Digital Eclipse interview: ‘We’re not selling you the game, we’re selling you the history lesson’
Editorial director Chris Kohler discusses the retro studio’s recent releases and its plans for the future
Digital Eclipse has been specialising in retro re-releases for a lot longer than you may think.
Founded back in 1992, the California studio was porting retro games to consoles at a time when ‘retro’ wasn’t even really a term associated with video games yet.
Under Digital Eclipse‘s careful attention to accuracy, numerous Atari, Midway and Williams arcade games were brought to such systems as the SNES, Mega Drive / Genesis, Game Boy Color, PlayStation, Saturn, PC and Dreamcast.
This continued into the 2000s when the studio became part of Backbone Entertainment and worked on a steady stream of digital re-releases of arcade and Sega titles on Xbox 360 and PS3.
The Digital Eclipse we know today, however, was formed in 2015 when Other Ocean Group – itself made up of former Digital Eclipse developers – acquired the studio name and reformed it, pledging a commitment to video game preservation.
At the time, Frank Cifaldi – who co-founded the new Digital Eclipse then went on to found the Video Game History Foundation – said he wanted Digital Eclipse to become known as the Criterion Collection of video games. It’s become the perfect description for the studio.
These days, Digital Eclipse has become known as a studio that doesn’t simply release retro compilations, but does everything in its power to ensure these compilations are given the gold standard treatment.
Buying a Digital Eclipse product – be that its Capcom collaborations like Mega Man Legacy Collection, The Disney Afternoon Collection or Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, or others like SNK 40th Anniversary Collection or TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection – ensures you’ll not only get a healthy selection of perfectly emulated games, but plenty of extra material to celebrate them in a way they deserve.
In recent years, the studio has taken things to the next level with its new interactive timeline feature. By giving players a narrative that combines imagery, videos, documents and the games themselves in a sequential manner, it’s the closest we’ve come to playable museum exhibitions.
Three of these timeline-based games have been released to date – Atari 50 and the first two games in Digital Eclipse’s new Gold Master Series, The Making of Karateka and Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story. All three are phenomenal presentations that are must-haves for anyone interested in gaming history.
One of the main people behind Digital Eclipse’s levelling up is Chris Kohler. A veteran games journalist whose career started in the early 2000s and took in such publications as Wired, Kotaku and the Retronauts podcast, Kohler joined Digital Eclipse in 2020 as its editorial director.
It’s Kohler’s job to research and write the aditional content that makes Digital Eclipse’s games far more than simple collections of ROMs, and instead essential chronicles of specific video game series, eras or creators.
Last month Kohler was at the BitSummit expo in Japan, helping to promote the release of Digital Eclipse’s remake of 1981 RPG Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Given that I was also at BitSummit, I took the opportunity to meet with Kohler and sat down with him to discuss what Digital Eclipse has achieved in recent years, and its plans for the future.
Let’s start with Wizardry, because it’s why you’re here, after all. It’s a popular game in Japan, isn’t it?
It is very popular in Japan, the computer games were popular. Guys like [Final Fantasy creator] Hironobu Sakaguchi, [Dragon Quest creator] Yuji Horii, they played Wizardry – in English – on computers, and that was what inspired a lot of their wanting to make role playing games in the first place.
They’ve said it in interviews. Sakaguchi has said “I was directly inspired by Wizardry”, Yuji Horii says the Slime character in Dragon Quest was inspired by the fact that there’s Slime in Wizardry. It’s not adorable, it doesn’t have a cute little face on it, but it’s still where a lot of that came from.
And then they did Famicom versions which were very, very popular, did very well, and the franchise just really grew and grew here. As it sort of petered out around the world, Japan just kept making Wizardry games.
Now the Wizardry IP is actually owned by Drecom, which is a Japanese company, and they’re the ones here with the booth, showing our new version of the first Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
They’ve got all this Wizardry merch and there’s a lot of it. I mean, when you go and look at the booth – even today, on the business-only day [before BitSummit is open to the public] – those demo stations are being played a lot, and people are buying the merch, and you can go get a soundtrack sampler CD at Super Deluxe Games, and this is the soundtrack that was developed for our version of the game.
So there’s gonna be a lot of Japanese-only merchandise around it, which is really cool, you know, we love to see that. But yeah, in answer to your question, it’s just been popular ever since the Famicom days, or really even the computer days before that, and it’s never stopped being popular. So we knew that the Japanese market was gonna be potentially the biggest market for this release, even though we were developing it in the US.
