This one's not working. Check, check. Oh, okay. Do you want to? We can pass it around. No, here. Let's say, let's hold the two mics between the three of us to see if that works. Yes. Greetings, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Come on in, Dave. Okay, okay, okay. Can you hear me if my voice, if I'm this far away from the mic? How about this? This is just fine. Well, I guess we can pass the mics back and forth, too. Will we pop our peas? So, hey, everybody. Thanks for coming. This is kind of a rare occasion because when Qbert was created in 1982, or since, I should say, since Qbert was created in 1982 or sometime thereafter, the three of us have not appeared at an event on a stage in front of a group of people like yourselves ever. This is the first time. If this was historic, it would be historic. We've actually been here, yeah. And I should also point out that the last time the three of us were physically together was two years ago in that hallway around the corner by the strangest of coincidences. I was coming into Chicago, jump in any time, but I was coming into Chicago for something completely unrelated to pinball or video or anything. And David told us he was going to be here. Yeah, so I wasn't going to sneak into town, and so I told Jeff Lee I'm coming into town. I'd like to see him. Warren's in L.A. I didn't think I'd see him. And I'm standing in the hallway and I knew Jeff Lee was going to show up. And I got a call on my cell phone from him. And then he shows up and I nearly fell over because he was like, what are you doing here? You don't belong here. You belong in L.A. So, yeah, it was wild. Yeah, we basically. We had a very fine time. We basically ambushed him without him knowing that I was in town and the three of us were together, and that was two years ago here at this event. You know, I wasn't registered, but I was just hanging out. And with another one of our colleagues, Jim Weisz, who was one of our hardware and software gurus at Gottlieb. Yeah. And we have gotten together in pairs, and we did one event at the, was it the Midwest Gaming Classic where? Right, up in Milwaukee a couple years ago. Jeff and I were there, and Dave appeared on Skype. On a bed sheet. On a bed sheet. That was in the bar. They've upgraded now. They've moved downtown and it's much nicer now. Yeah. So that was, anyway, but let's talk about Qbert. This is going to be a fairly loose, I think, and free-flowing conversation between the three of us. Dave does have a little presentation. I'll talk a little bit about this, the stuff you're seeing. You know, normally when I give a Qbert talk, I have a whole prepared presentation and I talk a about all the slides you're seeing. But since the three of us are here, we're all going to be talking probably at the same time. It's just running on a cycle. Dave will go and do his presentation and then we're going to plug in Jeff, oh, or maybe we can't. Well, we can't. We'll be plugging this recently. Yes, speaking of plugging. Qbert and we. We will give. It's been long in the works and I really pushed to have it ready for this event here. Yeah. Well, I'll kick it off just by saying that it's just still mind-blowing that people are interested in Qbert 30, what, eight, no, 35, 36, 36 years later. I started developing, I started the coding in 1982. The game was finished. We worked on it through, you know, mid-1982, and the game was probably finished in October, went out on test, rolled off the assembly lines sometime in the fall, and started to really get out there in the world late 1982 and throughout 1983. And you'll see a lot of like magazines and articles and crazily things like USA Today is covering Qbert. Glamour, Glamour magazine, you'll see a little blurb from Glamour magazine. The New Yorker was talking about Qbert. It was extraordinarily popular when it came out And, you know, I think we're all grateful for that. And really amazed that 30-some years later, people still, he was appearing in movies. Appearing in movies, although his nose is a little more flaccid than it used to be. But, yeah, that's astounding to us that there's like a new generation, you know, like ourselves. A new generation of kids. I remember last spring in Milwaukee, there was like the cutest little five-year-old girl that was just going crazy because her dad wouldn't buy her more Q-Bert memorabilia, but she just loved Q-Bert from the movies, I guess, because I can't imagine she actually played the game much. Right. Is there anybody here who has not heard the story of the creation of Q-Bert? Is there anybody here who's not familiar with how Q-Bert was created? Because I feel like we've told this story a million times, but I'm happy to tell it again. Jeff and I have, I think, slightly different versions. We do, but... Then we should give equal time to each. Yeah, sure, sure. You want to do yours first? I don't care. Well, okay, um... I was always a fan of, well, since my college days, of M.C. Escher and, you know, his periodic cubes, which he explored a lot. And back in the 70s, I was fooling around with that, making a lot of drawings, and then a few years later, I come to work at this video venture. And naturally that started to show up in some ideas. And Kan Yabamoto, one of our programmers, saw, I guess I had done some of this on the Apple. I don't really remember that so well, but that's what Kan's memory is. And so we quickly transferred that to the development system we used. Kan wanted to do something with that project, but he got sent off in another direction. Warren came along, saw what was on the screen, and he should pick it up from there. Okay, so basically what he said is absolutely true. What I saw on the screen was that Escher cube pattern, but it filled the screen from edge to edge. And when I looked at it, of course it was just fascinating because I also was fascinated with Escher. I had Escher posters on my dorm in college, you know. And the three-dimensionality of it, given that we had a very crude two-dimensional system, really jumped out at me. And I thought, that's really cool looking. Now, at the time, I was a new programmer. I had just started at Gottlieb in January of 1982. And the only thing I had done up to this time was I helped out on another game that Tom Malinowski was creating, which went by many names. Many names? Protector. Argus. Guardian. Videoman. Videoman? Why