Interview: Bich Cau Le (2026-01-10)
Bich Cau Le speaks with Alexander Rojas in this google meet interview for Sega Retro.
by Alexander Rojas with Bich Cau Le
Sega Retro · January 10, 2026
This Sega Retro interview with Bich Cau Le was conducted by Alexander Rojas via google meet.
AR:
Mr. Lee, hello! Oh- [corrects pronunciation] Le! I'm sorry, Le.
BCL:
Wow, you got it right.
AR:
I apologize about that. I absolutely knew it was Le, but I got a little nervous when I saw your face pop up on the screen. [laughs]
BCL:
No, most people pronounce it Lee. You're one of the few who got it right. Also my first name is tricky for most people. You can call me Bich.
AR:
How do you pronounce that, if you don't mind me asking?
BCL:
There are several forms of my first name. In the old times, I think some people called me Bich Cau. But now it's just simpler. Then to complicate things, I also have a family nickname and that's Tchiu. That's why you saw that in the email.
AR:
Gotcha. We were a little confused because - I'm going to hop ahead a little bit here but you're credited under one style of your name in the in-game credits for Kid Chameleon and then another style in the actual written manual. Had us confused as to which one to follow.
BCL:
Yeah. Sorry about the confusion.
AR:
No, no, no. That's not your fault at all. I really appreciate you speaking with me today. I know that was a super out of the blue email and I appreciate you replying and giving me your time like this. It means a lot to us and it's just very cool to be speaking with you.
BCL:
Thanks for reaching out. As I was kind of researching you and Sega Retro, I read some of the articles and your interview transcripts and wow, I didn't know any of this existed. It was a blast from the past to see names that I haven't spoken about for my gosh, how many years has it been? 30.
AR:
30 something. Yeah.
BCL:
That brought back so many memories. Thanks for reaching out. Very happy to be talking to you.
AR:
I'm so happy to hear that. That's part of the reason that we put in so much work to the history side of things. A lot of the website is documentation, writing down stuff like SKUs, but a lot of it is just being able to preserve what it was like back then and just to be able to take a reader back in time. I think that's important.
BCL:
If you don't mind me asking, I'd love to hear about your story. How does one become a Sega historian? That just blows my mind.
AR:
Thank you for asking. I guess I've always had a passion for this. I think I remember when I was younger, there were some magazine screenshots that they had put out for the development of Sonic 2 that showed off mysterious levels that weren't in the final game. That just kind of sparked curiosity in everyone and sparked the sense of mystery that there's something out there and that you can find it if you look hard enough. We eventually did, more or less.
AR:
Game development has always fascinated me because games are a very end-consumer thing - where they're in your bedroom and it's a very private, intimate thing, but they're made with teams of real people working hard, software engineers and artists and all of that stuff bringing that together. As I've gotten older, I've just found that fascinating.
AR:
I bumped into Sega Retro - they had been running Sonic Retro for a while. It had originally started as Sonic Retro, just dedicated to Sonic stuff. Then they decided they wanted to cover Sega stuff too. So they branched off. They had always hosted interviews for the purposes of citing citations. [laughs] I just thought, "Oh my gosh, it's so [nerve wracking to do your own interviews] because I viewed some of these people like celebrities. I still do. [gestures to Le on screen] That's why I'm nervous too.
AR:
I sat here for 30 minutes [last night] and looked up pronunciations on your name and got it all right and spent all this time practicing how to - and then the second I see your face. [laughs] Oh my gosh, terrible. I promise I did put some effort into that. It just didn't show.
BCL:
[laughs] How old were you when you talked about the screenshots of Sonic and all that?
AR:
I think I must have been 10 or - yeah, this would have been around 2002-05ish. I would have been about 12 to 15, I think.
AR:
I didn't actually bump into Sega Retro until about four years ago. I had known the site existed, but I like to edit [text] and I came across the website and the visuals are really nice. The skin was really nice. I like the white background and I like how clean everything is. It just kind of gave me this nice clean clear place to edit. There is a therapeutic angle to it, where if I'm just tired or if I've had a long day, I'll go on and I'll be like, "Okay, let's add a person page from Sega Interactive.
AR:
In doing that, I realized that I could reach out to some of my heroes, some of the people that I looked up to as celebrities - and that they weren't as far away as actual celebrities. You guys are actual celebrities to me, but Hollywood celebrities are very far and distant. They're some mysterious thing that you can't touch. I realized not only how readily available a lot of the people in the industry and at Sega still were, but how relevant their stories were and just - it's because so much of what we know about Sega and the company and the history and all that stuff just come from asking people. That's something we don't do enough. That's kind of my interest in it.
AR:
I don't make money off of it. I wish I did. [laughs] I guess everyone does, but it's just a passion of mine and I like talking to people.
BCL:
Do you coordinate with other editors? Do you have team meetings or is it mostly a solo independent activity?
AR:
For the most part, the interviews themselves are solo. I do all the research myself. I build most of the questions myself. But once I've finished building most of the questions, I'll go to a team of mine that I work with, or I just go to other people that I trust in the community, and I say, "Hey, I'm doing an interview with so-and-so. Do you have any questions?" Just being able to work with the community like that. It's a great community. Everyone really likes each other and I'm really appreciative to be able to work with them. A lot of them are quite smarter than I am.
BCL:
Do you ever meet them in person or have you had a get together?
AR:
Not yet. I know some of the members in the UK do - maybe because [the country] is not quite as big as the US - they go on some barcade runs where they all go bar hopping and hang out. I wish we would do that over here. Maybe that'll be the impetus for us actually doing that, you asking about it! I wish, but I am very close with them on the internet.
BCL:
I see. Then in terms of the things that you do research and the people that you try to interview, is your process kind of looking for holes in the history and trying to fill gaps? Is that kind of how you work or is it driven by?
AR:
That's a large part of it. I specifically don't want to focus on specific objective questions or questions that have a yes or no answer. I'm more interested in oral histories: what was the work culture, can you tell us some stories? I find the content and the answers deeper.
AR:
I said this in a previous interview, if I wanted to ask someone a list of yes or no questions, I would send them an Excel spreadsheet. I want to hear the person talk and I want to hear their own perspective. Because I'm not anyone else. I'm not here to lead you. I'm here to ask you a couple questions about a certain topic, but for the most part, I want to hear a story, I guess.
BCL:
I'm glad to help. I'm very happy to tell you my side of the story. Unfortunately I think you had a hope that I would have stuck around in the video game industry, but my stint was the first and last involvement with the video game industry.
BCL:
I looked at some of your interviews and it looks like most of the people I worked with continued on in that industry, but I kind of went into a different area and we can talk about that. The experience itself that I had with STI - there's lots of stories and I think anecdotes that I think you'll be happy to hear. Also I found some slight inaccuracies in some of the wiki's pages and I'll be happy to correct those as well.
AR:
That is super useful to us as well, because I described it in ANOTHER interview: we're like archaeologists in that we find broken pot shards and we kind of can piece it together. We could be like, "Okay, that's the shape of the vase, that it was like this [traces the contours of a vase in the air], but we're missing a lot of pieces. So we can kind of roughly get it to the right place, but so many of the details are going to be off. So we super appreciate any corrections or even if it's not a correction or if it's like, "Okay, you focused on this and it's a little bit correct, but in reality it wasn't to that degree" or whatever, that would be super awesome.
BCL:
Yeah.
AR:
So just to get started here, I wanted to ask: what's your personal background in computers? How did you first get into computing and programming?
