, yeah, Baron Der Hatchet. You might see him. And it's a multi-path thing. You can get through this game dozens of ways, and what you pick up, you can defeat the guy at the end. And it's not a game like Dragon's Lair where you stop, you lose, you start over. It's a game where every time it's a full event. You get knocked out, you wake up somewhere else. You get knocked out, you wake somewhere else. And then you finally get to the end where you defeat him or not. And if you visit Count Yorchikunsky after you've seen Baron Der Hatchet,
    26:45
    Count Yorchikunsky will tell you, never count, no, always count Yorchikunsky before Der Hatchet. I know. I'm sorry. It's just who I am.
    26:59
    A couple more games real quick Okay we going from this That American International Team Laser Jeff and I had two months to put it together for a European show It did not do well
    27:11
    So we took that and we turned it into the game called Blasted that did much better. It's just laser tag out a window where you're shooting anything and everybody in the opposite apartment building. It did pretty well. It's still got a lot of fans. Oh, and there are two professional actors and actresses who I used for, actually, that's me and my wife, for Blasted Cider, just a little background in the, Max RPM, programmer Gary Oglesby wanted to do a game where you actually had to use a clutch, a driving game where you use the clutch, so it was just a straight out, straight away, that was Max RPM, it did okay, It got released anyway.
    27:59
    After that, the new manager, because management, now middle management is creeping in, was the former programmer from Spy Hunter, and he wanted to do Spy Hunter 2, but they wouldn't redo that old hardware. We didn't want to wait for any new hardware. So we did Spy Hunter 2 on the max RPM hardware, which I still consider it's kind of an embarrassment. It's not a really good game. Everybody that he asked to work on it said no. They'd rather work on something else. So the team, you've got to have a team on the design side. If the team isn't pulling together, if the team isn't excited, the game may get done. But it's never going to be the kind of game that happens when everybody pulls together. This is a shot of everybody waving a salute because we were suddenly bought out by our biggest rivals, Williams Electronics.
    28:59
    Williams bought Bally Midway when Jeff and I, Jeff Naumann again, were halfway through arch rivals. Jeff comes into my office one day, throws an airplane barf bag down on the table and says, Brian, I've got it. It's like, I don't want to catch it, whatever it is. He says, no, no, no. And he wrote down on there. I always wanted to do controlling multiple characters he said this will let us do basketball the way it needs to be done not just arbitrary percentages based on the programmers you can do a call for a pass, you can pass you can do a pick and roll I'm stopping you Jeff you're 6'2", I'm 5'9 I don't know from a pick and roll but it looks like a great game it looks like it would be fun but for guys like me that don't love basketball I want a foul. So that's why in arch rivals, if you can't get the ball away from the guy any other way, you punch him in the face. You pull down his pants. You jump on him and roll and trip him. We had a ball with that. That was another great high-earning game. And it introduced a game mechanic that you may recognize from some later basketball games that Williams did. after Jeff and I left the company we were approached to do something like they were doing at Williams which was NARC and Mortal Kombat where they were videotaping actors and we said no I want to do cartoon characters and that was probably a big mistake because that one turned into NBA Jam but we were working I skipped ahead there We were still working for Bally Midway Williams. After our travels, we wanted to do a football game. They said, no, we're already working on one. So we did pigskin. Pigskin went out. It tested great. It was wonderful. And then here's, they say you learn from your mistakes. Here's a valuable lesson. You're going into production next week. And you think of a way to increase earnings by saying, hey, if you buy the full game all at once, it's going to cost you two tokens less. Because it's four quarters. for periods, I should say, to play the game. People are going to love this. You put it in the game, and the game goes out, and it's earning like this, and then it earns like this, and then it earns like this.
    31:24
    We introduced a bug in which when somebody bought in, if you bought into a full-player game, the game would play free for the rest of the day.