We partnered with 8-4 Ltd, John Ricciardi and those guys, to do the Japanese text and localisation. And they really helped us out a lot with culturalization stuff, to really make sure that when Japanese players pick up that controller and play it, they feel like it’s something that was made in Japan.
Do you feel that this will be the first Digital Eclipse game that will do better in Japan than anywhere else? Although you’ve obviously released compilations based on Japanese licences before (such as Street Fighter and Mega Man), it’s probably fair to say that those are popular everywhere, whereas Wizardry is bigger in Japan.
Yes. It is weird, but it’s great. It’s wonderful that we can do something where our home market is not the biggest market for it necessarily, but we want to grow it, right?
There are people out there, and we want to educate people that: “Hey, this is the origin of the RPG genre that you love so much, like Final Fantasy, in a big way. It would not exist except for this, so check this out, and see where those inspirations came from.”
And is that an easier way to get Digital Eclipse’s foot in the door in Japan too? Because even though you’ve made collections with Capcom in the past, I’d imagine stuff like Atari 50 wouldn’t be received with such enthusiasm here because Atari doesn’t have the history in Japan that it does in the west.
Right. I mean, we would love to continue – obviously we have a great amount of respect and love for Japanese games, of those eras, and when we’re entrusted with them we take that responsibility very seriously. So of course, we would love to do more Japanese releases.
Can we talk about the Gold Master Series?
I’d love to talk about the Gold Master series.
It seems that it technically started with Atari 50, with its timelines?
Yeah, well, yes and no. When I came on in mid-2020, about four years ago, the Karateka project existed as a smaller kind of skunkworks project that was happening. We had licensed Karateka from Jordan Mechner, who owns it.
Essentially, everything prior to Atari 50 was sort of a work for hire project, which we still do occasionally, where a publisher comes to us and says: “We want this project, can you be the developer on it?”
And we try to introduce things like: “Hey, what if we did it this crazy way? What if we did it that way?” But generally it’s like: “Well, you know, let’s just stick with what we know works”, and that model is the retro collection model – here’s your games, here’s your bonus content, you know, but fundamentally it’s about the games.
With the Karateka project it was like, this is fundamentally a documentary about the making of Karateka and the cool backstory behind it. And the games are there, but everything is sort of presented with the same level of importance. And as we continued to work on that and develop that, it started to make sense.
Even then, the earliest version of the Karateka project was still like “here’s the game, here’s the museum, and then here’s some film documentary content”, and it was all disconnected. And then we just started talking about: “What if it wasn’t? What if it was just one core user experience? What is that? What would that be like? How would you pull that off?”
Because it’s one thing to say “oh, sure, you watch a little bit of the documentary, then you play a little bit of the game”. But it’s like, how do you actually do that?
So as we’re working that out, Atari 50 comes along with the opportunity to do something. Atari needed something that was different – Atari already had collections, there was the Atari Flashback Collections for the same platforms we would be developing Atari 50 for.
So they wanted to put something out there for the 50th anniversary, but they needed something new. They needed to be able to tell retailers, “no, no, no, no, this is not just another Atari collection, this is something else entirely”.
So we were like, “great, we’ve done all this thinking about Karateka, let’s apply that thinking to this Atari approach”.
And what that allowed us to do was to essentially finish it. Because with Karateka, we were kind of working on it, working on it, working on it, and there was no deadline and no end in sight. With Atari it was like “well, it’s got to be out by this time”.
So there was a full court press from a big team within the company to all start working on it, to say: “Okay, we have this concept of the timelines, how do we actually make that work? What features do we need to put in?”
And then there’s a lot of thought that goes into just the UI design of the whole thing. How do you make it fun when you’re flicking through the timeline? How do you make sure that there’s those graphic and audio cues that keep you engaged, you feel like you’re doing something?
Also, it really had to be very zippy. There was a lot of technological work that had to be done. So when you’re on the timeline and you pull to the right and it just starts flipping through assets, you don’t see any loading, you know what I mean? With, say, the Cowabunga Collection, when you’re going through a gallery, sometimes the images can be slower to load in.
We couldn’t have that, because if we’re essentially making you go through all of these timelines, this virtual museum, you have to feel like you can just go wherever you want to without being held back at all, because if you’re being held back it’s like we’re forcing you to read, and we don’t want to force you to do anything.