BCL:
It started in my teens. A little bit of background. I actually grew up - most of my childhood was in France and I finished high school in France. I have a large family and some of us were in France, but the rest were in the United States. I finished high school there around 1988, I think, and then I came to the United States here in San Jose to go to college, which is what my brothers had done. They grew up here and went to college here.
BCL:
In France, as a teenager I got into computers with - there was a vibrant personal computer scene at the time. I don't know how much of the history about what was happening in Europe at the time you know, but have you heard of the ZX Spectrum?
AR:
Yes.
BCL:
That was one of the dominant personal computers at the time. I think that it was the mid-80s and it was pretty popular in the UK, I think. But there was a competitor platform called the ORIC-1. O-R-I-C 1.
AR:
[laughs] I was just going to ask. That's so cool.
BCL:
I got myself one. This was back in the time when software was loaded through a cassette tape and so you had to hook it up to the computer and play a tape to load bits into the computer. With the ORIC-1, that's when my passion for computers started. I learned BASIC and I started writing some simple video games in BASIC. I think one of the first ones I wrote - it's the equivalent of... I don't know what the name of that famous game is [Snake], but basically you control a snake and you have to move around and you gobble up goodies and as you gobble them up your snake gets longer and it becomes harder and harder to maneuver and things go faster and then you die if you crash into a wall or something like that. That was one of my first games.
BCL:
I would go to meetups and I don't know if we had conferences, but mostly trade shows and meetups, when I tried to see if I could sell my stupid little game to a publisher. They would ask me, "Was it in BASIC or assembly?" and I would say "It was written in BASIC," and they would say, "No, that's not professional enough." I had a lot of fun with that as a teenager. It was also the time where, in order to access the internals of the computer and do things that are interesting on the screen, you had to type these PEEK and POKE commands which modify memory. A lot of the tips and tricks and hacks around computers of that generation was about knowing where to poke a memory. That's how I got into personal computers.
BCL:
Then I came to San Jose - I can't remember if it was late '87 or '88. My plan was to go to one of the colleges, but for many reasons I couldn't go to a UC or CSU as a freshman. What I ended up doing is I stayed with my big brother and I spent two years in a community college here. While I was staying with my brother those first two years (this is '88, '89), he got me a Macintosh. They were called Macintoshes back then.
BCL:
That was great because it was an amazing platform on which to learn programming and do cool stuff. I continued honing my skills there. I got some compilers. I think Pascal was the language of choice at the time for Mac. I got into C programming and I experimented with writing games and I wrote this little Asteroids-like game on the Mac.
BCL:
Then as I was going to college, my brother - he thought I was kind of a lazy bum and he pushed me to find a job. At that time - '88, let's see... I was maybe around 18, 19 years old. I had never worked a job in my entire life. I started looking around and I almost took a job at a fast food place or something like that. I think the way I learned about STI was probably an ad in the paper.
AR:
[in surprise] No way.
BCL:
Yes.
AR:
It was the newspaper ad that Mark Cerny put out: "Game Creators, Game People Wanted," right?
BCL:
Yes, something like that. I don't know if I called or wrote a letter, but I probably called. I'm guessing it was the summer of '90, 1990. First of all, do you want to pause and ask me any questions or let me know if you want me to keep going?
AR:
Yeah, you can keep going. I'm actually taking notes here and I'll just swing back to the questions. [appreciatively] I'd rather you just finish your story.
BCL:
I called and I think Mark was very quick to pick up the phone and I think the next day I was in their offices. I think it was Charcot Avenue in San Jose. I think I had brought a floppy with my Macintosh game [on it]. I don't remember all the details, but let me tell you this about the interview. I think Mark grilled me on some crazy math and algorithms shit and I didn't do very well from what I remember. He was very skeptical. But Mike was also there, Mike Schwartz. I think those are the two who interviewed me. I think I was lucky enough that they had a Mac and I was able to show them the game. Despite all that, I think Mark was ready to just say no and not go forward with it. But Mike insisted to give me a chance. I remember him telling Mark that what I had built was significant. That was his word: that it was "significant". I think I got that summer job thanks to Mike. That's how it all started.
BCL:
At the time I remember clearly Mike was working on Dick Tracy and there were not many people there at the office at the time. I must have been one of the very first ones. There was the Japanese guy working with Mike on Dick Tracy. I forgot his name [Takashi Doi], but you probably have it in your notes. Essentially I spent that summer studying Mike's code on Dick Tracy.
BCL:
By the way, I think one reason that my work on the Mac was "significant," at least in Mike's eyes: the Mac was revolutionary in its time because it used the 68000 processor which I think is the same one used by the Genesis. When I learned that Sega games or Genesis games were written in assembly language, I was blown away. Wow, I didn't know that this was a thing - that people wrote games in pure assembly - so I was blown away. I think maybe the fact that the game console and the Mac shared that platform may have contributed to a favorable decision for me on my part.
BCL:
I spent that summer [at STI] studying Mike's code and building a little demo game. On the Genesis, one of the first commercial games was a really good one. I think it was called Truxton. It was this vertical scrolling shooter. I love that game. I built my demo game based on the same concept, a vertical scroller - except it wasn't a spaceship. It was an airplane. Then you would shoot down enemy helicopters coming from the top. I wrote it in assembly, so I was really proud. I learned a lot of the tricks from Mike and it was fun to play. I think over time, Mark and Mike really liked what I did.
BCL:
The summer came to an end and I had been accepted to UC Davis as a transfer student. Mark really asked me to consider staying full-time at STI. I had a tough decision to make.
AR:
Yeah, oh my gosh.
BCL:
To his disappointment, I decided to go to college. But one year later, I came back not for three months, for six months. But I'll pause there. That's kind of the first chapter, if you will.
AR:
Also, just as an aside, I appreciate you giving me the story in chunks here. Definitely makes wrapping around to questions a little easier.
AR:
The Macintosh game that you showed off when you did the interview - what was the Mac game like?
BCL:
The Mac game was kind of like Asteroids.
AR:
You did say that. I'm sorry. I was too wrapped up in your story.
BCL:
You control a little spaceship in the center of the screen and the way you move it was, you moved the mouse anywhere on the screen and your spaceship would follow where your mouse cursor was. That's how you moved around. Then there would be enemies coming from all sides. Then to shoot at an enemy, you would click the mouse button and that would fire off a projectile. You aim simply by - it shoots in the same direction that the spaceship was moving.
AR:
I like that control style. It sounds intuitive. Do you still talk with Mike at all? Sounds like you knew him pretty well.
BCL:
Yeah. Mike Schwartz. No. Unfortunately, the following summer he was gone during the Kid Chameleon project. No, I have not kept in touch with any of those people unfortunately.
AR:
If you're curious, I can always put you in touch with some people if you're looking to reconnect with anyone.
BCL:
Yeah, that'd be awesome.
AR:
While you were there at STI in your early days, what kind of computers were they using predominantly? Were they Amigas? Because I want to say Mike Schwartz was a big Amiga guy.
BCL:
I saw that in one of your articles and I think I can confirm that they were Amigas. It was an Amiga, probably connected to a development board. I think that's how it worked. The development board was kind of the development version of the Genesis, I think.
AR:
Then you said you looked at Mike's code to build a demo game off of. What code did he give you and in what context did he give you it? Was it like example code?
BCL:
I think I looked at Dick Tracy code.
AR:
Oh, okay!
BCL:
I remember we had these binders that documented the internals of the Genesis hardware and all the various codes and tables with values that you needed to enter to configure the scrolling, the sprites and all of that. That really became my bible. It's really hard to understand that stuff just by reading it, so combining that reference material with Mike's code, I was able to slowly understand how it all worked together. I think it would have been very hard to just start writing a game from the documentation. It was really important to have a starting point - an existing code base.