me? Why me? Gentlemen out there. We have to interrupt and introduce somebody who really was a father figure and a mentor and the guy who created the Gottlieb Video Department, Howie Rubin, right over here. So please, yeah. Nothing we did would have happened without Howie Rubin and Ron Waxman, the Vice President of Engineering. Those two guys created the Gottlieb Video Department. Yes, it's true. Anyway, so I'm kind of a green programmer, haven't done very much, and I'm walking by and I see this thing and, you know, I'm trying to find something to do because this Providgard Argus, as I called it, got scrapped. And basically they were like, all right, well, you know, you got your feet wet on this game that didn't go anywhere. Now you've got to do a game. You were hired to make a video game. So please, make us a video game. Tim Skelly, who is also sort of our technical guru and mentor, was working on Reactor, and he was finishing that up. And I learned a lot from him. Learned, you know, how to do certain things, techniques for doing certain things. But I wanted to program both gravity and randomness, because when I looked at that screen filled with cubes, it occurred to me that if a ball fell from the top of the screen, landed on a cube, it would have one of two ways to bounce down. And, you know, I was a programmer. Programmers love binary. Zero, one, left, right, that's all you got. So, and it occurred to me if I carved that, those cubes into a pyramid. So every time when you landed, you always landed on the one particular cube, but then you had all these possible ways to go. The path could be determined by a single byte. A random byte of data would give you a path for a ball. So that's all I had. I was like, all right, I'm going to program a ball bouncing down this pyramid that I'm imagining, and I'm going to teach myself randomness and gravity. And I did that. That was the first step. Then I needed, well, you know, everybody would come by and they'd say, wow, this looks really cool. And I'd be like, okay, I just was playing around. And it's like, all right, well, I need a character now. I need somebody to control. And I went to Jeff. Jeff, go ahead. You can take this if you want. Well, I had a game design that I was working with, but like flat-wormed, another Escher concept, crawling on the cubes. And then I designed a little document for a game we called Snots and Boogers, where this guy with a nose was shooting missiles at enemies that were on different dimensions on these cubes. And that's where the figure of Q-Bird first appeared on that document. So, and my first, I never saw that document. I was not aware of this at all. I had no knowledge of this at all. When I went to Jeff and I asked him, I said, you know, I've got this thing and I need some characters to put on it. Do you have any characters? And I did. He threw all of these characters, he put like a line of characters up on the screen. I think All the characters from Qbert, maybe others, I don't remember. I have others too, yeah. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, the orange one with the big nose. Now, the thing is, because I was a new programmer, and I'm literally just trying to get my feet wet and learn stuff, you know, when Jeff floated this idea of him shooting out of his nose, I was like, no, because it's too hard. I don't want hard. I want easy. I want something easy to program. So I loved the character and I took the character, but I nixed the idea of shooting because I couldn't figure out how to make it easily work with the directions of the pyramid. You know, it just didn't, you know, where is he shooting? How are you aiming? It was all too complicated for me. But Jeff went ahead and he expanded the angles of the character. He gave me all the angles I needed. And I implemented him jumping around the cubes. And then that's all I had. so people were like okay this is pretty cool of course a lot of people didn't like the fact that you could jump off the pyramid and die a lot of people gave me flack about that but I was like no it's got to be some challenge to it you got to feel some accomplishment so I kept it in and then and that's with the diagonal joystick too yeah people gave me flack about the diagonal joystick and I thought well but how else would you he's not going up and down Every time Qbert moves, he moves at a diagonal. So to me, it only made perfect sense. So I never understood that criticism, and I stuck to my guns on that one. Anyway, so I also implemented collision detection, which was a little tough for me because the balls are bouncing and there's this implication of a third dimension. But the idea, you know, I have Qbert running around and he's avoiding the balls. Now, Ron Waxman, real character, I mean, very large man, always smoked a cigar, would occasionally come in to the room where us programmers worked. We were all in kind of one big, like, think tank area. Late at night. Into the mic, please. Late at night. Late at night. He only wanted to talk to the worthy people who were staying past five. Yeah, he'd be in his office most of the time. At night, he'd come back to our area. And I remember one night I'm sitting at our development system, which was this blue box, the Intel blue box. It was a blue box. It was large. And he's sitting behind me, and he literally sounds like Darth Vader. You know, it's like I can hear him breathing. You know, it's like. I'm hearing this right behind me as I work. So I've kind of gotten used to tuning it out. But he's there, and I'm working. I'm just kind of playing the game, trying to figure out what to do. and then I hear his voice behind me going, what if all the cubes change color when he lands on them? And I thought, yeah, that's a good idea. So I took that idea and I ran with it. And to me, that's kind of when it became a game. You'll tell us when it was on the schedule. I don't remember when it got put on the schedule officially, but to me, that's when it sort of became a game. Before that, I was just kind of messing around. And then after that, I don't know if you guys want to add anything about the actual development of it, because to me it just all, it was just one thing at a time. Well, you did, originally I had these enemies coming in at different angles, and so you added them at some point, and that gave you a little difficulty? Yeah, that, I remember Jeff goes, well, what if we have enemies coming in at these, at the other angles of the pyramid, you know? And I was like, oh, Jeff, you're killing me. Damn it. Because I'm trying to keep the game simple for me. Now you have gravity going different ways. Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, I don't know how to do that. I don't know. Because obviously we're working under extremely limited memory, limited speed. We had no trigonometric functions. But this idea actually stuck in my brain, and I couldn't get rid of it. And I eventually was like, all right, I'm going to tackle it. And then I did. But all the elements to me just sort of came together. They were fairly obvious. Well, we need a guy to chase after, you know, the player. We need an escape to the disks. And then just, you know, the cartoon balloon, which I think, Jeff, was your idea, the cartoon balloon. Yeah, I've got sketches of that. It goes back to, like, high school or earlier. It's an old comic book device. Well, yeah, right. I think we're all familiar with it. At one point, a lot of you may know, it went out on test, and there were actually marquees printed up with that swear balloon. Yeah. And then that's a whole other story, which is how Kubrick got his name. Because all throughout the development of the game, I had no name for it. Literally, I was like, I just am trying to put a game together. I don't know what I'm doing. But we had to name it when it was done, when we were about to put it on test. So I think everybody kind of agreed that the name of the character should be the name of the game. Well, what are you going to name the character? So I went around and polled everybody. I actually wrote down names on a list, you know, a piece of legal paper. I polled everybody in the company I don know if you guys remember this or if you guys remember the names The only name I remember was Arnie Aardvark and that was Frank Starshak who came up with Arnie Aardvark And I was like, no, I don't think so. I recall a meeting where we went in. Here's ring names in this meeting. We're sitting around spitballing and people had lists. Well, ultimately that's what we did because getting suggestions from the people that worked there didn't seem to work out. So we did have a meeting. You were not there, Dave, but you were there. And Richard Tracy was there. Howie was there. Ron was there. Bill Jacobs was probably there. I'm not sure. I mean, maybe ten people sitting in a conference room trying to come up with a name for this little orange guy with a big nose. and I remember at one point stepping out of my body and thinking this is absolutely surreal what are we doing I mean I was in my mid 20's but I'm like this is crazy is that what you went to school for right exactly but then somebody wrote the name Hubert up on the whiteboard Richard Tracy came up with Hubert my boss and we were like, okay, Hubert, okay, well, why? He's like, I don't know, it's a cute name. But then somebody made the connection and they changed the H to a C because it's cubes. So they saw Hubert and they were inspired. And listen, we were there for probably two hours at that point and everybody's getting antsy. But now you can feel this energy in the room and people are like, oh, Hubert, oh, something's clicking here. And then somebody walked up and maybe it was you, Jeff. No, no, you came in later. Somebody took the C-U and erased it and put a Q. And everybody was like, wait a minute, we're on to something. But there was Q dash, and Jeff changed the dash to an asterisk, and it became Qbert. And we all jumped up and we screamed and we were hugging each other. No, that didn't happen. But it felt that way in my mind. That never happened at Gottlieb. Anyway, so that's how Qbert got his name. But then Howie was like, no, no, no, we're going to put it out with a cartoon balloon. That's going to be the name. And we would say, Howie, you're insane. How are people going to refer to it? How are people going to order it? And Howie said, and I'll never forget this, he said, they'll find a way. If the game is good enough, they'll find a way. And I got to say, I appreciate and admire that logic. Howie is definitely an out-of-the-box thinker. I'll tell you another Howie story. So when I first started, we were in Bensonville. We were in a big plant in Bensonville, nothing rolling off the line. We had a big empty plant, just the new video department, which was very small. I don't remember how many people, maybe a dozen people worked there. And in the middle of the day, we'd all be working. We'd all be working hard and enjoying working. And Howie would run and go, everybody stop working. We're going to go out in the plant and play some football. And he made us stop working and go play football. But it was the right thing to do. I mean, it was good for us. Do you remember this? I'm not a football player. I would have gone off the loading dot and just smoked cigarettes. All right. Maybe this is a good transition for how he got his voice. I think it's a great transition. He had a name. He also had a voice. AV, we need to switch. Maybe we can do it. We're technical. Got it. Yes, absolutely. . Well, I don't know about the word fancy. I really wanted it to feel fair because it is completely a kludge. You know, we had no depth in our system. It was just a flat system of sprites. And so I had to basically, you know, based on which direction each object was going, I had to see what their overlap was and then decide if I wanted to call that a collision or not. And it was tricky. But it got to the point where I felt it was fair. And when people were playing it, most of the time nobody said, oh, that's not fair. I shouldn't have collided. Once in a while, but it's just so muddy when you, you know, because it's an isometric game, there's not actual a third dimension. Let's see if we get sound here before we go any further. Okay, there's a sound coming from here. Hold on. I can make Hubert sounds if you want. No, no, no, I can make Hubert sounds too. Hey, the sport I do remember was softball, And our engineering department had a team, and there was a factory team. And I guess we were in a league with other companies. And I think we lost every game we played. I'm one of the worst baseball players ever. You might have been the star of the team. Oh, I don't know about that. I played