    31:34
    We got new ROMs out, but by that time, the word in the industry got out that it was, an iffy game, so it never sold as many as arch rivals. A lot of fans for it. I always wanted to do marketing stuff. Rampage, arch rivals, we did let operators change the names of the teams and do their high school colors. This one, we had jerseys and hats and playbooks and everything else. That was pigskin. Pigskin was fun to do. Oh, and like a lot of our games, home ports, I never understood Jerry Glanville's pigskin foot brawl that Razor Soft, but again, I wasn't following sports, so I didn't know who he was, but that's, so I like just to see that. Okay, that was our time at Bally Midway and Bally Midway Williams. We formed about, for about a year, EA had been asking me to come work for them. I kept saying, no, I love California, but I can't afford to live there. Oh, we'll give you a bonus to move out here. It's like, I have an acre. Can I get an acre in Silicon Valley with the money you want to give me for, no. So we went back and forth. Finally, they said, all right, Brian, what if we just gave you enough money to start your own company? I could do that. Not that I'm qualified, but that was Jeff and I when we form game refuge and our first game for ea was their highest earning original title the day year it was released it was called general chaos jeff and i left midway under good terms we got on a train we drove out there i've been taking trains for a while now for certain reasons and jeff went with me for the first time he brought one cassette tape that he turned over in naperville and 30 minutes after he's like 35 more hours of this. So he's always flown everywhere. We got out there, we pitched him general chaos because we hadn't told him anything we wanted to do. The meeting went well. One exec said, hey, why don't we make it street gangs? And I said, no, absolutely not. Jeff's giving me one of these. I said, I got kids. I want my kids playing something that's obviously fantasy. I don't care how cartoon violent it is. I don't want street games. Pause, breath. Okay, we can see that. So we made it through that first meeting. We did this with EA. We started on a couple sequels, a sequel to General Chaos, and this one, which was called Plunder, in which you were one side, another two-player game. One guy controlled all the undead. The other guy controlled all the explorers. Both of them got pulled because EA decided they wanted to get into the arcade business. All right. I'm going to pause and take a breath here. And that didn't work out too well for him, as some of you may remember. we were doing a game for the new midway and as an outside consultant and they said and we've got our 14 year old male covered we've got everything they want but we need something that older people will play younger people will play Finally, Jeff and I looked at each other and said, let's redo Rampage. They got on board. Joe Dillon loved the idea.
    35:07
    We had a good staff by then. We had about five programmers. We had however many they are. Does that look like eight? Yeah, eight animators plus myself. We did Rampage World Tour, and the beauty of that was the hardware was powerful. We could do what we want. And we had talked to, by this time we had a reputation, so guys from magazines were calling us saying, you've got to put secrets in so we can do secrets inside. This thing is full of secrets. It has Area 51 in it, a cartoon version, of course. We had homages to RoboCop. We had that warehouse where Indiana Jones stores the Lost Ark. you can go to hell in rampage world tour and eat hitler so i mean we did everything we could there's a page that's almost a booklet that's almost 20 pages deep of all the secrets in this game so we had a ball with that rampage then this version of rampage really took off it got ported to everything at the time.
    36:17
    Most of the, yeah, I have to say younger. I'm 68 years old. Most of the young kids, and that includes anybody under 50,
    36:27
    remember Rampage World Tour probably more than Rampage. Oh, word of advice. When you're promoting your new game and you're going out there in costume and you're going to a demo derby, don't paint your car to look like the best car because every other car immediately descends. I think we were out in 45 seconds on that particular day. So there's just a little marketing advice there. Rampage World Tour, again, get commissions all the time. What else can we do? We did merit touchscreen games. We went to Williams first, and they said no because we wanted to do kind of virtual 3D. We did four games for them, and their royalty system was based on how much your game got played. That was great.
    37:17
    Unfortunately, the other people that made games for them weren't very happy by the end of the first year. They sold a ton more the year we did that. And so they had to restructure their royalty program because we were getting too much play.
    37:34
    That's why you've got to read contracts. Then we stumbled into the gaming industry. And you know what? I don't know how much anybody wants to know what game. I'm still making games. I've been doing games for 40 years. They got into the casino games. We got into, oh, this is an arcade. So we did this one. We were approached by the people who had a Paramount license. We did Star Trek Voyager. Paramount was great. They let us add our own characters. this was the capsule that was huge it was in like almost every movie theater in like 2006 everywhere in the country all our, it was wonderful great team, all modelers and I'm out there at Paramount, we're walking through one of the darkened sets, myself, the producer and one of my animators and oh this is cool, this is neat because I was out there getting research stuff and all of a sudden what the hell are you guys doing in here Comes around the corner, chomping on a little butt of a cigar. You don't belong here.
    38:41
    My producer, literally, big guy, he turns around and stands there. I'm going like Ralph Cramden. My animator, Ben, God bless him. He's a big Trekkie. LaVar Burton. I loved episode where you had the blah blah blah and you made this thing you had such a beautiful and all of a sudden angry cigar chomping LeVar Burton turns into Reading Rainbow the nicest sweetest guy showing us all around it was wonderful but that was the fun of Star Trek Voyager let's see we did a lot of you know what Okay. One other aspect of what we've been doing for 40 years is commercial stuff. For the Komatsu, who makes those big rig things, they asked us to do a thing for a trade show where we would drive their trucks, their 40-tron pickup trucks, mining trucks, in a race. but we had a couple conditions.
