INTERVIEW
Rob Fulop  | Rob
Fulop is a true pioneer in the videogame industry. He
co-founded the second 3rd party publisher Imagic, and for three
decades he has granted life to the VCS, Atari line of computers, Pinball, Sega
Genesis, CD-i, 3DO and more! He practically invented the virtual pet genre decades
before its time. In addition to gaming, he is also a professional poker player.
Rob has definately been busy and one might say that he has done it all! |
MT>
It all started with a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Did you ever think then that
the first game you ever programmed back in your 11th grade math class in 1975
would bring you to where you have landed now?
RF> Actually it took me about five seconds after learning how to write my first
program in BASIC to decide that this was what I was meant to do. I had always
loved games and puzzles, had spent years performing magic tricks trying to dazzle
my family and friends, and had taken to math pretty well at that point. Combining
games and math into a form where I could dazzle people occurred to me as "natural"
a path as I could imagine ... certainly it was one of little resistance .. I remember
playing the TicTacToe game I made and telling myself "cool, I'll just do
this for the rest of my life".
MT>
Describe your internship at Atari.
RF> I joined the coin operated games group working for Steve Calfee. They were
making pinball machines at the time, and they wanted somebody to write a little
sound effects editor that could be used to generate pinball sound effects. I had
to learn 6502 assembler code which I had never heard of. The project took exactly
ten weeks, completed the day before I went back to school. During those ten weeks,
I became absorbed in the culture of the coin op group ... which was pretty much
"vintage Atari". Very casual, very fun, very cool people. I would gladly
have done the work without pay.
MT>
How did it feel to be offered the opportunity to program "the game that shut
down Tokyo", Space Invaders, for the Atari home computers?
RF> The opportunity didn't occur to me as any "big break". I recall
being at lunch with a few guys ... somebody said "I wonder how Stella Missile
Command would work?" ... and we talked about it for ten minutes .. and
since I had just finished Space Invaders I started goofing around with
a simple kernel that should a missile streaking down the screen .. and we just
went from there. There was hardly any sort of big approval process at the time...
programmers basically made whatever they felt like making until somebody told
them to stop.
MT>
There were approximately two and a half million copies of Missile Command sold.
I believe that Good Deal Games has most of them in our overstock inventory now.
Anyway, did you ever think that an early project of yours would become such a
big hit for the time?
RF> I had just finished Space Invaders for the Atari 400/800 which was
getting criticized for not staying true to the original coin op game. My decision
to "change things up" in my own version of Space Invaders turned
out not to be what the public wanted. Duh! So I set off to make Missile Command
as EXACT a replica of the original as I thought could be done. I knew people would
like it, but even I was surprised how it became such a big hit for the company.
MT>
Tell us about your Atari bonus that turned out to be a real turkey!
RF> Not much to tell actually. I had shipped Missile Command three months
prior, and was expecting "to be taken care" given it had done so well
in the market. I recall opening the envelope and seeing the coupon and thinking
"what a bunch of boobs, seriously! All they would have needed to do was give
me like $10K or so and they would have owned me for life". That was the moment
I decided to leave Atari.
MT>
Working on individual projects by oneself was common at the time. Did this lead
to a great deal of pressure and competition with your peers?
RF> Not so much pressure as simple peer rivalry. We were basically a bunch
of geeks who liked to play video/computer games. So at lunch we'd play the new
games that people were working on .. it was common practice to leave your game
running on your workstation at lunch, so we'd come back and somebody would start
fooling around with somebody's game .. playing it .. offering critique .. whatever.
If nobody played your game at lunch it was either because it wasn't far enough
along ... or because it was obviously a dud of a game. So nobody wanted to be
the author of a game that nobody wanted to play on their lunch break. So it was
a very 'self correcting' system. There was no formal "competition" ..
but plenty of informal peer pressure going on. You became on the "in"
crowd after showing everybody something new and fun.
MT>
You co-founded Imagic with Bob Smith and Dennis Koble to form the second third-party
publisher. Were you fearful of Atari litigation as was Activision?
RF> Personally the litigation, or threat of litigation, meant nothing to me.