softball. Just keep doing it until you get it out of the speakers. It's coming out there. Oh, it's coming out of there. Oh, okay. That's why I always have sound on my first one. No, see it's coming out of there. . Wow, we are technically challenged here in 2018. I'm still extended, so it should be up there. You guys made it go away. I'm so sad. Any other questions while we're waiting? Anybody have any questions? Keep going until we get the random. That was Jun Yum. Hardware designer. I mean, from Midway. A Midway alumnus. Native of Korea. He went through several iterations of the board, right? It's being extended. Yeah, and he later went on to design some boards for some games we worked on for Premiere. exterminator game. That was his thing. Yeah. He... Oh. Oh. Oh. Well, right. It was on a dip switch. So you could, a lot of people had the knockers turned off just because they found them annoying. But Jun didn't really have anything to do with the knocker. The knocker was the idea of one of our engineering techs named Rick Tai. He's the one who originally had the idea. And since you have the question, I'll just finish the story. So Rick had this idea for the knocker, and when we put it in, you know, it sounded like a knock. It sounded like the knock you know. And I did not know that. I did not like that. I did not want that because it sounded like a knock, like somebody knocking at the door. What I wanted was a thud, like a body hitting the bottom of the cabinet. So here's what we did. We put a little piece of foam right where the knocker hits the cabinet, and it made the perfect sound. It sounded like a thud, and I was so ecstatic. And when we went to management, and Howie, I don't know if you remember any of this, But we went to management. They said, no, we can't put the foam in because it's like an extra $15 per cabinet of labor. And so the foam didn't go in. The knocker went out, and I was unhappy with it, but everybody seems to love that feature, so I'm not going to complain. But I will say that if you own a Qbert cabinet, try putting a little piece of foam in there and see what it does. You realize Warren's vision. try that but don't hurt yourself not if you do it yourself I guess you got to find the right foam yeah yeah I don't think so. But there's no running through here. Yeah, that's it. Right. That's right. Yeah, just click on that. Does it want to use two screens? It does not. I'm not sure why. So it's standard. It should be over there. I don't know what the hell this is doing. We'll put the second screen on. Okay. We'll just do that. I'll do it. I'll just do that. I can do that. Also made it much easier for emulators in the future. So many Gottlieb games can be emulated with the same emulator. Okay, we have it. We have it. See, video is easy, audio is hard. It always is. It's two signals. I don't get it. Okay. So, I have a tight little seven minute presentation. I'll whip through it. See I've done these before. You always want to slide with some sound. Now I know the presentation works. So I've started my career. I've done a few pinball machines. I did these at Data East. And I got a Q-Bert's Quest. I didn't know I did it because I left the company in like 83. I saw the writing on the wall and I went off into home game consoles for Nintendo and stuff like that. And then they sold the assets and it became Premier and they did all this stuff. Four years ago I gave a presentation in Las Vegas and when in Vegas you go to the museum and I went to the museum and they had a Cupid's Quest. That's novel. And I played it and I was like, those are all my sounds, thank you. much, I mean the great Craig Byerwaltus who did all the coin op sounds for pinball had added a little connective tissue but it was only about 20%. The rest of it was mine. So I put it on my CV now because it's all Qbert sounds. Whoa, way too much of that. Way too much. Whoa, way too much of that. But so I, that was the first pinball game I worked on and I didn't know I worked on it. Then I've... Oh, I didn't get paid for it. No, work for hire. That's a theme which will run through the Q-Bert notion here. Work for hire. You know, you create. This is my baby. Thank you. We own it. Okay. And I've done a few pinball machines. But let's get back to the Q-Bert story. Now, I don't have my notes anymore, so the back story is how did I even get to do this? How does a guy from Indiana end up doing this crazy thing? In 1980, I was working in data services at an insurance company. A handhunter found out that I was an avid microcomputer hobbyist and got me an interview with the brand new video game division at Gottlieb. I was interviewed by Ron Waxman, and he was very frank. Why should we hire you? You're from an insurance company. I convinced him to let me have a week. I went home and created a simple space game. It had a shooter and it had bullets that went across the screen. I don't think I had hit detection yet, but it looked like a game. I got the job and I gave a two-week notice at my company. During that two weeks, people worked on me, told me what a crazy thing this was to do. I started to waver. On Friday, which should have been my last day, I called Ron and said, well, I've thought it over and I don't think I'm going to take the job. Ron said a couple things to me and then he basically just said in his way, See you on Monday. And I showed up at Gottlieb. So Ron, in my career, is a very key person. That is an exact true story. I was not going to leave the comforting womb of my bogus insurance company and go off to Bensonville to this empty factory. And I wasn't even that nuts about video games. I just wanted to stop working on mainframes and work with 8-bit processors and get somebody to pay me to do that. But I'm so glad Ron was Ron because, ah, see you Monday. And this is a revised Q-Bert story because I've told this story many times, particularly about how the voice came about and I've much maligned a piece of technology that it's not really quite fair. A little more context. Okay, now I'm working at Gottlieb, but I'm not doing sound yet. Nobody needs any sound. They're still trying to make graphics boards and stuff. So I was making graphics utilities on the Apple II for sprites, which I think you may have used. Yeah, yeah. So it was really, if you didn't have that utility, then you were like drawing it on graph paper and, you know, with