AR:
Right. How was that documentation in terms of usability? We've heard that some people kind of liked it, but a lot of people said either it would be in English or maybe not super clear, or sometimes it would be in Japanese and poorly translated. There'd be a bunch of notes all over the page. I don't know how much you remember about that.
BCL:
What you just said, the latter. I think it was mostly in English, but I could clearly tell it was translated and not perfectly translated. There were probably some fragments that were still in Japanese. There were inaccuracies and handwritten notes like "this is wrong" and all of that. But interestingly enough, as I said, it became my bible and it made more and more sense to me over time and I became more and more comfortable with it.
BCL:
I also became very aware of the system's limitations. One of the most important algorithms in the game engine - by the way, at that time, the quote-unquote "game engine" was the game itself. There was no Unity or anything. The game had to include all of its runtime. One of the most important algorithms is collision detection. That means you have N number of sprites or objects on the screen and you need to determine if any two objects touch each other.
BCL:
That became a very crucial and important algorithm in the engine. I quickly learned that you have to render everything in a particular frame by a certain time, by a certain deadline. If your computation spills over and exceeds that time window, then it's going to take one additional frame to render. Everything would slow down by 2x if you exceeded that deadline. It was very obvious because on the screen, depending on if a bunch of enemies show up and then you fire off a bunch of bullets, there will be a point when - and the algorithm is N squared in complexity because you have to compare every object to every other object - so the cost of computation rises with the square of the number of objects.
BCL:
If you exceed a certain number of objects on the screen, then everything would just slow down to a crawl because you would exceed that deadline. That's also one of the things I had to learn to optimize and kind of work around. But there are times you just couldn't work around it. That's an example of something that I became very aware of and I learned - it was my first experience doing low-level development.
AR:
I'm sure you had to. On the whole, how did you like working with the Genesis?
BCL:
With a game console with dedicated graphics hardware and sprite support and doing it at the assembly level, it was just incredible. I loved it and I was really proud of it.
AR:
One thing I wanted to ask was the date of - I heard you say three months. Was that in relation to the first span of time at your summer job?
BCL:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was the summer of 1990.
AR:
Right. That was in 1990. Gotcha. And then it was - six months in '91 was the second time.
BCL:
The following summer, the UC system had partnerships with various companies in Silicon Valley where there was a standard three-month internship, but there was also something called the six-month co-op - they would call it - and people in the university system really had good things to say about actually spending six months at a company to get a more in-depth experience.
BCL:
By the way, before that summer I think Mark called me and despite the disappointment of the previous summer where I chose not to stay with him... I don't know if he called me or I called him, but a new opportunity came to rejoin STI for a longer period of time and I took it. As I said, it was consistent with the university policy of encouraging six-month co-ops. It was decided that I would spend six months at STI beginning in the summer of '91.
AR:
You said that UC Davis encouraged that kind of co-op stuff, but was UC Davis directly in touch with STI? Or was UC Davis encouraging you to reach out and then you already had that STI connection?
BCL:
No, the UC was not involved at all. It was just a common thing for students to take six months off. I didn't feel as bad dropping one quarter and delaying my eventual graduation because it was something that seemed to be encouraged anyway. I coordinated with the university. UC Davis was not involved [with STI] at all.
AR:
Gotcha. And then one final topic on your intro to STI here. That Truxton-like demo game that you eventually made, did that have a name at all? Were you developing that at STI or?
BCL:
Unfortunately, it probably did have an internal code name, but no, it was never an official thing.
AR:
You'll have to forgive me here because this is where my age shows, but did you have computers where you were living or was this just coded at STI?
BCL:
No, this was all at STI. I was living with my big brother and I didn't have access to development hardware at home.
AR:
Okay. Then you kind of already told me just through all these stories here, but what are your impressions of Mark Cerny in general?
BCL:
By the way, in some of your interviews, I think it might have been with Brenda or Craig, you mentioned you've had a hard time reaching Mark. Is that still the case? Have you had a chance to talk to him at all?
AR:
I did reach out to him and he politely declined. He was actually super polite. He just doesn't want to spend time talking about STI. However, I later reached out to him again: I wanted to ask him about some STI staff who had passed on because we don't have an opportunity to speak with them anymore. He was actually cool about doing that. I am in touch with him. If you do need to get in touch with him or if you want to say hello, I can probably do that. Unfortunately he just doesn't want to revisit STI [in an interview].
AR:
Mark, if you're reading this, I'm still open!
BCL:
Yeah, he's quite a character. I have a world of respect for him. It was obvious to everyone that he was incredibly bright and it just blew my mind that someone so young could be so bright at the time. It was clear to me that he was technically gifted. He mastered the Japanese language. He had a Japanese wife. He commanded the respect of all of us. But he could be scary at times.
BCL:
"Scary" meaning he could go from being super casual, informal, funny, warm to becoming very serious and making you feel how he feels about your performance. There were times - moments when deadlines were missed... We had these standup meetings every morning, especially my second summer, and there's a lot to talk about that. He had high expectations of his team and there were things that were part of the process and part of the routine that were both kind of amusing and stressful.
BCL:
I can jump straight into one example where at every standup during the Kid Chameleon days, each of us - and we went round robin - each of us had to tell a story about anything. It could be what we did over the weekend, whatever. We were expected to put a lot of thought into it and emotion and then describe in detail what we did. It was, I think, a source of stress for some people. A lot of people took it very seriously, where they would come and tell an elaborate story about what they had done. In my case... I think one day, I remember preparing for this storytelling thing because I knew it was going to be my turn. But that's an example of something that was the Mark way of doing things and that was super important to him. That's an example of something that made him very unique, that he had those things that were important to him. I guess teamwork and team spirit were pretty important.
BCL:
Going back to what I was saying earlier, when there were tough times or missed deadlines, he did not hesitate to call out people by name at the standup. In one case I remember him addressing me directly and saying, "I expected more from you."
AR:
Harsh.
BCL:
There was that side of him that made it tense a few times.
AR:
He was a perfectionist, right?
BCL:
Yes.
AR:
I can only imagine because as you said, he was so young then. It must have been tough and a lot of stress on him at the same time, probably in ways that I think a lot of people didn't see. Were those stories that you had to give... That wasn't every morning, was it? Every morning you had to tell a new story?
BCL:
I think it went round robin. [questioning] Was it all of us having - it probably didn't [happen every morning].
AR:
I was going to say, that's a lot of finding stories. "I ate a NutriGrain bar last night." [laughs]
BCL:
Yeah. I don't remember if it was kind of only a certain number of people every day or did we do the full - I think we reached a size where it probably became impractical. We still took turns. For each of us, it was probably less than once per day, but maybe we had to do it once a week at least.
AR:
Interesting. Because with STI, Mark was really doing a lot of things that hadn't been done before. He was also kind of going out on a limb by doing it because he had the support of Sega and all of this stuff. I can almost imagine that must have been tough on him and it must have been tough on all the early staff there.
AR:
The first summer - we touched on your hiring and the early demo, but in your own words, what would you say that you primarily did at STI? Or if you could just go over your time at STI during those first three months, what did you do primarily?
BCL:
I basically learned to be a Sega Genesis programmer. That was the main takeaway. I earned that experience. I think one reason Mark was disappointed that I didn't stay was because he had invested in me.
AR:
They were training you for it.
BCL:
Yeah. But I would say he got more than his money's worth the following summer.