So if you just feel like you have this freedom to just run all over the place and do whatever you want, you never feel… like, if a block of text appears on screen and you’re like “I don’t feel like reading”, that’s fine. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything. Nobody is locking you into this.
There were some concepts of “well, what if we show you a clip, and then you play a little bit, and we show you another clip”, and that was ultimately very constricting because it kept the player locked into this thing that they couldn’t kind of break out of.
So we finished with Atari 50, we were able to take it all the way to completion, and learned so many lessons and essentially templatized it to the point where – we didn’t entirely restart Karateka, but we kind of restarted it in the sense that we moved it into the Atari 50 engine and template, took all the work that had been done, because I had written tons of stuff.
Then I had to write more stuff, and then we had to switch stuff around, but it was worth it. Ultimately, if you saw what this looked like originally versus the very, very smooth presentation that it has now, a lot of that was due to the fact that we were able to work that all out through Atari 50.
Further reading
Review: The Making of Karateka is a superbly curated interactive documentary
Having then templatized it, we then had the Jeff Minter thing coming up. So then it became a very easy thing of “oh, these are going to be #001 and #002 in the Gold Master Series. They’re very similar, we’re just going to do it in a similar kind of way”.
And yes, we will continue the Gold Master Series. We’re working on stuff. I don’t know when we can talk about that, but we absolutely are going to just keep doing that.
“Yes, we will continue the Gold Master Series. We’re working on stuff. I don’t know when we can talk about that, but we absolutely are going to just keep doing that.”
Is that a difficult series to keep going, because it’s based on what’s available to you? Obviously with The Making of Karateka you were fortunate in that Jordan Mechner seems to have collected and kept everything that he ever had. And then the Jeff Minter collection was different in that he has such a large body of work, meaning you could have quantity as well as quality. There must only be a finite number of developers you can rely on to have so much content available.
That’s my job! My job is: “What do we have, and how can we make something out of what we have?”
Atari 50 was all about – I mean, there was tons of stuff out there, but it was really about curation, because with Atari 50 there was a lot of “well, why isn’t this game in there, why isn’t that game in there, why didn’t you talk about this or that”. It’s because if we talked about everything we’d never be finished, and there’d be 50 timelines and it would just be a mess. We had to narrow it down.
With Karateka, there was so much content that Jordan had saved that we were uniquely able to tell this one story, this one game. With Jeff Minter, it was really about the breadth of the games. So for every project we think about that – what do we have in abundance and how do we make the best use of that to tell the story?
And ultimately, then, if we’re lacking in certain areas, then it just comes down to me and the editorial team, like: “What are we going to do? How are we going to fill that in?”
Now that Digital Eclipse is owned by Atari, does that help in terms of acquiring content? You’re adding new DLC timelines to Atari 50 which focus on Atari’s war with Intellivision…
Well, we’re doing an M Network chapter. There is going to be some stuff about Intellivision, but the playable games are going to be the M Network Atari 2600 games, and then it’s going to reference Intellivision in terms of the videos and stuff like that.
It’s going to talk a little bit about the beginnings of Intellivision, but just to be clear, you’re not going to play Intellivision console games. But, of course, the M Network games are versions of those games.
Sure, but was that new DLC chapter made possible because of Atari’s acquisition of the Intellivision IP, or was it in development before you knew about that?
Well, Atari had bought the M Network games before the rest of the Intellivision catalogue. So they had announced they had acquired just the M Networks stuff, and so we had started working on it just like that.
Then, essentially, what was happening was we were like, “okay, can we show the Intellivision commercials?” And we decided: “Let’s kiiiiiiind of plan to mayyyyybe do that.” And then fortunately, with the acquisition of the Intellivision properties, it was like “okay, definitely go ham, do all of that”.
So you’re going to see the great George Plimpton commercials and stuff like that, they’re going to be in there. They’re fun to rewatch, they’re really interesting stuff.
This is more of an observation – were you around for the development of the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection?
I was not around for that. That was just before my time.
Because the museum in that, where all of SNK’s games are presented in a timeline format, almost feels like a prototype for what would eventually become the timeline system in Atari 50 and the Gold Master Collection. That was fantastic.
It was. Brandon Sheffield and Frank Cifaldi worked on that. It was fantastic. And the level of deep research that went into that was definitely something that I wanted to carry on. Frank Cifaldi is more of a completionist – he’s like “if it’s out there, if it exists, I want it in there”.
