Paul Reiche III, Toys for Bob Q&A

Conducted by Omni

As always, the introductions: who you are, how you got into the gaming industry, your education, and your role on Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure (DESA).

My name is Paul Reiche III and I am the CEO and creative director of Toys for Bob, a small game studio in Novato, California.  Fred Ford, Terry Falls and I founded the corporation 2 years ago, growing out of a 15-year game development partnership between Fred and myself.  Between the 3 of us, we have over 50 years in the video game industry and have worked on almost every platform from the Apple II up through the Xbox.  Our other employees all have impressive talent and experience in the industry, with most of our artists, designers and programmers having been leads on their own projects in the past.  The games we’ve made as Toys for Bob include:

  102 Dalmatians

            The Unholy War

            Little Witching Mischiefs (Japan only)

            Pandemonium (PSX)

            The Horde

            Star Control I & II

In the ancient past, I designed some of Electronic Arts earliest games such as Mail Order Monsters, World Tour Golf and (with Free Fall Productions), Archon I & II and Murder on the Zinderneuf.

How did your past development experiences help with DESA’s development?

We inherited the Tony Hawk 4 gameplay engine technology, which was quite a large, complex mass of code and script.  The programmers’ main job was to establish what we could (or should) change and what we could leave intact.  Fortunately, our programmers had worked on so many different kinds of games and systems that they were able to sort this out quite quickly.  Our designers had never made a skating game before, but we had made plenty of level-based platform games, so each of them understood the tools (such as 3DSMax) and limitations imposed by the 3 different console platforms.  Many of the artists had worked with Disney before on 102 Dalmatians, so they had a pretty good idea about where we could take creative latitude and where we should stick to the movies’ looks.  The animators had the fewest limitations imposed by the system, so they were able to spend all their time making their animations look better and better -- that’s why they look so good!

Considering the source material for DESA, why weren’t the soundtracks utilized instead of the pop/rap/hip-hop music?

Since DESA grew out of the Tony Hawk games, sometimes we would ‘do what Tony did’ and other times we would step outside that framework to be more true to the Disney/Pixar films.  With music, Activision decided to stick to the Tony Hawk formula of playing a soundtrack of popular music.  Given perfect hindsight, I think it would have been cool if we could have offered the music from the films as an alternative to the pop tracks.

Who had final say over what was included in the game?

The answer is complex, but fundamentally it was handled very well.  Since Activision paid Toys for Bob to create DESA, realistically Activision had final say over everything in the project.  That said, I can’t think of any instance where they exercised that control to ‘overrule’ Toys for Bob -- the relationship was just about perfect in that way.  Disney and Pixar were also involved at every step, approving every single thing in game.  There were a few instances where Disney required us to yank out an animation because ‘the character doesn’t do that’, and even though we really liked some of those animations, we understood that they were just protecting their most valuable assets.

Why and how did you decide on the included characters?  Why not have some penguins from Mary Poppins?  Or Grumpy from Snow White?

Activision chose the 3 most successful Disney animated movies.  Simple as that.  … but penguins are cool!

What was the average age of the testers for DESA?

I think we had 3 focus group testing sessions, each with about 10 kids in the 6-10 range and 10 more in the 8-14 range.  We expected the younger kids to love the game (and they did), but we were happily surprised that once the oldest kids got their hands on the game and saw how the characters skated, they got over thinking ‘Disney ain’t cool’ and had a blast.

The Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 engine was used for DESA, but the controls are simplified.  Obviously, the target markets are different – how difficult was it to get the controls right for a younger audience?

I think that was the most difficult aspect of the designing the game.  Anyone who plays Tony Hawk (and who hasn’t) has that game’s controls permanently etched into their brains and hands, so making significant changes was almost sacrilegious.  Our driving concept was that a kid should be able to have fun pressing just one button, and the ‘learning curve’ for more advanced moves would be much smoother than a full-on TH game.

Were there any challenges or consideration while making DESA for multiple platforms? What hardware was used in developing DESA?

All of our designers and artists use PS2s (hooked-up to Windows PCs) to create their work, because the PS2s are the most limited in performance and, most importantly, they are far and away the dominant console in the market.  This means that we had to fight to keep the game rocking along at 60 fps in our more complex levels.  We did some enhancements for the Xbox version, and given how great Microsoft has been promoting DESA, I wish we had done lots more!

What video games get played around the office?

We play 4-player SNES Super-Bomberman every single day.  We challenge ANYONE to compete against us.  We will crush them!  (Oh yeah -- sometimes we play that new game.. uh, ‘Quake’, I think it’s called).

Half-Life 2 has had some of its source code stolen.  What do you think of the theory that it was new-age industrial espionage?  Or was it just some hacker looking to make a name for himself?  What does it mean to have source code stolen?

I would bet that in cases like this, it’s just somebody looking to ‘be cool’ by stealing something that everyone is excited about -- kind of like the folks who steal Star Wars scripts.  

With duplication piracy so common and widespread, I think actual money-making criminals could care less about the source -- they just want the CD images.