AR:
Other than training, did you contribute to any other STI games during that first summer?
BCL:
[shakes head] It [my contributions] was all the second summer.
AR:
Gotcha. Let's see. Let's go back to the start of the second summer. You were brought in at the beginning of those six months. What was the first thing that you did? What were you brought on for?
BCL:
There were many changes. The new office was completely new to me, right? The one in Palo Alto. I still remember the address, 3600 Bayshore.
AR:
[in affirmation] 3600 West Bayshore, Suite 100.
BCL:
Yes. That was completely new to me. The environment obviously was a much larger office. Then when I showed up, a big chunk of the team had already been formed.
AR:
Right. The Kid Chameleon team.
BCL:
Most of the faces were new to me. Mike was gone. That's when I met Brenda for the first time, and Craig. Bill Willis was there as well, I think. I became good friends with Bill. One thing that will permeate this whole summer - in case it wasn't obvious to you, I think I was the youngest kid there. Most people there were probably 5 to 10 years older than me, and I was just 19 or 20 years old. I was the youngest and in many ways the team treated me like a kid. I was teased, but in a loving way, and sometimes made fun of - so that was the environment. Feel free to ask me questions. [laughs]
BCL:
That's when I learned that they were working on this game. At the time, the title had not been finalized. We didn't know what we were going to name it.
AR:
What do you remember in terms of early titles? Dylan Charles or Kevin Kidd. Any of those ring a bell?
BCL:
[nods] Yes. I remember the many conversations and debates around the name and Dylan was one of the candidates because of Beverly Hills 90210. There's a character- [Dylan McKay]
AR:
No way.
BCL:
Yeah, I do remember those conversations. I don't know what led to the final decision around [the name] Kid Chameleon. I don't know when exactly the concept of this main character morphing into all of those superheroes was formed. But I think that influenced the final name because of the chameleon aspect of it.
AR:
Ohh my gosh. I've never made that connection before. [slowly] He changes like a chameleon.
BCL:
Yes.
AR:
[laughs] It's funny. You look at things from a certain perspective years and years. That perspective is such a lens to look at things through that you don't notice something extremely obvious sitting an inch to the left of it. It's so funny. What was Bill Willis like?
BCL:
Yeah, I loved him. He was really easygoing. He had a sense of humor. I loved to joke around with him and he was my partner in the programming [group], meaning most of the team, I would say, were designers and artists. Bill was probably the established programmer when I joined. I had a really good relationship with Bill. We talked a lot. I met his wife and we also did some activities outside of work - sometimes just with Bill, but most times with the whole team. I remember that Bill was really into golf and he had invited me several times to go golfing with him. But I wasn't interested [in golf].
BCL:
Also, related to the age difference [between me and the staff], my brother was kind of growing worried that I was hanging out with the wrong people. He was worried that I would age too fast by being around people that were older than me. When I told him about Bill inviting me to go golfing with him, one of my brother said, "You're only 20 and you're already thinking about going golfing with a bunch of old people." So I never joined in those activities, but I do remember going to the movies with the team.
BCL:
No matter what, outside of Bill, I think I never really felt part of that core team. I didn't feel super close to them because I always felt like a little bit of an outsider due to the age difference and also I was a little shy. That had something to do with it too.
AR:
Other than Bill, what other STI staff would you say that you were particularly close with?
BCL:
Later in the project, we hired Steve Woita. I love Steve as well. We also became really good friends. What's interesting with Steve... I think at the time we didn't have an official tech lead on the game. Mark hired Steve to be that person - to be the official lead on Kid Chameleon - because Steve had industry experience. I guess the expectation was that he would take on a role similar to what Mike Schwartz had on Dick Tracy. It didn't work out that way. As I said, I love Steve. We had a very good working relationship, but the Genesis system was completely new to him, the internals and all that.
BCL:
In practice, I had built most of the core of the game, things like the main algorithms and things like the collision detection stuff that we spoke about. By that time - and armed with my experience from the previous summer - I ramped up very quickly, because I knew the system inside out and I was very proficient with everything. Steve was a little slow to pick up on those things and there were some delays. It became clear that I was doing a lot of the core internal work. He was completely fine with that.
BCL:
But that became a source of confusion and maybe misunderstanding, or the situation got weird. One day, Mark made it more official that I was the lead for the core elements of the game, especially the player movement, the sprite animation, the various algorithms and all that. I don't fully remember how he made that official. It might have been something pretty subtle, but to me it wasn't a big deal. What I remember was that Steve took it super well - we kind of joked about it - and what could have been a tense or a bad situation turned out to be not a problem at all. We continued to be really close friends throughout the project.
BCL:
I was really lucky and blessed to be working with Bill and Steve on this. That may be unknown to you, this little tidbit of information. I know on the wiki [Sega Retro], for Kid Chameleon, it was mentioned that one of my main responsibilities was the animation of the transformations.
AR:
The helmets, yeah.
BCL:
Yeah, I did way more than that. [laughs]
AR:
[laughs] I don't know if you saw my face going [shocked expression] when you had been saying all that but that's incredible. Those kind of discoveries happen quite a lot where you go to someone who is credited for some small part on the game and it turns out they did 90% of it.
BCL:
Yeah. I was probably the main programmer.
AR:
That's just super cool. I'm going to take a little bit of a step back here and then hop back into Kid Chameleon. When you were hired at STI for the second summer, the part we're talking about now, I apologize if I already asked this. Do you remember the official role that you were hired into, company role, the name of it? Was it software engineer or something?
BCL:
Yeah, game programmer. I don't know if we had official titles back then. It was a pretty flat hierarchy as you can imagine. But if it had to have a title, that was probably the closest.
AR:
What on Kid Chameleon - on the programming and code side, what did you NOT do? Because it sounds like you did the overwhelming majority.
BCL:
I'm trying to remember what Bill - he was already there when I joined. It's hard for me to answer that. I don't remember all the components of the game. I just remember what I felt were the important core components like the animation, the collision detection, the movements. But I'm sure there was a ton of other stuff that I just don't fully remember.
AR:
Right, right, right. As someone who hadn't worked in the game industry before, what was the most unexpected aspect of the development process for you?
BCL:
What surprised me the most was all the non-programming technical work that had to be done. More of the team was dedicated to design and graphics than the programming staff, right? I learned that design was a huge part of game development. I think we must have had at least two game designers (maybe three) whose roles were to design the levels, place the graphic elements in the right locations and design the characters and design how the levels would link up with each other. That was one learning experience. Then the other one is graphics, right? The graphics designers. That was also a big chunk of the team I think. We must have had two or three artists. Brenda was one of them, I think.
AR:
Yeah, she was. I think Craig too.
BCL:
I remember at least Hoyt, he was a funny guy. I think Graeme Bayless was another designer. The overall answer is I learned that game development was a really big team effort.
AR:
How did you like working on a big team like that?
BCL:
It was great. I think we were just the perfect size. We were big, but not big like how games are built these days, right? I love that we were a team but still small enough that we felt really close to each other. It must have been 10 people, a dozen people. That's my guess. Which seemed like the perfect size for focused work but also we were there to help each other - and small enough to do things together outside of work. So I thought it was a perfect size.
AR:
I believe Kid Chameleon was probably done on Amigas. Do you remember the software that you were using to work on the game?
BCL:
I think it was still Amigas, but there might have been a transition to something else midway. I don't fully remember. I think I know what you're talking about. I think in one of the wikis there was a mention of a transition to more of a PC-based [environment].
AR:
Right.
BCL:
I can't say for sure if that happened while I was there.