like hex bytes and stuff. So I I made a utility in the Apple II to do that. I became the sound programmer because when Tim Skelly's first game, which hadn't even been named yet, was starting to become mature, Tim knew it needed audio. I'd been talking to Tim. I respected him. He's the only one there who had ever had games produced. He had been very successful at Cinematronics. I had been a musician since high school. I'd played for seven years full-time in rock bands and lounge bands. When they said, gee, we needed sounds for this game, I raised my hand and said, hey, I'm your guy. So now I the sound guy And from the North Lake plant they brought over an instance of the Gottlieb sound board and a little bit of code that Craig Byerwaltus had done so I could see where the addresses were and stuff and said, hit it kid. Now you need to understand a little bit something about the Gottlieb sound board. Back in the day, this was harder than it should have been. Programming was hard and only for men. The reason was they gave me this to do the job on, the Rockwell Blue Box. Like the Intel Blue Box, it was an ICE, it was an in-circuit emulator. Out of that box, well, okay, out of order. Out of that box came a thing you plugged into the host and you literally emulated the 6502. But the problem with the Rockwell was it wasn't really for software development. It had 16K of memory total which enforced certain kinds of disciplines on your coding like you didn't have enough memory for a symbol table and to run the code and to run the assembler and loader linker and the emulator. So you couldn't really have label names or any kind of names bigger than three characters, four at the max. This makes it harder and that's a little, if you can read it, this is an example. I mean, assembler is gobbly gook anyhow and then when your labels have to be L1, L2, it's bad. Now the other part about this box which which was so interesting, was that you extended the processor out of the box onto the target, and the target was like attached to a pinball, I'm sorry, a coin-operated video game cabinet next to me. And the back was on it. And to make this work, you had, the box had to get its power to run the thing from the host. If that was ever interrupted while you were doing this, it reacted by turning on that disk drive right over the directory and wiping out your disk. Now, I'm over here coding and doing something, somebody comes by over here and bumps my cabinet and the door opens and there's a power interlock because there's a high voltage coil on the back of a monitor that you don't want anybody to get hurt by, That effectively cuts the power to the processor, which the box responds by wiping out your source. It was a lot harder than it should have been. I just thought this crowd would appreciate a war story. Now, eventually, Jim Weisz, who was mentioned, built me a ROM emulator board that fit in an Apple II. So I could emulate the sound board's ROM with that. And it looked just like ROM to the game system, but it was inside the Apple's address space. So I could even tweak the code while it was running as long as I stayed away from code. I could tweak variables and stuff. That was cool. And I had 48K of RAM. Now we're talking. I was going to get an aid. I was going to go to a drugstore and buy one of those cards, those happy birthday cards. When you open them up, they play music for about two minutes. Those cards have so much more memory than what I devoted my life to for two years. So don't touch that door. I had a big sign eventually put on the back of my coin-op cabinet until I got rid of the blue box because horrible things would happen. The Gottlieb Soundboard. The Gottlieb Soundboard used a microprocessor to create a stream of numbers that were converted into voltages, amplified, and sent to a speaker. Jim Weisz designed the board. It was first used in the pinball machine Mars got a war. There were not a lot of resources. 4K of EEPROM, a 6502 running at a little less than 1 MHz, 128 bytes of RAM, an 8-bit digital-to-analog converter, and from the Federal Screw Works, really, the SC01 Voltrax. Yes, that's important. Now, Q-Bert sound doesn't start with Q-Bert. So that's Tim Skelly's first game, and management knew that we had a talking sound board because the board talked for Mars. Badly, but it talked. So they insisted they wanted their video game to talk as well. I'm a junior sound guy. Sure, whatever. So they gave me this. I mean, they gave me the sound board. It had that part on it, and then I could go to the data sheet and try to figure out how one goes about using this. And yes, I think there is no small irony that this part comes from the federal screw works. Because that is the way you feel after having used it. That's my primary tool. Those are the 64 phonemes that the chip synthesizes. I mean, in this time, that's pretty cool that it even did this, right? But it's like the dancing bear. It dances, but it doesn't dance very well. And, of course, expressed in hex, if you want to make the S sound, you put in one F. Of course, why not? So the only tool that I had to make this damn thing talk was the dictionary. So if I wanted it to say something, I would go to the dictionary and see how the dictionary thinks phonemes were expressed, and then I would try to find the magical mapping between that and these, and it wasn't fun. But it particularly wasn't fun for Reactor because we had a little chamber, a little bonus chamber, where a character could get knocked in there, and every time it hit the wall, you got some points. And when you crossed thresholds, we wanted to say 1,000 bonus points because it's an eye-busy task. Your character's actually over here. The thing's down here bouncing around the bonus chamber. 