I… certainly, if it’s available, I’d want to get it in there. I’ve not taken stuff out or anything like that. But I’m more along the lines of “what do I need to tell a compelling story”. I feel like I fall into more of the storytelling bucket. I’m looking at all this stuff that there is, and it’s like, “what is the narrative throughline here?”
And so for both Karateka and Jeff Minter – and for Atari 50, which was a little tougher to do because it’s just so much covering so many eras – it’s just trying to curate the things, the objects that can be used to tell the story.
When you go to a museum, a museum does not take everything they have and just put it on a shelf and go “here, go look at it”. They go to their collection and they say: “What’s the story we’re trying to tell? What are the objects that are going to help us tell the story in a visual way and then tell a story through laying those objects out?”
In the Gold Master Series, we can include everything, but what you’ll see is it’s layers upon layers, right? So you have the horizontal timeline [as the] main story, if you want to dig deeper [there’s a] vertical timeline with some more stuff. And if you want to go deeper than that, nested in a vertical timeline may be a gallery. So you get down to “oh, here’s a gallery of 60 pages of game designs”.
Now, not every one of those is going to have an individual caption, and not every one of those is going to accelerate the story in some way. But if you’re a big enough nerd and you really want to dig in and look at every single one of those you can, and a lot of people do.
Some people, I think, are just sort of skimming through and are like, “okay, I got it”. And then some people are like “okay, well, I’m going to spend 10 hours and I’m just going to look at absolutely everything”.
It’s especially useful when you’re dealing with a really old game. I bought all of the Atari Flashback collections, almost out of a sense of…
…Duty. It’s like “you’re doing this, I’ve gotta buy it, it’s important”.
Exactly. I appreciate that retro is a fairly niche market, so every time a retro release comes out I buy it, to support it. But with the greatest will in the world, with those Atari Flashback compilations, there’s only so much you can play a 45-year-old Atari 2600 game without any context.
And again, that is such an important part of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Because I remember starting at Digital Eclipse and looking at a lot of collections that were out there to familiarise myself, and noticing that you’d put in an Atari collection, and you’d load it up, and would be, like, “Atari! A collection of Atari games! Press Start”.
Then you press Start and you just jump into a menu which is like: Asteroids, Astroblast, Astrosmash, Astro Grover, Astro this, Astro that. Because it all starts with A, and they’re all in space, and you’re like, “well, what do I do? Where do I go?”
And if you’re a huge dyed-in-the-wool nerd, you’re like, “I’m going to go to my favourite game and play it for an hour”. But if you’re me, who juuust missed it – I’m a Nintendo kid, right? So I played Atari a lot back in the day, but it wasn’t my big thing when I was that proper age to do it, and so I’m just sort of like, “well, what do I do?”
And I end up saying “eh, I’ll jump into this game… eh, maybe not my thing”, I go to another game, I jump into that game, It’s not my thing either. And then I end up playing around for like an hour, 45 minutes or so, and I’ve played a bunch of games, but it feels like “maybe this collection isn’t for me”.
And so a lot of that feeling really inspired what we ended up doing with the interactive documentary stuff, especially the idea of – when we were doing Atari 50, I was like “I want the games playable off the timeline”, and the engineers were like “every one?” I’m like “yes, all 100 games are going to be on this timeline”.
And the reason for that is I want this experience to have a beginning and an end. And I don’t want to start with Asteroids. I don’t even want to start with Pong. I want to start with a photograph of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, founding Atari.
“I want this experience to have a beginning and an end. And I don’t want to start with Asteroids. I don’t even want to start with Pong. I want to start with a photograph of Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, founding Atari.”
And then when the game comes in, I want to say: “This is what this game is. This is why this is important.” And then maybe you jump in, you play it for a little bit and go “well, I don’t like that game” and jump back out.
But if you do those little bits of gameplay, but it’s in chronological order, and you’re being told a story while that’s happening, then by the time you get to the end of those timelines, yeah, maybe you’ve done the same thing that I did where you jumped in, played a little, jumped in, played a little. But all those things, instead of feeling directionless, all added up to something.
You played one big video game that is the history of Atari, but also the history of video games. Because in Atari 50, you end up with Atari Jaguar games at the end of it. You’ve witnessed video games evolving, and you understand why those games are like they are.
So even if you didn’t even find a favourite game, the hope is that you come out of it saying: “That was worthwhile. I did something that was worth my time. I spent five hours and I had fun.”