AR:
That might have been a little afterwards. One of our researchers, Devon, asks if you recall the assembler and linker that you were using on Kid Chameleon.
BCL:
I don't remember the names of those things. Sorry.
AR:
No, no, you're all good. It's been 30 years. Another one of our researchers, MDTravis, asks what your debuggers were like and just how often you worked with debuggers and what that was like as a whole.
BCL:
That's a good question. How did we debug? Oh my god.
AR:
We're interested in it too. So whatever you can remember. Even if it's just vague memories.
BCL:
I definitely can't remember any names, but even the debugging process... I don't even remember how we debugged things. For example, were we able to pause and hit breakpoints? I don't remember anything about debugging. I don't think there were such things as print statements, either, or logging statements or breakpoints.
BCL:
[thinks] There's got to be breakpoints. There must have been breakpoints. There must have been a way to look at memory contents, but I just can't remember. Sorry, it was so long ago.
AR:
No worries. I appreciate you searching your mind for that. Then you were also - and I apologize, I had a bit of difficulty going into this because there isn't a whole lot of information. You were mentioning the helmet transformations and the wiki getting that wrong. All I really had to go off on here [for interview research] was the helmet transformations, a cheat code that you added, and then your credit in the manual and in-game credits.
AR:
It was just that one cheat code that you put in, right? To get to the credits?
BCL:
Yeah. I can say a few things about that. First of all, I think the wiki says that Steve and I had created the cheat code, but to my knowledge, I don't think I told anyone. That was kind of an embarrassing thing. I don't know if "cheat code" is the right term. It probably is, but I designed it so that it was a combination of controller button presses that had to happen in a very precise location on a particular level. I thought I had designed it so that it would be impossible for anyone to discover. I don't think I told anyone about that. I did this probably in the middle of my six months' time there, just so it would be a cool thing to show my friends and family later on. But that almost blew up in the company's face. I don't know if you knew about this, but I got a call from an angry Mark a few months later. "Okay, we averted disaster."
BCL:
What could have happened is: there was some kind of marketing promotion for the game where there was prize money for the first players to reach the end of the game, to finish the game. I think there was real money involved. My cheat was discovered; I think I read about it somewhere. Around the same time, Mark called me, but luckily I think they spotted it in time to call off the whole campaign. I don't think there was any financial loss on the company, but still, Mark was not pleased. I got a call from him. I don't think I told anyone about the cheat.
AR:
Let me check what our source is here because... We have an issue of Beep! Mega Drive from February '93? I don't know how - Hm, this would have been a year afterward... Oh okay, I think we have it documented here that your cheat was added in, but then Hoyt added another level. So instead of skipping you to the credits, it skipped you to one stage back [from the credits] which was the final boss fight. That's what we have written down. I don't know if that sounds accurate.
BCL:
Yeah. I think I read that a few days ago. That may be what happened. Thinking back, that was probably what I was trying to do, to just be able to show my family and my friends, "Hey, look at the credit screen. I'm there." Not only is my name there, but my caricature was pretty funny. The depiction of me on that screen is actually pretty accurate. Those were the jeans and the shirt I wore, and I tended to have my hands around my chin like that in my thinking pose. It was pretty funny how accurately it captured how I looked at the time.
BCL:
I think that was probably my intent to jump straight to the credits screen.
AR:
That's so cool. Do you remember anything else about the promotion? Like how much money it was going to be or any other details?
BCL:
I just remember reading about it somewhere, possibly in a game magazine. But I don't remember the details of it. I remember freaking out when I read about it. Then when I got the call from Mark, I think I kind of knew what he was going to say.
AR:
That's so cool. I actually did want to ask a question about the transformations. Did you play any role in the design process or, I guess, the gameplay balancing process for any of them?
BCL:
You mean the design of the multiple characters?
AR:
Because I'm thinking, while those [transformations] were probably designed by one of the designers, you were the one that had to implement them into the game. I'm almost curious if in the process of doing that, you had some input on the way that those transformations would play or something like that.
BCL:
No, I think it was all the work of the designers. With each of those characters, there were technical challenges. For example, the hoverboard - I don't know if it was a surfer or hoverboard character - you could flip him upside down and then he would ride on ceilings. I remember having to work out the motion algorithm to support that. Those elements of what the characters did, what each of their powers was - I think it was mostly the designers that were responsible for that.
BCL:
This is a complete aside but I just remembered. I think there is a samurai character and Hoyt - initially, when the kid (Kevin, I guess that's the name of the untransformed character) went to the samurai form, we would play this little chime and it went something like [verbalizes Oriental riff] - kind of a very Chinese Asian thing. That just drove him nuts because he thought it was racist. I remember he made a big deal out of that, and we ended up changing that little music fragment during the late stages of the game development because that was a bit of a controversy.
AR:
Honestly, I think that's a good decision. Any other anecdotes from working on the game? I'm just loving hearing your stories here.
BCL:
Yeah. Mark had some creative input into the game. He came up with the concept of a flip. His idea was that Kevin would jump against the side of a wall and then, in its forward and upward motion, the character would still climb up the side of the wall and slow down. As the character reached the upper edge of that block or that platform, he proposed a move where, if you press the jump button again, it would allow Kevin to flip onto the platform and stay there securely. He suggested that, and I implemented that. That was a bit of a tricky thing to get right. The point being, throughout the game - I wanted to make a note that Mark had some occasional creative input into the game design.
AR:
Is that something that he tried to do in most of the studio's projects that he oversaw? Have a little bit of creative input?
BCL:
Yeah. I was just trying to think and recall other things... [thinks] Feel free to proceed with asking something.
AR:
I'm very interested in a postmortem or just more anecdotes. I just like hearing more about the game.
BCL:
I liked the game. I brought home one of the development ROMs after those six months so that I could continue to play it. But I've since lost it. I don't know where it is.
AR:
[painfully] Oh no.
BCL:
Since a few years ago, I bought this little Sega Genesis emulator or it's one of those boxes that you can buy from Walmart and it comes with a bunch of something like that, just so that I could play the game again. I started a quest to try to finish the game because the game is quite difficult. It's really hard to finish it because after you lose a certain number of lives, you have to start all over. That's my recollection. So with the Genesis Mini, I was hoping to use the game save feature to always save my progress with as much life as I could. I got maybe one quarter of the way through the game, but I didn't make it farther than that. I kind of stopped. But some of the levels were really hard. No, just really good memories. Trying to think. Yeah, it's a hard game.
AR:
Yeah. I appreciate you testing your 30-year-old memories here.
BCL:
I don't know if it was necessary to make it that long. I think maybe the wiki for Kid Chameleon makes the claim that at the time it was maybe one of the longest, if not THE longest, in terms of just the sheer number of screens or levels. I think maybe it was one of the design goals to make it just huge.
AR:
I think so. I think that Cerny said something like that. He wanted to - if I recall correctly, it was something about giving people a lot of value and kind of making a good first showing in STI's first original game.
AR:
You kind of already answered this through your stories but I wanted to ask directly: what was STI in its early days in terms of working environment and work culture? A lot of people have said it was kind of relaxed and it was a free, open [development] environment and I just kind of wanted to gauge your perspective on that.
BCL:
Yeah. Obviously, my second summer there was completely different from the first. So I'll speak mostly about the second summer. It's everything that you just said. It was my first time working in a cubicle environment in a pretty big building. It was an open space, and it was very easy for team members to walk around and chat with others and seek help. That combined with the team activities. I looked forward to going to that office every day during that summer. It was great. I had a really good time. I think I really loved everyone there. I wish I had kept in touch with them. There was no tension or bad feelings that I can speak of.