    39:52
    They couldn't go more than four miles an hour and they couldn't touch each other. So we start on the game and we're doing more. And I, okay, first thing, would you mind if we go downhill? Oh no, that's no problem. Cool, I think we've solved the speed problem. And then later, and then, well, I'll tell you this in a second, but, and then later, towards, as we're getting to the edge, it's like, I gotta ask, why don't you want the trucks to touch each other? Well, we don't want the paint to scratch. I said, I think we can handle that. We did a game where you go down a mountain. By the end, you are going about 150 miles an hour in 40 pickup trucks And you doing loop flips in the air as you going over ramps The whole thing was to try not only did you have to try to win the race you had to lose the least amount of load so collisions made you lose And you could go any, at least from the player's perspective, you could stay on the road, you could go over hills and mountains, you could, because early on one of the other conditions was, and you should know that our audience will have a drink in one hand, they don't play video games and a cigarette in the other or a girl on their lap.
    41:07
    That's a creative challenge for making a video game. So basically, they don't know it, but if they go off anywhere we don't want, we gently steer them back onto the course or we gently steer them to a secret thing over.
    41:20
    It was, and it's one of my finest design challenges that I'm so proud of, totally idiot-proof. And they had a ball. They ran it for 11 years. at their every three years or every four years they had a convention. They ran it every year, and the crowds only got bigger. I've had people working on construction in my neighborhood that, you're the guy who, and it's like, not you're the guy, you did that game? We play that every year. That was very gratifying. The lines were 300 people long, and as you saw from some of those earlier things, up top they could watch. It was like live TV coverage. and we put all of their other vehicles that you weren't racing in the background. So that's what you do when you're doing commercial stuff, and it can be just as much fun. This one was a bit, this one was, how do you describe it?
    42:17
    Probably the first and only game we have ever done on our own dime. It is full contact poker on heavily armed rocket-powered snowmobiles in a perpetual winter in a Cthulhu mythos reality where you can cast spells and bring up demons that will, not demons, you bring up the main god of this mythos, Cthulhuntite. Sorry, I know, bad puns. anyway it only sold about 95,000 copies but it's a flipping riot and at this point I'm going to kind of stop we've got 15 minutes left I will plug General Chaos 2 30 years later I started it as I started my round the country podcast tour with the indoor kids, Kumal and his wife, I found out I had cancer. And when our main client at that time found out about it, he moved his business to Australia. So me and the business had some major restructuring. So the first attempt at a remake of General Chaos kind of fizzled. So finally got everything back going, had enough clients, we're doing this. Okay, we're going to do General Chaos. Let's restart it. I announced it to the world just before St. Patrick's Day a few years ago, which, you know, was that three-week sickness that happened right after St. Patrick's Day. So we had to stop it again. But we're in the middle of it now. It's coming out. I've got a team of six guys working on it.
    44:07
    I should have video up at my booth later of where it's at right now. And come by the booth. Any game I've ever done, and I've done about 90, I've got posters for most of them. Oh, Evil Brow was the bad guy in Arctic Stud was a brewer who made Evil Brow beer, which you found out at the end of the game was made by his workers' urine, who were small goblins. It was their urine that you were drinking the whole time. Cow tipping was a game we did for team play here. That was just what it looks like. and I made some great shirts for that and I didn't sell those I'm not sure why no one wanted to wear that on their chest I still love that one alright I'm going to stop here for a sec actually I'll just let it run what I'd like to do is just say I'd like to open it up for questions I mean I can talk about the movie if you guys want to hear about the Rampage movie that was a blast or anything else I've done so I'm going to take another drink while somebody thinks of a question.
    45:14
    Yes? Do you ever keep painting the old marquee? Do you ever have a collection of these? I have a limited collection. Back in the day, I really didn't follow the industry. I was too busy thinking about what I'm doing next. In later years, I realized, I mean, I sold my environmental discs of Tron for $1,000. bucks. Okay, so I should have paid more interest into what the industry was doing, but I do have a bunch of my marquees, and then a pinball marquees that I had something to do with. But no, for the most part, I don't have any really big collections of anything. My games, and that's it. I don't know. I don't know. Like I said, I was always interested in what I was getting to work on next. Yes? Do you make W-E-W-A-N-G-L-O-Y? The only game I had, Strange Science by Dan Langmeier.
    46:22
    Yes, Langloy, I'm sorry, Dan Langloy, asked me to do a T-shirt for him one year for Christmas, Santasaurus Rex. And then the next time he had a new game, which was Strange Science, he had me do a six-page comic book for it. So that's as close as I've ever got to doing art for pinball games.