There was another thing where, we were putting games in the collection and I was like “hey guys, Club Drive for the Jaguar, let’s get that in there”, and Atari’s reaction instantly was “that game got like 1/10 reviews when it was released”, and I’m like, “does it matter?”
Because we’re not selling people the game, we’re selling you the history lesson, we’re selling the experience. And if we if we position it right – if we say “Club Drive was a very early attempt at doing a polygonal racing game” – and you jump in and you mess around with it, we can take games that are… [pause]
You know, I don’t believe any video game is bad anymore, you know what I mean? I find that everything has something interesting to teach me. With something like Club Drive, which is tough to love, I actually played a bunch of it and tried to put that context around it of: “Here’s a very, very early attempt at doing a polygon driving game. Try it out, see what you think.”
And if we set people up by saying “hey, this game kind of sucks”, you go “ho ho, that sure is bad” and you leave, but you had a good time because nobody was telling you “have a great time with this”, it was more like “check this out and see what it’s like”.
And so hopefully, that’s how people receive it – we can take stuff that’s not necessarily well-reviewed and we can make it a compelling part of the package by putting the right context around it.
It’s funny, because when I was writing my Nintendo 64 Encyclopedia and was playing the Cruis’n games, those weren’t very well-received at the time but I think some ‘bad’ games age better, maybe because there haven’t been many arcade racers like it since. The same with lightgun shooters.
Right, exactly. Because at the time it’s up against all these other games, then when the genre dies out you start looking around in that genre for new experiences.
I mean, there’s tons of PS1 games that I think people gave a pass on, and they’ve aged better than a lot of things.
Before Atari acquired Digital Eclipse, it also acquired Nightdive Studios, which also specialises in retro. Have you have many dealings with them yet?
Nope. We went out drinking, that’s about it. [laughs]
Obviously they focus more on the early polygonal era, whereas Digital Eclipse tends to focus on everything leading right up to that point. Is collaborating with them in the future something you’d like to do? Like combining your timeline engine with – and this is purely theoretical – a history of Turok games or something?
Sure, yeah, so far there’s not a lot of overlap because you’re right, they’re about games that are a little bit later on in terms of, whereas we’re essentially about integrating emulator-based solutions into our engine.
And so we kind of top out with modern hardware, especially with – I love you Nintendo, but – with the Nintendo Switch, it’s getting on in years and it’s more difficult to emulate later platforms and have them be performant on the Switch. And so, there is a little bit of a division there in terms of what we’re doing.
But I mean, yeah, there’s nothing that’s actually in the works at this point, but absolutely, I think that we’d love to see more collaboration between us and the other divisions of Atari and stuff like that, as far as being able to do something where maybe Digital Eclipse has got their part to play, and Nightdive has their part to play, and we’re working on some big kind of thing. So that’s what the Atari acquisitions have kind of unlocked.
Can we talk about the new Power Rangers game? Because that sort of came out of nowhere.
Well, that’s the idea, right? [laughs]
Right. Obviously Digital Eclipse is mainly known for presenting existing retro games in a new way, but you also occasionally dabble with new games that are presented in a retro style (like the Space Jam: A New Legacy game). How did Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind come about?
These things all come about – and this is something that I’ve learned going into the development side – is that all kinds of conversations are constantly happening all the time.
And this was a hard lesson that I had to learn, because very early on, our head of production came to me and, without naming the specific franchise, was like: “Hey Chris, we got to put together a pitch for <specific franchise that Chris Koehler would be extremely excited to work on>”.
And I was like, “oh my God, I was put here on this planet to write this pitch”, and we put the deck together and it was going to be great. It went nowhere. It just went absolutely nowhere. Not because not because our thing was not strong, but just because the levels at which these conversations are happening, it might be somebody who’s trying to get something going in their company, but it hasn’t been greenlit.
But it’s just constantly happening all the time, and when you actually see a game come out, that means that out of the hundred conversations that happened that month, you know, this is the one that actually was able to go forward because what we’re able to do and what they want aligned.
In this case, Hasbro has this line of Hasbro Retro Arcade type things that are happening – there’s a GI Joe game as well, that we’re not involved with – and so they specifically wanted pitches about “how would you use Hasbro properties?” It’s often that, it’s like “hey, what would you do if you had this franchise?” so then we’d do that pitch. And that was something that came together.