BCL:
I do remember Yuji Naka (of Sonic fame, Japanese programmer) visiting one time. At the time I was just blown away because I had played Sonic. I don't know if it was the release version or an early development version of Sonic, but when Naka visited the office and Mark presented and introduced me to him, and I learned that he was the one who created Sonic, I was in awe. I did not know about all the issues that came after that. At the time, I was just a kid, and then he was God, right?
BCL:
I don't know if he stayed at the STI office and worked on the next game while I was still there. I think I saw him occasionally, but I don't think he had a permanent cubicle or anything. That was one thing I remember.
BCL:
Going back to the environment. As I said, this was my first real job and I was super young, and I had nothing really to compare it with. I had a really, really great experience from it. Bill and Steve were just great co-workers. No egos that I could tell you about, especially with how things happened with Steve around the technical leadership role. I'm thinking back... I'm just blown away by how well he took it and how we continued to have a very good relationship after all that. I only have mostly positive things to say about my experience and the team there.
AR:
That's awesome. A lot of people say that he was just a really great guy to work with. There's an interview that I haven't gotten around to publishing yet, but they said more or less the same. I'm not actually going to remember this right, but he was just very humble about that kind of stuff, I think.
BCL:
Yeah. Have you spoken to him in person?
AR:
Not yet. But he's absolutely on my list. I need to speak to Hoyt, Mike Schwartz, Bill Willis, and a couple... I mean, I'd like to speak to everyone of course, but those guys are on my list as well.
BCL:
Yeah, if you don't mind me asking, how recently have you started researching STI and the people? Is this something recent or you've been?
AR:
Kind of recent. I guess I've always had an interest in STI again from what we had spoken about at the beginning of this interview with Sonic 2 and all the mystery there. "I've always been interested in Sega of America" I think is probably the better answer, as well as STI being - I think I called it the flagship internal development studio [of SoA] which I think is about right.
AR:
It's incredible the amount of documentation that's been done on STI and its projects. I mean it's just incredible the amount of sources and information that we have. There's a project called Sonic X-treme, a very infamously cancelled project that STI did. There must be over 100 full paragraphs of content you could write on it. It doesn't help that Sega would throw maybe too many resources or too many people or too much time on a project, or in that case there was a lot of mismanagement. You're going to have a lot of history there either way, but there's just something very fascinating about Sega of America and what they were trying to do after the Genesis took off. They had all this money and then they started investing into all of these internal studios and all these internal departments. Then that didn't work out and by '96 they had to do some corporate restructuring and scale everything back. It was just kind of a time that you'll never see again. I think that's fascinating.
BCL:
Yeah.
AR:
Do you remember about when in your six-month second period at STI you saw Naka? Was it later on?
BCL:
I think it was near the end, maybe the second half.
AR:
That would have been mid to late-ish '91, I think. Something like that?
AR:
Then you said you played Sonic and you weren't sure if it was the final version or the early version. Actually, Craig mentioned something very similar: that Cerny or someone had brought many early versions of Sonic 1 to STI and they were playable in the break room. And that you guys would go in there and play it. Does that ring any bells?
BCL:
Yeah. I do remember that break room. I probably played Sonic there. Was that the only place and time I was able to play Sonic? That I don't know. Again, I don't know if it were released. I wouldn't be surprised if I had a copy because I had a Genesis at home. I must have had a Genesis at home. Because I'm pretty sure - because this was one year after Dick Tracy and I had already played Truxton, as I said, that first summer. I must have had a Genesis at home. So was Sonic released then?
AR:
Let me look up the release here. Sonic 1 was released in the United States June 1991.
BCL:
So maybe I had a copy at home. I remember spending quite a bit of time on that game. I loved it. It would surprise me if it were all played in the break room. I would say there was a good chance I owned the game at home.
AR:
Right, because there's a lot of people interested in those early break room copies. Obviously one of the big features of the Sonic series is the rings and that when you get hit, all the rings fall out of you. Craig says he remembers playing a version of Sonic in the STI break room that DIDN'T have the rings falling out of you. Might not have even had rings at all. Or the rings might have been there, but just for score. But the whole "You're hurt and then you get the chance to collect them and get some of your health back" thing. He wasn't sure that was there yet. Does that ring any bells to you?
BCL:
No, sorry. It's possible that I didn't play that game much in the break room if I had my own copy, you know?
AR:
Yeah, you already had one. Taking a little step back here, you were saying cubicles. Was it one person per cubicle or two to three people in a larger cubicle?
BCL:
Maybe I'll take that back. They were not even cubicles. The way I remember it, it was more of an island of desks with some desk-mounted partitions to kind of block face-to-face line of sight. I think I may be wrong, but I think it was even more open than standard cubicles. I think islands of desks with partial partitions on the desks to separate the workers is maybe more accurate. But again, it's pretty fuzzy. But what I do remember was, it was super easy to roll our chairs from desk to desk and collaborate.
AR:
And that was pretty common to see people doing that and working with each other? I mean, obviously it's going to happen anywhere, but one of Cerny's things [principles] with founding STI was that he wanted it very open and for everyone to bounce ideas off each other and learn from each other. I'm wondering how much that was supported or encouraged in an official capacity there.
BCL:
I don't think anything was official. It was just the layout that was conducive to that kind of collaboration.
AR:
We have Hirokazu Yasuhara, the creator of Tails, as working on Kid Chameleon. Do you recall working much with him? He was an artist. It might have been a different thing.
BCL:
No, but even still, as an artist - I interacted with the artists quite a bit. Perhaps due to a language barrier... he was very quiet, and no I did not interact much with him.
AR:
Speaking of, how often did you work with Japanese developers in general?
BCL:
I don't think I did at all.
AR:
Okay. Gotcha. Then I was curious about what you thought of a couple of the people that you mentioned. Graeme Bayless, what was he like?
BCL:
He was warm and funny and those are the words that come to mind. I like Graeme. But he had I think a deep voice and a loud voice. He had a commanding presence. Those are the things I remember. Was he there that whole summer?
AR:
What was working with Hoyt like?
BCL:
He was a great guy. Brenda and Paul [and Hoyt] were kind of a trio of troublemakers. Hoyt had a deep sarcasm. That's what I remember about him. He was very good at his work. He had an interesting sense of humor. Quiet, but when he would speak up, I think he would make you laugh. He was pretty sarcastic about a bunch of things. Once in a while, as I said earlier, he had strong opinions on some things. Wasn't afraid of expressing his opinions. That's what I remember about Hoyt.
AR:
Did you have to be opinionated to work at STI or was there - you said yourself you were shy. It sounds like a good working environment, and that you didn't have to shout or stick yourself out too much to get your work done, but I don't know if that's a good analysis.
BCL:
I mean, I'm living proof that you could be shy and still do well in that environment. There were no politics. There was not really a need to have strong opinions and be vocal because most of the direction came top down from Mark. There was very little controversy, politics for that I remember. I think we each kind of knew what was expected of us. There was no need to be an asshole to succeed in that environment, if that makes sense.
BCL:
In fact, the project - from a project management perspective - we really had free reign. There were no such things as sprints or strict schedules. For the most part, we kind of built the thing by going with the flow. I don't remember really having to complete X by a certain deadline. There were times when there was a perception that the project was slipping and Mark would let us know during the standup meeting, but other than that there was very little micromanagement. I'm speaking from the perspective of the programming team. Perhaps things were a little different in the art and design teams, but I didn't really feel any pressure per se.