I knew that I had done nothing wrong by leaving Atari to go be a co-founder of
Imagic. I was "clean" so to speak.
MT>
Do you think that Demon Attack deserved the Billboard Video Game of the
Year award?
RF> No self respecting author could answer "YES" to such a question.
I was happy with the way the game turned out. My motivation was to make my former
colleagues at Atari start crying when they saw my new game ... that's basically
all I wanted to do .. impress my former colleagues and be "missed" professionally.
We were still hanging out at the time socially, but getting to show off my new
toy was certainly fun.
MT>
What plans did you have in your head for the sequel to Cosmic Ark?
RF> None whatsoever.
There really was no place to go with the concept .. it was pretty WYSIWYG ...
I had 'borrowed' the play pattern from a coin op game called SPACE ZAP
.. but it wasn't fun enough to hold up as it's own game ... so I added the planet
and the little creatures, etc.
MT>
There is a tiny spacecraft that flies off screen at the end of Cosmic Ark.
The ship later appeared in the game Atlantis. Were there ever plans to
continue using this ship in future games or marketing or even promoting it as
a mascot of some sort?
RF> We talked about doing something with the little green saucer that flies
away at the end of Cosmic Ark, but no specific games were conceived of.
It was just something I thought fun to do ... sort of leaving the audience hanging
.. as it were.
MT>
The limited amount of Cubicolor EPROMS has made them a collector's item
over the years. Does it upset you when you see copies going for crazy amounts
of money in online auctions and sales?
RF> Why would it upset me that copies of my work are hoarded and passed around
like precious pieces of art? There is obviously value in scarcity... and there
are so few copies of Cubicolor in existence ... so if people happen to
want to collect these games ... obviously Cubicolor becomes a "collector's
item" by accident. I think most collector items become so by accident and
have little to do with any real 'value' other than the perception of other collectors
who can't have the item itself since not enough were ever made in the first place.
MT>
Rumor has it that you do not like your own game, Fathom. Is this true?
RF> Fathom
sort of came about backwards ... I started with a cute animated graphic of a dancing
dolphin and sort of made it up as I went along. There was no real "vision"
to start with in my head .. and I think the final product makes such clear. At
some point I decided the game can't be all underwater .. since I was unhappy with
the way the dolphin controls worked. But I was playing a lot of JOUST at
the time in the arcade ... and I loved the flapping mechanic featured in the game
... so I started messing around with flying a bird around the screen the same
way. I was going to do another game and just toss the underwater Dolphin game
(called SCUBA at the time) ... but then somebody suggested just combining
the two games so that's what I did. The I threw in Volcanos .. then clouds so
that the birds had something to do ... and it just grew from there. Fathom
always has occurred to me as "cobbled together" ... sort of a patchwork
of cool ideas that never really jelled into a consistant experience. But people
liked it.. so that's all that matters really.
MT>
What was your personal reaction when Imagic's public stock offering was cancelled
moments before going public?
RF> My personal reaction was precisely what how somebody would imagine a person
reacts when something they were working hard for drops away the very last moment.
I went through the classic stages of grief ... shock ... denial ... then anger
... finally acceptance.
MT>
An "army of remote controlled robots" sounded fantastic! What happened
to Zito and Bushnell's TECHFORCE project, in which you played a part?
RF> TECHFORCE!! Wow, you guys ARE good! TECHFORCE was
a classic example of what I call a "faux pitch". A "faux pitch"
is something which sounds a lot better than it actually is to play. Many MANY
game concepts turn out to be 'faux pitches'. We knew TECHFORCE was a dog
long before it was done... because nobody that was working on it ever wanted to
play with it. Not even one time. There was no "there" with TECHFORCE
.. there was no underlying replayable game that was fun to play. It was the classic
toy that a kid would see on TV and convince himself that it was a "gotta
have it" sort of game. And then the kid inevitably abandons the thing a few
days later and replaces it with a $0.99 plastic ball that Grandma got him from
Walgreens ... because the plastic ball turns out to be a thousand times more fun
than the overpriced high tech gizmo he wanted in the first place.