And then we were just blown away by the reaction at Summer Games Fest. We thought we’d put it out there and some Power Rangers fans would be like “oh yay”, but people were like “it’s my game of the show” and I’m like, “oh no!” [laughs] Because now there’s so much pressure.
But it’s good because ultimately, you know, it energises you. When you’re working in secret, you’re sort of assuming people are going to be excited, but now that people are really excited, it just energises you to do the work.
It also makes some decisions a lot clearer about “should we do this or should we do that” – it just makes it a little clearer once you know you have that fan energy, you want to deliver to people what they hope it will be.
Obviously, there are other developers and publishers making retro compilations. A lot of the time, these are just a case of “here’s a list of games, play the game you want”. Do you get frustrated when you see one of these compilations come out and think “ah, those are some IPs we’d have loved to secure and do them…” I don’t want to say ‘properly’, but handle them the Digital Eclipse way with your editorial treatment?
Doing it the way we do it is expensive, you know what I mean? Nothing in video games is cheap, absolutely nothing that was anything to do with any video game has ever been cheap. But it is, for certain properties, a lot less expensive to just say “let’s emulate it, let’s get whatever bonus materials we can get, let’s get it in there and let’s call it a day”. And that might be necessary for some things because it might not make financial sense to do the more expensive route.
So it’s just incumbent upon us to show, with each product, why we feel it’s worth going the more time consuming, more expensive route of doing it, whether it’s a full-on interactive documentary or whether it’s something like the Cowabunga Collection where we took more time, we added more features, we really made it a feature-rich compilation. If you do it that way, then hopefully there’s more of an opportunity there.
But [when others release retro compilations] it’s never a frustrating thing. I mean, first of all, I think it’s laudable. Given that we know the statistic from the Video Game History Foundation that 87% of games released prior to 2000 are not legally available anymore, any time somebody can chip away at that and make anything legally available again, I applaud them. That in and of itself is very important.
And there’s got to be room for all kinds of treatments, you know? What we want to concentrate on, is we want to do the high-end, white glove treatment for games. But that can’t be everything, because if you tried to do that with everything, there’s not enough development studios, people, time to do it.
So I’m happy to see anything come out at this point. You would not believe the hurdles that are between just re-releasing any game. There’s so much baloney that you have to go through to re-release anything. So anything that actually gets through all of that and comes back out, it’s a tiny miracle.
“I’m happy to see anything come out at this point. You would not believe the hurdles that are between just re-releasing any game. There’s so much baloney that you have to go through to re-release anything. So anything that actually gets through all of that and comes back out, it’s a tiny miracle.”
Speaking of white gloves, presumably Nintendo isn’t interested in a collaboration yet?
Well, you know, historically, Other Ocean [who previously owned Digital Eclipse] did Minecraft 3DS Edition for Nintendo, and we’ve done stuff with Nintendo as a company historically in the past. So I don’t think the door is closed, so you know, we’ll see what the future will bring. But certainly nothing is in development at this time.
I mean, they’ve got their own stuff sorted with retro, they’ve got their own path.
Because what I loved most about The Making of Karateka was all the playable prototypes in it, and when some of Nintendo’s prototypes leaked a while back I felt bad for them, but was also fascinated by what was in them. So it’s frustrating because they must have this treasure trove of prototypes somewhere, and it’s just a matter of when (or if) they ever want to pull the curtain back and show them.
Yeah. Again, if we ever have the opportunity to officially re-release that sort of stuff… putting those all in The Making of Karateka was sort of like “hey, look, this is how you can take these early builds of games and you can make something good out of them, and you can add this richness to your game that people are going to really appreciate”. But you have to research to put the context around it.
So again, just speaking in general, if we have the opportunity to show prototype builds and stuff like that, we will always do that, within the parameters that we are able to do.
Often, one of the things that can be a problem is – okay, you have a prototype. I want to put my prototype in this collection. Everybody’s on board. But what if it crashes? You know, what if it’s an unstable build? Because you’re going to fail console certification if you’re just putting in a crashy game.
What if it’s a computer game and it crashes to the computer’s prompt screen or something like that? You have to worry about that. And that could be an issue with retail games as well. So there’s always, you have to research it, you have to find it, legal has to sign off on it. But then from a technological perspective, engineers have to make sure they can properly integrate it. It’s a whole thing.
Speaking of computers, how did Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story go down in the States? Obviously in the UK the guy is considered a legend among a certain generation of players but I get the impression he’s less well-known in North America.
