Making Of Miner 2049er
Interviews
Bill Hogue speaks with Magmic's Wes Tam
Wes Tam, lead developer of the new Miner 2049er for mobile put a call in to Bill Hogue, the game's original creator. Here's what these era-splitting developers had to say to each other ...
Read the full interview below or listen to the MP3.
Wes Tam: Hey Bill, it's Wes Tam. I'm just sitting here at Magmic Games in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Where are you at?
Bill Hogue: Hey Wes. I'm just sitting at home here, in a small town just outside LA.
WT: L.A. - nice. The weather must be good.
BH: Yeah, it's warming up. I've been cleaning up the pool this week. We converted to salt water and it's completely awesome. I'm thinking of doing solar heating, too. If you ever make the trip here from Ottawa, come for a swim.
WT: Cool. Swimming with Bill Hogue and his entourage.
BH: (Laughs) Not much of an entourage to speak of. But my dog, Kiki, will be around. And I could call Jeff Konyu - the other guy who worked on the original Miner 2049er.
WT: You and Jeff still hang out?
BH: Yeah, we've been lifelong friends. Ever since I met him while I was working at Radio Shack, when he came in to buy some transistors or something.
WT: A friendship that started in a Radio Shack ... and then transformed into a video game partnership that changed the industry.
BH: Well, at the time, we wouldn't have known it. I was into making games for home computers, ones based on games that were in arcades at the time. Whenever there were no customers at Radio Shack, I'd be programming a new game. My first one was called Coneheads. It was based on a popular Saturday Night Live skit.
WT: Coneheads?
BH: Yeah, Coneheads.
WT: I can't believe there's a Coneheads game! That's with Dan Aykroyd, right? He's Canadian ...
BH: Heh. I didn't know that. Yeah.
WT: Remarkable. A Coneheads game. (Laughing)
BH: Those Conehead guys were funny. But it wasn't a commercial release. The first real game Jeff and I did was called Supernova.
WT: Were you any good at it?
BH: Gawd, no. I've always been terrible at the games I make. How about you? You any good at your games?
WT: No, I'm terrible at them, too. Especially the new Miner 2049er. Even the AI I developed kicks my ass ...
BH: (Laughing) I guess we shouldn't make games that match our own abilities. People wouldn't like them much. But I never got into making games because I wanted to play them myself anyway. Why'd you get into it?
WT: I think it stems from computer class in high school. For my assignments I would always be changing the rules, from, like, get the user to enter a name, an age, and then have the machine tell them "Hi so and so, you are 17 years old." I would always add graphical elements, like coloured boxes flying around, or I'd make it more complex, like a game. My first real game was a hockey sim, where all the players had values out of a hundred and performed according to their stats. That was my school life. Well - that and having my friends wonder why I was spending my spare time writing code instead of getting hammered.
BH: My entry into video games wasn't anything to write home about, either. I was going to college at the time, and I took a computer programming class. But it was crazy. We were learning how to program punch cards. Meanwhile, I was doodling and drawing graphics for games, and, you know, the teacher would be droning on about punch cards. Ultimately, I just dropped out. It was such a waste of time.
WT: I know what you mean. I spent a lot of time in class wondering why I had to endure such meaningless stuff. I just couldn't get passionate about it, you know? But then I started to apply what I was learning to making games and I got totally into it. So I stayed in school, graduated, got jobs in the industry and ended up here at Magmic.
BH: Not me. I didn't finish my degree until I was around 30. I had already made a lot of money doing the games, and stuff. So I just wanted to go back and study. It was kind of funny, though. They were teaching stuff that I'd invented fifteen years earlier! The teacher would be saying "Here's a binary sort, blah blah blah." and I'm thinking to myself "Hey, I invented that." It was kind of weird.
WT: That's pretty funny. So you could have been the inventor of the binary sort.
BH: Yeah, I very well could have been.
WT: Man, it must have been so different when you started programming.
BH: We were basically pioneers. It was a small group of us. And seriously, there was nothing. Everything was so new. Software, code - even hardware. I remember harassing my manager at Radio Shack to buy me a voice synthesizer once. He finally caved in, and I played with it a lot. At night I would crank call people with it.
WT: What?
BH: Yeah, it was this mock survey thing. It would start out all official, you know, a robot voice would tell people they were taking part in a survey and the guy would be shouting to his wife in the background "Hey, honey. This is unbelievable. A computer is talking to me on the phone!"
WT: Funny.
BH: Yeah, and then I would start asking all sorts of wacky questions. And the people would start freaking out. They didn't know what the hell was going on. You would just hear them going, like, "What? Um, wh-" Totally confusing for a typical 80s household.