AR:
That's great. I'm sure you're aware that kind of sentiment is unfortunately very common in the game industry, especially was back, when you had to sometimes be a jerk or put your foot down or speak louder than everyone else in order to get what you wanted. It's good to hear you didn't encounter that.
BCL:
Having said that, because I was kind of the young kid, maybe there were things going on and feelings hurt that I just didn't know about because I was kind of naive. It was my first real job, so I don't know. I think from other accounts, from other interviews maybe, you'll get a different perspective, but from my perspective it was just a fun rewarding place and time to work.
AR:
That's good to hear. I think Rick Macaraeg was on the project [Kid Chameleon]. Did you know Rick too well? Because he's one of the - and I don't know if you know this, but he did pass. That's partly why I'd reached out to Cerny and others, to gather statements. I don't know if you wanted to say anything about him, but I'd love to learn more about him.
BCL:
I do remember him. I did not interact with him much. I also have fond memories of Alan Ackerman. I think he passed as well.
AR:
Yeah, he did.
BCL:
I do have more memories of Alan than Rick.
AR:
Yeah, I'd love to hear them.
BCL:
Alan was quite a character. He was really sweet. I remember because he had a very distinctive low tone voice. I mean, you could barely hear or understand what he was saying most times, but he would often burst out into a nervous laugh and that's what I remember from him. [laughs] He would go "ha ha ha" and he would crack those really funny jokes that you don't expect, right? That's what I remember of Alan. I think he was very close with Brenda.
AR:
Yes. Yeah.
BCL:
He was a character. Of the team, he was one of the more unusual characters.
AR:
It sounds like he made a lot of people smile though.
AR:
How well did you know Brenda?
BCL:
She was the one that teased and made fun of me the most. She would team up - she would GANG up with Paul. I forgot Paul's last name. Paul joined kind of later.
AR:
Paul Mica.
BCL:
Yes. She and Paul made fun of me but in a humorous way. Brenda, oh my god. She's the jokester. She loved to play pranks on people. I have really great memories of Brenda, even though she tormented me at times. I'd love to talk to her, but I was always on the defense because I didn't know what she could say or do to me. She was the comedic glue that organized STI - she was really a big pillar of the team and largely responsible for a lot of the humor and human aspect of the whole working experience there. She was a big part of that.
AR:
That's awesome to hear. I've had other people say that before. "Brenda made STI fun" is what I've heard from a lot of people.
AR:
Do you remember her one day running around with the video camera and asking everyone to film a silly video?
BCL:
I saw that in one of the interviews. I read that I don't have a recollection of that.
AR:
It might have been after you had left.
BCL:
It's possible that I was there. But I don't remember. Sorry.
AR:
Right. One day we'll find that video and if you're in it, I'll let you know. Do you remember going to Napa on the STI Napa trip or was that also after you had left?
BCL:
I have no recollection of that. So it might have been after my period there.
AR:
What was Paul Mica like?
BCL:
Brenda and Paul got along very well because he had the same kind of understated dark humor. He was one of the few that made Brenda laugh. That was saying something. I mean, Brenda was responsible for most of the jokes and the pranks and stuff, but Paul had that understated serious voice most of the time, but he would just crack a joke and say it in a very subtle way and it would make Brenda laugh and she loved that. I think they were really buddies.
BCL:
You would walk up to him and he would be very polite. I think he's of Hawaiian origin, something like that. Then later you would hear him say sarcastic things or crack a joke and then realize that he's not as innocent as you thought. That's kind of the Paul that I remember and he was a perfect match for Brenda. They ganged up on people and they ganged up on me.
AR:
Do you recall a producer named Cindy Claveran at all? That name ring any bells?
BCL:
No.
AR:
Okay. Then you kind of already answered this, but just double checking: outside of Kid Chameleon, did you have any other work on any other projects at Sega, even small or temporary?
BCL:
No, sorry. I know that you were looking forward to hearing about that, but-
AR:
[appreciatively] No, it's all right because it tells us - I guess part of the reason I ask is because STI, as Sega progressed (especially after the Genesis took off) would move people around on projects and it seemed like it had a million little projects going on. For the first kind of two years of STI's existence, basically up until Mark leaving, that [overworking and lack of focus] wasn't really a thing, so it's just nice to hear confirmation of that.
AR:
We're kind of reaching the end here and I do appreciate the patience. From your perspective, do you think STI could have been run any better, or operated differently in any aspects?
BCL:
No, no.
AR:
It sounds like Cerny put a lot of effort into what he did and his role in the company. He cared a lot.
BCL:
Yeah. It really felt like a family, and I can't say that of my other work experiences that followed this. That was the first and only time I really felt like my work team was also my family. I haven't felt like that since. It was something special.
AR:
Would you say that's one of the more rewarding aspects of your time at Sega?
BCL:
Yeah. Absolutely. Correct.
AR:
That's good to hear. I'll have to see if you're interested in connecting with some of them. I'll send you some emails after this. Following Sega, you didn't have any further work in the game industry, you mentioned. If you don't mind me asking, I'm not going to go too much into detail there, but I am interested out of respect for your career and just general interest. What kind of career did you have after Sega?
BCL:
At the time I talked with Bill near the end of my tenure, I think - we talked about what was next and I think Bill was exploring some employment opportunities. He kind of joked at that time that there was a perception that video game programmers were not real professionals and that they didn't qualify as software engineers. I remember kind of laughing about it with him at the time.
BCL:
To answer your question, I went back to school and I got my bachelor's degree from UC Davis. I graduated in a difficult year for employment and so I decided to stay in grad school. I finished around '95 with a master's. Then I went on to work for Hewlett Packard (HP) because at the time, HP was one of the most respected companies in the industry. It was almost everyone's dream to go and work for HP, which I tried very hard to do. I worked on operating systems and compilers. A few years later, I joined what was at the time a startup - you may have heard of that name, VMware, and I spent an insanely long time there.
BCL:
Then I started a startup with some friends called Platform9 - that went on for a long time too. I don't move very much. Once I start a job, I tended to stick around for a while. I must have spent eight to nine years at Platform9. Finally, I'm at a small company called Spot AI right now. We're doing video AI processing. That's where I am now.
BCL:
Throughout my career, I occasionally look back at what's happening in the video game industry, and I just couldn't believe how it turned into a multi-billion dollar industry - how big-budget games these days can be made that rival movies in terms of production and development cost. I'm just amazed at what's happened with the industry and also all the development tools, the graphics engines, the hardware. It's just unbelievable.
BCL:
Do I have any regrets not sticking around in that industry? Not really. But sometimes I ask myself, "What if I had stayed?" After my second stint at STI, on Kid Chameleon, Mark did not pressure me to stay. Maybe it was because the Kid Chameleon project came to an end. It was good timing that I went back to college just as we were wrapping up the game. I think there was a sense of closure, and I felt happy about being there for the completion of a project. Maybe that's one reason Mark didn't try to pressure me into staying. Maybe he figured that I had college plans and he didn't want to mess with that.
AR:
Were you able to apply anything you learned at STI to your later work in any shape or sense of the word?
BCL:
When I worked at HP, I worked on compilers. With compilers, you need to be very intimate with how instructions are generated to produce the most optimal performance. The experience from Sega working at that level really helped kind of bootstrap my career in compilers and also operating systems. You also need to know a fair amount about low-level systems programming - that helps a lot.
BCL:
But ever since I've moved on from Sega... When working for VMware, I had to go back to very low-level system programming. With VMware, it's virtualization software, so you can simulate a computer in software. You also have to be very skilled and experienced in the low-level details of instruction sets and all that to build a successful virtualization project. It helped a lot with that career.