Personally, I’m just happy it exists in the first place because it feels like the history of video games online tends to be told from an American point of view, with the general story being “Atari crashed the video game market, Nintendo saved it”, whereas in the UK we were doing okay, thanks very much! So I like that the Jeff Minter collection is telling part of the story of what was going on in the UK during that time, but I wonder how well it did in North America.
That’s a good question. I’m not the guy looking at all the sales, you know? And I could always ask, but haven’t, mostly because I’m so on the creative side of things that I finish a project and get it out there, and if it gets reception I take that feedback, and then I’ve moved onto the next thing because it’s just so fast-paced.
I would have to imagine that it probably sold proportionally more in the UK because that built-in audience is there. But ultimately, for me, I look at it and it’s like, “God, this is a fascinating story”.
As you may know, I was on the Retronauts podcast since its inception in 2006, and we always got yelled at by UK listeners going “this is so America-centric, why aren’t you talking about Chuckie Egg?” I’ve still yet to play it and I never will.
I think it must have been installed on a lot of school computers or something, because it wasn’t that good.
[laughs] So we always get this. You know who I just saw earlier today, was Joseph Redon, who’s the head of the Game Preservation Society here in Japan. And I had interviewed him back in the day and he had spoken about this too, from the Japanese side.
He was like: “This history of games is so America-centric, because it’s a lot of Americans writing these history books, and it’s just like ‘well, first there was Pong, and then there was Pac-Man, and then there was Super Mario Bros’”.
And I’m guilty of this as much as anybody. And over the years, you know, as you read more histories, it opens your mind up to things and you realise that well, no, in Japan there was this vibrant computer scene where Square started, Enix started, Konami started, all these companies, and Wizardry. They started on these computers but because those computers didn’t exist around the world, those games were being locked in Japan.
But you must understand those in order to understand what came next. And in the UK it was very similar. Most people did not have the Nintendo Entertainment System, people had the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum or things of that nature. And so, now understanding that and looking at the Jeff Minter project, this was my opportunity to really dig into this and try to get Americans to understand this a little bit better.
And so I looked at it as – rather than try to fake like this game came out of Britain – if you read it, it’s sort of like an American’s view on trying to tell people from around the world: “This is Jeff Minter and this is the context in which he lived. This is the context that is the British computer games culture of the ‘80s. How did that differ from what you were doing in Japan, in the US? It was a DIY culture: throughout the 8-bit era it was the era of ‘make your own video game, copy it to a cassette tape, sell it, potentially become a famous video game designer’.
“But in that time in the US, in Japan, you were locked out of that because we had moved essentially onto these closed ecosystems for the NES and the Famicom, but in the UK it was simply not the case up until the 16-bit era. It was still very much this open, DIY, cassette tape, floppy disk, mail order kind of culture.” And people do not know that.
And I look at this not as a handicap. This is an opportunity. This is an opportunity to tell a cool story about a place that you had no idea existed. A time that is long past. So it was like, “I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about Jeff Minter, but then also talk about the UK bedroom scene” because it is like a fantasy land to people who grew up in the US in the NES time.
I’m always going to try to take those opportunities, because if you get too bogged down in the video gaming-ness of it and just talking about the video game designer – first of all, it’s not as interesting as it could be if you were telling a larger story. It’s not as relatable as it could be.
And you also miss all the context because you cannot look at these Jeff Minter games and just go “wow, these games are weird”. It’s like, if you understand more about the UK at the time, you understand more about why these games are so weird. And then hopefully we can catch people up, because people who grew up in the UK go “oh yeah, we love Jeff Minter” because you understand all about him, you know? But if you didn’t, you have to know all of that stuff in order to potentially become a fan.
Ultimately, if all we’re doing is taking old games and repackaging them for the people that already love them, we’re just circling the drain, because there’s not going to be enough of those people. And so we must create new fans. As a video game collector, I understand that I want to collect something once I become aware of how cool it is. And so people are going to want to play games once they become aware of how interesting they are. But you have to create that awareness somehow.
“Ultimately, if all we’re doing is taking old games and repackaging them for the people that already love them, we’re just circling the drain, because there’s not going to be enough of those people. And so we must create new fans.”
So is the UK a well that you would like to go back to again for future content? I grew up fortunate enough to be a Nintendo kid, a Sega kid, a Spectrum kid and an Amiga kid, so I loved everything. And as I was playing through The Jeff Minter Story I was just constantly thinking “I would love a Sensible Software one of these”, “imagine a Bitmap Brothers version of this”.