    46:41
    Anybody else? Yeah. In those days, time frame was about nine months. Spy Hunter took a year and a half, but he was in a little office that management even forgot to keep going back into. I think George Gomez, who's doing Pins of Stern, it was, Spy Hunter was his idea originally. And Tom had a new hardware that had to be, Tom Leon, the programmer, had a new hardware where he had to figure out a lot of stuff from scratch. Because at Bally Midway, we shared everything. Every team, oh, these were Touch Tunes games that I did for the short-lived Touch Tunes bar top system. everybody shared everything else at Valley Midway it really was the wild west we were all buds we'd all go out and have our long lunches together and then stay late into the night I'd sleep on the cot under my desk but nine months was a typical game back then and there would only be two three people working on it programmer an artist or two spy hunter like three artists were working on it and a sound guy. That was it. So it was easy. You cranked it out, and you talked all day long. I go to your office. We talk about this. We pull in this guy. We talk about this. Design was wonderful. And for me as an animator, I'm working on a game for this guy who goes, let's try this. No, that didn't work. Let's try this. No, that didn't work. Let's try it. And it's like, I want, I can't, it's not like an art print. I can't take it home and show people what I've been working on. I want it to get out. Or you've got another guy who does the minimum they ask him to do and then doesn't slide. So I kind of became a game designer out of self-defense. If I'm spending a year working on it or nine months, I want it to get out there. And that was my motivation. And Jeff Nauman, programmer I did a lot of the games with, he was the exact same way. We want to get this out. Ego aside. It's not about ego. it's about and then when we got bought out by Williams and I think this is kind of common knowledge completely the opposite thing management by design at Williams pitted teams against each other you did not share things with each other there are cash bonuses here that you know if you can do this like this so nobody shared stuff with and they I mean I'm not saying it's a bad management because Williams made kick-butt games, but it wasn't, wow, this is fun, and I get to go here all day. It was more, you know, a different work atmosphere, and it paid off for him. But, yeah, that's why we only, Jeff and I were the only two designers they kept when they bought Bally Midway, video game designers, and we left after pigskin. We left after a game and a half. And I digress. I tend to ramble. You guys may have noticed I tend to ramble. Anything else on any other stuff?
    50:00
    Yeah. Good question. I don't have an answer. We're doing it as a PC game first, which I know it can go straight to Xbox if publishers decide.
    50:17
    I've got the full rights to do the sequel, but the original publisher EA still has a right of first offer. I don't think they're going to act on it. It's not their type of game they're doing right now. Once they say, but if they say yes, they can do anything they want with it, go anywhere they want with it. We're doing it as a PC game. My new CFO has a lot of public, I've got two publishers that are interested in it. If EA says you can do what you want, but they'll have, and then they'll have ultimate say. It's certainly going to be on PC. If I self-publish, it'll be PC, Steam, whatever. If I don't and we've got a publisher, it's going to be up to the publisher whether he wants to release it as a PC and or just, hey, let's set it straight up for this. So I wish I had a better answer.
    51:09
    Yes? Yes. That was mutual. I think George Gomez said it first in a documentary I shot about him or about the industry 20 years ago. So You Want to Be a Video Game Designer is a documentary you want to watch if you want to see me, Jeff, Eugene Jarvis, Mark Turmel, all the old Jack Hager, all the old people at the time when they were much younger and much more willing to say, tell the unfiltered truth about what was going on in the industry and how they got into the industry and what they had to do. It's called So You Want to Be a Video Game Designer. It's on the Brian Colon Game Refuge channel on YouTube. But, repeat your question.
    52:07
    The three-player was a money question. It was we had two customers, the player who's got to love it and wants to live forever, the operator who has to pay for it, put it in his store, and wants you off in 30 seconds. We had to make them both happy.
    52:29
    So actually, excellent question, because the three-player was a natural. Let's get a third guy on here. Didn't have enough art in that old hardware. So Ralph is really George in a different color palette with a different head. That's why Ralph was a giant wolf.
    52:50
    Things that we could do to get that extra quarter, laughing was my thing. Make them laugh, they're going to put in another quarter. Make them go off the stage naked like they do in Rampage, they're going to laugh. And when they realize if they've got that much time to put in a quarter to keep their score, they're going to dig for that quarter faster. And when the players come up with, oh, he's down there. Let's eat him before he can put in another quarter. They put in quarters even faster. Arch rivals. It's a time-based game. The time runs out to zero. The game stops, right? No.
    53:26
    It stays at zero. no one ever notices, until the next shot is taken and the ball stops right there. Then it asks you for your next quarter. Are you going to put in a new quarter to see if you're going to get that thing or not? We had to do things to get players to get the money in, as much money as possible, because that determined how many games were produced. And I'm out of time, guys. One last question as people are coming in. Otherwise, I'm going to say thank you all so much for coming. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you.