2,000 bonus points, you know. 3,000 bonus points. That's how they wanted it to say it. Of course, we had the Votrex chip. It wasn't going to do it. So, I set out to do that. But the problem was bonus points. It seemed simple enough. I tried the obvious mapping from the dictionary to the thing. Didn't work very well. Then I tried some other stuff. When that didn't work very well, then you just start trying crazy stuff. And the thing is, after an afternoon of doing this, there's a psychological phenomenon called habituation, where after you've been trying to do a thing enough, you think you've done it. So then some poor innocent would walk through the lab, and I'd grab him. I'd He said, come over here. And then I'd play 10,000 da-da-da-da. Every freaking time. What are bogus points? I could not. I tried Zs. I tried Hs. I tried everything. I could not get it to say bonus points. Now, I'm a grown man, and I've been doing this for days. And out of frustration, I was talking to Chris Brewer, who was my hardware tech, and we just sort of said, hell with it. What if you just put random numbers into the chip? What does that sound like? It sounds like that. Bam! That's cool. Meanwhile, Kiebert doesn't exist yet. Just random numbers. I mean, see, it's like in modern art, you know. Back in the day, when you painted a portrait, it took a lot of time. We spent days and days making a beautiful rendering. In modern times, we just have conceptual art where you come up with the idea, hey, let's cover the south of San Jose Fernandez Hills with a big orange tarp, you know? It's just the concept. And so sticking random numbers in the chip is pretty much the same thing. 10,000 bonus points. Damn. Well, you know, it's not, it's the Vulturex quality, right? but... Bastard! Okay, I think the website's down now, but there was a website you could go and you could put in a phrase and then this guy would put it through whatever system he had and feed it to a real Votrex chip, digitize that, and make the WAV file available to you. And that's what that is. I am humbled. It actually is possible, however badly for the Votrax to say 10,000 bonus points. Bastard. But if I had been able to do it, I may have never stumbled into Qbert territory. So... Qbert sound fact number two. There is no swearing coded into Qbert. Hello, is it? Virtually all of the Qbert speech is the result of sticking a series of random numbers into the Votrax chip. Hey, soon. With two exceptions. Hello, I'm during the... And... Bye-bye. See, that's important. People ask about that. And people asked at the time. We got letters. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we got letters. Parents complained. People would literally, people would think that Qbert was swearing. People would say, they'd swear to me. I heard him say blah, blah, blah. People, I think some people, a kid in Arkansas wrote up this. His parents banned him from playing the game. because of the swearing. See, I know it's an infinite number of phrases because this is just a random number generator and I feed ten of them in. And so I would have loved to take it to court, put the game in the thing, and just let it talk all day. The problem is you can't prove he didn't say that. Well, the one thing was, we used to have one in the cafeteria where we ate and it made sound during the attract mode, and I'll swear to God it said Radio Shack one day. Seriously. Sound fact number three. Q-Bert's Pyramid Completion Tune had been written years before by me as a jingle and submitted to a local car dealership. You get a lot of great car when you buy one from us for the best deal on a new or used car. They didn't buy it, so it ended up in Q-Bert. That's it. Bye-bye. I'm done. Thank you, David. So the key fact of that was I had that voice in my pocket. I was just, you know, wow, this is cool. Then I go down in the lab where I think Warren had just put the orange thing on the pyramid and was like moving it around. I don't know if you remember. and I came up to you and said, you don't know me, but I have something for you, and you're going to like it. So I realized that this slide was kind of stuck up on there, and the reason was it needs me to push a button. But while it's stuck there, I thought I'd tell the story because Qbert was featured in this issue of Video Games Magazine. It's from April 1983. And I remember when this guy, Neil Tesser, came to interview us, and he interviewed the three of us as a group. And Gottlieb did not permit our names to be used in the article. And the interesting thing is that the thrust of the article is that Qbert and Joust, which came out about the same time, were both really successful games made in America. Because most of the popular games were made in Japan. So, Qbert, Joust, the timing was right. The article covers both Qbert and Joust. In the Joust section, everyone's name is in the article. I mean, John Newcomer, Eugene Jarvis, Ken Fidesz, everybody in Williams is named, that had to do with Joust, is named in that article. But, when they talked about Gottlieb, Gottlieb wouldn't let us use our name. So, I was D-Ziner. That was my code name in the article. Jeff was R-T-E-E-S-T. And Dave was Jay Walkman. You know, the weird thing is, when we worked on the Caveman game, which was the first game I worked on the previous year, in Play Meter Magazine, there was an article, the Gottlieb's Pinball Evolution. It was a hybrid game. And they named us all in the article. so it wasn't like it was a secret they named everyone except they didn't give the actual programmer Joel Krieger credit he wasn't mentioned at all they said Frank Starshak yeah they tended to get things wrong I have one of these pictures that are cycling through it's a picture from Playmeter or Replay I can't remember which one but it had me and Howie Jun Yum the hardware designer and Boyd Brown who was the president of the company And so it says something about Qbert and then the designer, Jun Yum, so implying he was the designer of the game but he was not. And then it said programmers Howie Rubin and Warren Davis. So they tended to get things wrong a lot. Howie wore so many hats there. Yeah. And then another thing I think you just saw in a previous slide after that article, you saw there was sort of a credits page. but that was from Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q-Bert so the upshot of this magazine article was that when we saw that Williams people were named in that article and we were not we really kind of were pissed and we convinced management to let us, when we did Faster, Harder, More Challenging Q-Bert, I put in a credit screen so yeah your name's in there and one programmer Kanye Abamoto who did Mad Planets snuck around that. He had Kahn in the high score table. He's got Kahn going across and then he has Yabu Moto as the first letter of each name going down. He managed to give himself some credit. That was cool. There's another story I'd like to tell and that's about when we were merged with