WT: (Laughing hard). That is awesome. These days you can go online and find a million tutorials on everything - including how to make video games.
BH: Boy, the industry sure has changed. So has the business side of things, I guess. Even the idea that younger people have a serious role to play. I remember this one time at Big Five Software, when I had my parents working for me. Guys would call to deal with us and if they didn't like the answer I gave them, they'd say stuff like "Well, that's fine, Bill. I'll just speak with your father and we'll have it settled." And I'd respond with "Well, actually, my father works for me. So you're not getting another answer." People thought the whole thing was kind of strange.
WT: My friends don't really see my programmer life as strange. I get to spend some pretty good time with them, hanging out, playing sports, or whatever. And my parents definitely don't work for me. But sometimes I'll just disappear for an entire weekend, or even a week. And my friends will be, like, "Where the hell were you?" I don't think they'd understand why I get the urge to spend so much time just sinking myself into a project, or learning about something new. So I don't usually respond.
BH: Yeah, it's easy to sink yourself into a project. I'm doing stuff with robotics now. I get really into it.
WT: Robots?
BH: I program up to 250 machines and get them to work together. I love it.
WT: Where do you work?
BH: At Technicolor. I write real-time code which controls print machines. But I think I'm a traitor now. I just went out and saw a digital film ...
WT: Where's the Technicolor studio?
BH: At Universal Studios.
WT: You see lots of stuff getting filmed, celebrity sightings?
BH: Yeah, sometimes. But it's better when it's us computer guys that get mistaken for celebrities. We'll go out for lunch or something, and the tourists on the tram rides will be taking our pictures and yelling at us.
WT: I've always wanted to be in the entertainment business. As a kid I wanted to be a director or writer. But my parents said I was on crack. They told me to keep studying math. I figure I've won that battle, though, because at least video games are on the entertainment side of the math studies. But I wouldn't mind doing something more movie-like. Maybe on Youtube, a clay animation or -
BH: I love the physicality of things - how things move. I guess that's why I like the robotics. Secretly, I've always wanted to work for Disney, in animation. Well, I kind of did work for Disney animation, truth be told. For a week. But then Technicolor lured me back. And a week later, the Disney studio folded, anyway.
WT: Good timing.
BH: That was a while ago. A lot's happened since then.
WT: Speaking of which, what did you think of the new Miner 2049er?
BH: I was pretty blown away. Especially because I was just thinking here I am playing my own game on a tiny little device that is, entirely more powerful than the original Atari it came out on. I love the scrolling aspect, too. It allows you to focus on the area you're working on at the time. We never had that in the original.
WT: Yeah, that was one of the trade-offs. Because of the small screen size on mobile devices. It's a bit tricky - people look at a map of the entire level and try to plan out their course, but in the game you only see a portion of the level. I was really worried about that - and I was wondering if you'd hate it ...
BH: No, not at all. I think it's really cool what you've done. You nailed the graphics, too. Did you use my emulator for that?
WT: Kind of. The artists looked at your emulator a lot. We played it a ton to figure it out. Luckily, the graphics were pretty simple.
BH: Yeah, the games back then were a lot more basic.
WT: I like simple games, though. Not necessarily simple graphics, but simple game play. The kind of games that even kids can play, if it's appropriate.
BH: I don't mind kids playing video games. I don't buy into that whole argument that kids get corrupted by games. Kids can be corrupted by pretty much anything these days.
WT: For sure. And it's not like every game is violent. There are a handful of games that are, for sure. But there are a lot of games these days where you can do so many different things. There's a whole new genre of games focused on teaching things, improving brain and communication skills. And these aren't mundane or monotonous classroom games. They're innovative, fun games where kids are actually learning. To classify all games as violent is really unfair to the industry.
BH: It's not a new discussion. When I was starting out as a programmer, there was a car game where you crashed into pedestrians and a little cross would appear where you killed them. The whole "video games are bad" discussion has been going on for a long, long time.
WT: And how about television, or film? There's a lot of violence there, too. The difference, I think, is that the censoring bodies are more mature in those industries. The governing bodies in the video game industry just need to catch up a bit.
BH: Actually, I found my own way to censor the video-game habits of a ten year-old boy. I had a girlfriend and we took her kid to a video game store. He really wanted to rent a violent game and he just wouldn't let up about it. So we rented Britney's Dance Beat for him, and that was the end of it. After that, he took a whole new approach to the kind of games he asked for.
WT: Britney's Dance Beat would torture the majority of people, I think. Not just ten year-old boys. If you made me play it, I think I'd cry.