AR:
You had mentioned project management. Is that kind of what you're doing now as well? Project management?
BCL:
No, I'm still an individual contributor. I've had maybe the opportunities once in a while to move more into a management ladder, but it was never appealing to me.
AR:
Do you like seeing your individual contributions to the work that you're doing?
BCL:
It's just more fun than dealing with people issues. [laughs] Yeah.
AR:
I'd imagine the code certainly talks back less... but I don't know. Depends on what you're working on, I guess.
BCL:
In the past year with AI, things have changed a lot with the - AI coding assistants write maybe 99% of the code that I write these days. It's changed the work a lot. I don't know to what extent in the video game industry it has changed how things are done, but I can't imagine it not having a huge impact. I would imagine writing a game these days is not much different from writing any piece of commercial software, right? There's huge frameworks and engines and APIs and documentation, and I think AI probably has the same impact and can be very productive in those environments as well.
AR:
What's your master's in?
BCL:
It was in computer science. My bachelor's degree was in electrical engineering and computer engineering but my master's was in pure computer science from UC Davis.
AR:
Okay. And lastly, just to do the biographical wrap up, when you moved from France to the States, that was for school, correct?
BCL:
Yes. The other half of my family was here already, and my brothers had gone to UC.
AR:
Was there a reason that you chose San Jose in the Bay Area? Was it Silicon Valley or did you have someone recommend it?
BCL:
My brothers had gone to UC. And the brother I stayed with had graduated from UC Davis. In my mind, I wanted to go to UC Davis to follow in his footsteps, and I only heard good things about it. That was why I came: for college. But the first couple of years, I couldn't attend UC Davis. I went to local community colleges like De Anza College and Foothill College, and then I transferred.
AR:
Here's a funny question. Did STI have a receptionist?
BCL:
Maybe in the final days of my stay there, but I don't think so.
AR:
Did you take a look at your page on Sega Retro at all? The one that we have for you.
BCL:
A few days ago, as part of you reaching out, I did. There wasn't much.
AR:
[in confirmation] There's not much. I wanted to ask, would it be okay if I were to put up a picture of you in the little biography corner there?
BCL:
That'd be awesome. Yeah.
AR:
Thank you. I think having a picture for a developer is important because it shows you that there's a person behind the code. A lot of these games just live on the internet. When that happens, there's kind of a disconnect that real people worked on this. They showed up at seven or eight every morning, got their coffee - it was a real human process. I think having a picture goes a long way for that.
AR:
What I usually do is I build out as much of a biography as I can on the person from the interview that I do. If there's anything that you'd like to contribute to that or there's any kind of focus or if you'd like to steer things in one way or another, just get in touch. Super happy to.
BCL:
I'm curious, what are the editing rules for the wiki? Is there a review process or can anybody go in there and do an edit?
AR:
Pretty much anyone. It is open. We do have moderators and people paying attention so that there's no vandalism and those kind of things. For the most part, we just trust in our community and we all kind of know each other. So we feel pretty good about what goes up usually.
BCL:
What are the next steps for you? That's one question. I'm curious as to how you can build upon your work. Is it for pure personal satisfaction or does this help start maybe a career or a project? or is it just building more experience or recognition? I guess, what's your side of it?
AR:
A little bit of everything. The core of it is a personal passion. I like stories that can transport me to another time and place. I think that's a magical thing. There will never be another place like Sega again. There really won't be. The game industry in the '90s was lightning in a bottle. You'll never see it again. I think Sega of America was the embodiment of that in terms of all the money that it put into it, the talent that it gathered, and all the ambition that it had. Didn't always pay out, but I just think it's one of the most fascinating set of stories on the planet. That's my personal interest.
AR:
I would like to build a career out of it, especially to the extent that it allows me to speak to more people. Maybe I'd like to do something with a book or something, but anything I would be doing on a career level would really be to progress this history and show the world why I fell in love with Sega. You just have to phrase it right.
BCL:
A book would be an incredible project. How do Sega Retro and similar wikis compare to Wikipedia? Is there any possibility of one being folded into the other one day or is this so specialized and detailed that it should remain its own thing?
AR:
I think so, or at least that's my understanding of it at this point in my career. We do a lot of things that Wikipedia doesn't especially in terms of custom templates and the kind of infrastructure which allows us to document things that they wouldn't document - I mentioned SKUs and stuff. We kind of have this whole ecosystem and this whole Sega Retro house style philosophy on what we document and how we approach it. I mean we have customization down to the ref templates. We have a custom template to handle all of that.
AR:
Like you said, it allows us to specialize to an almost insane degree sometimes. Every now and then I step back and see we have all of this incredible focus on this one tiny part of game history. There's also that therapeutic aspect and sometimes that carries you into dumping a huge amount of info for something that's largely inconsequential. It's also the interesting history angle, and it's an exercise in writing encyclopedically. There's a lot of aspects to it, but in the same way you were talking about STI, it's also a family. I love the people that I work with. I work with a team helping me research and edit and do questions. And the wiki and staff and the community. They are, in a way, my family. I feel like this is my home.
BCL:
Maybe last question: personally, are you a gamer? Do you play games from that era?
AR:
No, not at all. A lot of people are really surprised to hear that. I enjoy games as a concept. Every now and then I'll - I've just gotten older and I'm busy and I have ADHD. All of that together is just - sometimes the last thing I want to do is play video games. It's funny... I'll want to get home so after work I can research and write about the games, but I don't actually want to play them. There are some exceptions. It's like a film historian who's been exposed to so many movies that the last thing they want to do when they get home after work is sit down and spend hours watching movies.
BCL:
No, that makes total sense. I think you're not into the games themselves, but what's behind the games? The backstory?
AR:
[in confirmation] There's only so much you can say about a game. He hits his head on the block, a thing comes out. You can analyze all the stuff in the game. I find the human side of its development so much richer. It's also more relatable. I've been able to relate to a lot of the experiences that people have shared with me and I've grown from them. I'm still growing from them. I'm probably growing from this one right now. I'm very grateful that everyone has been very kind to me in terms of sharing their experiences, including yourself. I appreciate that.
BCL:
I wish you the best of luck. Maybe this will lead to a big change in what you do or your career. If not, I think the fact that you love what you're doing is just awesome.
AR:
Thank you. I think that's a good point because it might not lead to success or anything tangible. I question that every now and then. I would get this sense that I was doing all this work and - I think I had used the term "releasing it into the void." It almost seemed like it didn't mean anything because it didn't have the audience that I wanted or the reaction that I expected or something like that. That's where the family aspect comes in. You're reminded by all the humans that you work with that life is good and you don't have to worry too much.
BCL:
If you happen to interview people like Bill or Steve, feel free to shoot me an email saying that you made contact with them. I think that could be the first step in maybe something where I could reach out to them. If you're successful in interviewing any of them, I'd love to hear it and I'd love to see those interview transcripts.
AR:
They'll be the next ones that I reach out to. I'll be keeping in touch with you this entire time. I might have further questions too. You might hear from me sometime soon.
BCL:
This was very nice talking to you and discussing all those memories. Thanks for having reached out to me in the first place. I'll be following your work now that I know about it.
AR:
Thank you so much. You gave me quite a lot of compliments and no matter how much work I do, I never know what to say. Thank you for everything today.
Transcript sourced from https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Bich_Cau_Le_(2026-01-10)_by_Alexander_Rojas and migrated into devquoted with linked people, tags, source metadata, and media where available.