the main plant. In the middle of the development of Q-Bert, we started Q-Bert in Bensonville when we were separated from the main plant of Gottlieb, which was located in North Lake. But at some time during the development of Cuba in the summer of 1982, management moved us, and again, Howie, this is a great place where you could jump in if you want, but management moved us from Bensonville into North Lake. And we were, you know, I mean, I thought that was kind of cool, because I was excited about meeting all the pinball designers. I loved pinball, and I admired all the guys who made pinball machines, but I, you know, had never met them. So we come in to the main plant, into new offices, and, and, you know, all of us, I think, were kind of excited and, and wanted to meet these guys and they giving us the stink eye They are looking at us like you little and And we didn understand why And then we came to realize that they were never allowed to develop video games. They wanted to, they were the ones to be the ones to jump in the video market, and they were not permitted. Well, it was a little different for me being an artist. I knew the artists who did, you know, pinball art, the cabinets, the back screen. So I was put in that department with those guys, and some of them were friends of mine. It was awesome from my end. Sorry about that. Wow. The other thing was they built a space out for us. We all got the new offices. That's right. I think they were kind of shoved in the back at that point. So they were not happy. And I understand why. The other thing is at some point, because Coca-Cola was our corporate overlord, we were actually owned by Columbia Pictures. And at some point, Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures. and I don't know how what was happening up in upper levels of management and that's one of the things Howie and Ron were really good about is sort of protecting us from upper management but they called us into a meeting once and announced that we were going to change our name Gottlieb which listen Gottlieb is a family name and it's a historical name and I don't know why they felt the need to change it but they felt the need to change it and they unveiled it and this big logo that they probably paid $50,000 to some company to develop, and it says, we're now going to be called Mylstar. And then my first thought is, and I said this out loud, does anybody realize that's rat slime spelled backwards? Yeah, yeah. And I've got to say, Boyd Brown was not happy. Everybody laughed, but he did not. He did not find that amusing. I might point out that that is the, I've expropriated the rat slime name for this publishing company. That's right. So it lives on. I have a question. I think for me, if people could understand what we did, we made the designers do what Peter from David and I did. We had a different kind of work. So we're moving into a pit bull factory where everybody was and they went home. And we had an ethic that said, come in whenever you want to come. Nobody's watching you. But, you know, come in. Make sure you do your work. And I found that we had to send these guys home because they stayed for whatever. That's true. Well, they didn't realize, too. They were going home at 5, and we would be there until 8 or 9 or 10 or even later sometimes. Just because. Sometimes. Yeah. We put in crazy hours. We were, like, insanely motivated at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Does anybody have any questions? What was your first response to Q13? You wrecked it out. How did you find out about that? I don't exactly remember I just heard about this movie and someone said Q-Bert's going to be in it and when I saw it I loved it I thought they did a real incredible job in a way Q-Bert's been abandoned by Sony or Columbia Pictures, whoever owns it and that was reflected in the movie I thought that was a real nice touch. Well, I saw the trailer for Wreck-It Ralph, and oh, look, Q-Bert. I think my wife pointed it out. Wait, isn't that Q-Bert? First time I saw it was somebody told me. I heard about it before I saw anything, and then I saw the trailer. And I was sort of excited about that because Q-Bert has been somewhat abandoned in recent years, and I thought, oh, maybe they're going to do something with the character. You know, none of us own the rights to Q-Bert in any way. We were work for hire. We signed something when we started at Gottlieb that said anything we develop for the company belongs to the company. When Gottlieb folded, that reverted to Columbia Pictures. Although there was, didn't the JBW try to buy the rights? Ron and a couple other guys, other executives, started a company. They took the LaserDisc technology and did some work for the U.S. Navy. and somehow they were the licensor for Qbert. And I presume the other games, but Qbert's the only thing they ever did. There was a number of cartridges. And then at some point, the rights reverted back to Columbia Pictures, which was bought by Sony. So Sony owns the rights. In the mid-1990s, I was at a game developers conference up in San Jose. And I remember there was a Sony booth there, Sony's game division and I went up to some guys that were working there and I said why don't you guys do anything with Qbert? And he's like well what are you talking about? And I said well you own the rights to Qbert. And he said we do? And he was like scrambling around telling all this did you know we own the rights to Qbert? We own the rights to Qbert. So a year later there was a version of Qbert for the PC. So I credit myself with telling Sony that they own the rights to Qbert. However when Wreck-It Ralph came out, they really haven't done much with the character over the years. And so I was sad that he was realistically portrayed as being forgotten. But I was happy to see him. And any time you put Kubrick in a movie or out in front of the public, I'm thrilled. I think all of us take great pride and ownership, and we're just grateful that people still like it and remember it. And I have to add, I'm baffled at pixels. Well, Well, my story on that was some Thursday morning, somebody pulled me into the front office, into the marketing area, which I, where I never went. It was like I crossed through the third dimension into the marketing area. And they sat me down in the room and they showed me like one segment between commercials of