MT>
Night Trap was a result of an interactive mystery game called Scene
of the Crime, created to demonstrate the power of the unreleased Axlon / Hasbro
N.E.M.O. console. What happened to Scene of the Crime? Are the VHS tapes
viewable or even playable?
RF> Scene of the Crime was the precursor to Night Trap. Somewhere
I have a videotape with the game running in real time. But no, I don't' think
the game is playable ... as there is no NEMO console that exists that could play
it.
MT>
Sewer Shark and Night Trap cost a record four and half million dollars
to produce. These titles easily had the largest budget of any games at that time.
Did you ever feel like you hit the BIG time or the peak of what the industry had
to offer?
RF>
No, we thought Night Trap and Sewer Shark were throw-aways .. and
we were just at the beginning of the "movie-game" industry. We thought
we were going to become movie producers.
MT>
How did you contribute to the ill-fated Genesis and SNES networking product, the
Edge-16?
RF>
The Edge-16 was something John Scull and I came up with when we sat down to found
PF.MAGIC ... John soon afterwards convinced AT&T to bankroll the concept into
a working prototype. Soonafter, Sega picked it up as an extension of the Genesis
and we were ready to rock the world, raised $4mm from a VC and off we went. Too
bad AT&T backed out of manufacturing the unit, as who knows what could have
resulted. The idea is still solid though ... let kids play with/against one another
over the phone lines... and carry their characters around in their pocket on little
plastic cards which they can plug into a game system and resume playing the game
where they left off.
MT>
You programmed Rabbit Jack's Casino, the world's first online casino for
America Online. As a former professional Poker player, and the programmer for
title itself, did you 'know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em?'
RF> I could then, and still can hold my own in a poker game. I have played
in the Main Event of the World Series of Poker several times .. but typically
only when I have won a seat via a satellite tournament. I still play high stakes
No Limit Holdem once a week, and several buddies of mine ended up becoming "poker
celebrities" over the past few years.
MT>
Were you surprised when the N.E.M.O. projects Night Trap and Sewer Shark
were resurrected for the Sega CD console?
RF> No, Tom Zito had been talking about rescuing the work we did for Hasbro
for several years before it actually happened.
MT>
How did you feel about democratic politician Joseph Lieberman's crusade against
Night Trap?
RF> Nauseated and Appalled are probably good words to describe my reaction.
MT>
You once stated that the original Hasbro version of Night Trap featured
a hidden scene with a topless Dana Plato. Was the game originally meant to be
marketed to an adult crowd?
RF> I said that? I don't recall. I think maybe they shot something like
that as a outtake / joke, but it certainly would never have ended up in a released
product.
MT>
Supposedly, the "P.F." in P. F. Magic has several different meanings.
Please explain.
RF> It stands for Pure F%&king Magic, which is how one would always describe
their code in the comments section of stuff at Atari. If a module worked, but
nobody really was sure how it worked, it would be labeled PFM and that meant "who
cares how the damn thing works, it works, people like it, that's all that matters".
I wanted PFMagic to be a company where all that mattered was the customer's experience
.. and nobody on the outside would know anything about the technology involved.
This was a very "Disney" like value, and I really resonated with it
.. still do actually.
MT>
In 1978 you interned at Atari as a sound effects editor for pinball machines.
Was this relevant to releasing PaTaank in 1994 for the 3DO platform? Are
you a fan of pinball?
RF> My editor for Atari had nothing to do with Pataank, nor am I a particularly
enthusiastic pinball player. We just wanted to do something
cool for the 3DO
system ... and 3D pinball sounded cool .. so we tried to make it. It came out
okay ... certainly not an epic game by any standards.
MT>
I spent a great deal of time playing your game Ballz on the Genesis back
in the day. The idea of using separate sphere-shaped sprites to form the characters
was clever. How did this concept come about and why?
RF> I think Keith Kirby was the guy who showed us that we could make a cool
articulated character out of spheres .. and doing so would save the processor
a TON of time ... since a sphere looks like a sphere regardless of where somebody
puts the camera .. and a sphere can be represented internally simply by keeping
track of it's center point, radius, and color. So characters built out of spheres
make for good video game playing.