Especially looking at the Amiga. A few console ports that made it to the States aside, it’s crazy to think that some of the games on that system which are completely unknown in North America are considered some of the best games ever in Europe.
Yeah, again, we will tell any story that we think is interesting. So could we go back to that? Yeah, potentially. Are there specific plans to do that? No, not at the moment. But even if, by doing stuff like the Gold Master Series, if other people look at what we’re doing and are like “oh, let’s do that” I’m happy. Because as a consumer of all this too, we’re making this because it’s the kind of stuff we’d like to play. And so if somebody else does something in this vein with the Bitmap Brothers or whatever it is, I will absolutely be there playing it.
Because I really do believe, having now done multiple of these, the best way to tell the stories of video games is through an interactive video game. And I want to learn, you know? It’s tough to learn about these games. For Jeff Minter it was like “I’m doing the work so you don’t have to”, I’m reading everything I can about Jeff Minter, I’m going through the old magazines and playing the games, and figuring out how to play them.
Further reading
Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story is a fitting tribute to a gaming icon
I don’t get to play the games in each of these collections as much as I would like to. I played the hell out of Karateka because, you know, it’s one game. And I played a lot of Jeff Minter games, but there’s so many of them and it’s like, I’m not the engineer, hooking all of this stuff up. I have so much to do in terms of writing and assets, but I need to understand where each of them came from, that’s what I need to do. So I’m in each one of them to the extent that I need to be.
But had it not been my job, I would not have been able to do that level of deep research to really understand these games, and so when people were like “oh, you should play Jeff Minter games”, I wouldn’t have been able to really get into them. I would have to do a lot of time investment to really understand it the way that somebody who grew up with it understood it.
So hopefully this game is like a cheat sheet that lets you get into it as fast as you can, and understand it a little bit better. And so if other people do that for me – like, I don’t really know that much about Bitmap Brothers, so if somebody did that for them, for me, and I could play it and come out of it feeling like I knew a little bit more, I’d be really grateful.
Finally, back in 2021, Digital Eclipse ran a campaign looking for investors, and ended up raising around $10 million. And obviously now the studio is owned by Atari. How does the future look for Digital Eclipse? Is everything rosy for a lengthy future now?
So the idea [for the campaign] was we needed funding if we were going to flip the script on how these games got made. Because everything prior to that was the publisher comes to us and says “make this”. And in the end, we can tell the publisher “hey, what if we did it in this cool way that we’ve been imagining?” And what’s ultimately going to happen is “well, that sounds expensive, maybe just do it the regular way, it sounds like it’s going to take a lot of time or get too complicated.”
Especially because it’s a retro game collection, you know, the publisher is not looking to invest a ton of money, time or resources into it. It’s more of a “we have these old games, let’s put them back out again, let’s make some money”.
And so within that, I mean, you see things like the Street Fighter Collection and the Mega Man Legacy Collection, and SNK. We were trying with each new collection to, you know, advance the football a little bit. Football is sort of… in America, it’s a differently shaped, almost pointy kind of thing.
Like a rugby ball, I get it.
Yeah. So we were trying to just move it along, and with the funding we got, we now had money where we could take that money and do things like license Karateka, pay to license Jeff Minter’s games, pay to license things and then say “okay, there’s nobody telling us what to do, we can do it literally exactly the way that we want to do it”.
And then we get money from the sales because we’re selling it. With the other projects, they pay us to do it and then they get all the money afterwards, right? There’s no backend in it for us. So it was really about changing the way that worked.
And then we spun out as an indie studio, then we were acquired later on by Atari, so it’s good to have a corporate parent, because now it’s not like “if this game sells well, then you can get paid”. It’s a little bit safer in that regard.
We love what Atari is doing. We love what Atari wants to be. We’re a really important part of what Atari wants to become. That brand has definitely gone through a whole lot of, you know, different phases. And we’re trying to sort of bring it out of that “wait, Atari is still around?” or “they’re not really Atari because Nolan Bushnell doesn’t work there anymore”, you know?
And we believe that with Digital Eclipse and Nightdive and everybody working in concert, this can be the number one name in retro within the games industry and just cover all of those bases. And so, at Digital Eclipse, we’re just working as hard as we can to hold up our pillar of that platform, as it were.