Q-Bert. Yeah, clearly it was done, right? And, well, you're the sound guy. And then it was like, what do you think? Now, I don't think I gave them the response they wanted because they never called me back. But my feeling was, you know, they gave him, they made him like Bugs Bunny. They gave him like a Jersey voice, you know. They gave him a voice. He talked. And all the characters, yeah, come on, let's all go down. And it's like, I, yeah, I wouldn't have gone there with him. I mean, to my mind, if you had asked me before you started production, I would have made him Charlie Chaplin. He would not have talked, except gibberish, I mean his talk, and then whenever he did that, there would be subtitles, and that would be hilarious, right? I would have thought of him like Peter the Bugs Bunny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you wouldn't take him where they took him. They wouldn't make him into Bugs Bunny, which is kind of what they did. They didn't want to hear that, And so they kind of nodded and sent me on my way and never asked me to come back. I didn't even, you know, and they never gave me any of that good stuff from all, you know, they licensed that thing to what, 50, 60 things? Like 130, I think. 130 things, yeah. And I never got any of that good stuff either. I should have been nicer. Columbia Pictures took over the licensing. . My only other licensing story is a very fond one that Parker bought the rights to Gottlieb Games to port them, so they ported Reactor to the 2600 courageously. Right? And that Christmas, Parker Brothers ran prime time ads for Reactor. And they used the music from the game. Now, I had been a professional musician since I'd been in high school. I struggled on the road. I had been trying, you know, to break through the barrier and have some commercial success for years and years and years. And I've been at this game company for now like a year. My music's on TV. It was like, yeah! And so that was a great moment. And that's one of my happier times is that Christmas when I could hear reactor music, stuff that I had written being played back on that insanely minimal system on television. Is there an intercession starting here? Yeah, they've got a set of pinball machines. Oh, okay. Question over here? I don't know about that. I... Yes, I continued freelancing for a number of years, doing some arcade games, did a few with Warren, some for Howie, some got made, some didn't, did a few cartridges. I eventually got out of the business and started working rehabbing, making cabinets and doing carpentry work. And it's been about the last five years I've found out, I got introduced to this world again, this retro gaming scene, which I didn't imagine existed at all. But that's a great segue to plug your book. Right, right. So I've been creating art and I've stayed in touch with a lot of my colleagues over the years. And I was contacted by a guy named Terry Minnick who owns the Pixel Blast Arcade. And I've done some projects with the Galloping Ghost Arcade. They've been very generous and supportive. So I have this memoir. It's a history of the Gali video game experience. Brand new. And hopefully work on some new game projects coming up. Yes, if I can find my table. 286 pages. Yes. Lots of pages. Yeah, a lot of pages. A lot of pictures. 50 pages of illustrations. So, yeah. What happened to Faster, Harder, More Challenging? Well, it's out there. So basically it lived in my house. I had a Qbert cabinet at home, and I swapped out the ROMs for Faster, Harder, More Challenging Qbert. It was never released at the time because it was kind of too early when I did it. I did it literally like two months after Qbert, and it just never got released. and then stayed in my cabinet for 15 years. And in 1997, I want to say, I was working for Disney, and I was made aware of MAME. A guy that worked with me at Disney, Fred Suzuki, said, hey, I can put you in touch with those MAME guys because it's literally just a ROM swap, the exact same hardware. So I gave them ROM images for faster, harder, more challenging Qubit, and since 1997, it's been available. Well, you can ask Howie later, but my take is that... I think Howie's gone by then. That's true. It wasn't ready. It was too soon. People were still discovering Qbert. My thought was they'd keep it on a shelf for a year and then release it, and why they did not, I have no idea. Any other questions? What gave you the idea to make Qbert Q? I did not have the idea to make Qbert's Cubes. Qbert's Cubes was actually made by a guy named Neil Bernstein. When Qbert was done and faster, harder, more challenging Qbert was done, the company said, hey, would you like to make another Qbert game? And I declined because Qbert was basically my first game. And I had other ideas I wanted to pursue. I didn't want to be locked into Qbert, even if it was popular. Maybe that was unwise. I don't really regret it. I went on to work on Us Versus Them, which is probably the game I am most proud of, even though that didn't get a wide release either, but that's a whole other story. Someday maybe we'll do a thing about Us Versus Them here. But Neil Bernstein came to me at one point, and he was a junior programmer. He was a younger guy, came in after, or came in as the department was being built up, and said, listen, I have an idea for a Q-Bert game. Do you mind if I pursue it? And I said, no, please, go ahead. So it was all Neil, Jeff did graphics, and Dave unwittingly supplied the sounds. And did not get paid again. He was already gone from the company, but they were the same Cupert sounds. Do we have to go, or this gentleman has a question? All right. I'm going to tell you something that I'm not proud of. There are only five levels in QBERT. Six, seven, eight, and nine are all the same as five. Okay? You happy now? You made me admit it. It's true. It's true. And the only reason it goes up to nine is because it's a single digit and there was no room in the artwork to put ten. So it really... Audience Member 2, When I got to ten, I was like, it's nine again. It just... The tuning of it literally cycles after level five. It's the same level over and over again. Audience Member 2, Kind of like Y2K? Yeah. Listen, it was my first game. I didn't know much about tuning. I was happy to get something out the door. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Thank you very much.