Interview: Brian Dawson (2025-12-13)
Brian Dawson speaks with Alexander Rojas in this phone call interview for Sega Retro.
by Alexander Rojas with Brian Dawson
Sega Retro · December 13, 2025
This Sega Retro interview with Brian Dawson was conducted by Alexander Rojas via phone call.
AR:
Hello, Brian, can you hear me?
BD:
I can hear you. How are you doing?
AR:
Good, good! Thank you so much for hopping on a call with me.
BD:
No worries. I think it's good to connect like this. Let's either dig in or figure out if there's value in digging in, and if so, figure out a way to do it. We'll see how it goes and ultimately if this works. I'm excited to dig into the memory banks and share some of this experience. There may be some things that I don't remember immediately and we may have to follow back up on, but it would be great if you could give me an understanding of the general feel of the type of information you'd like to get and overall what you're doing. I assume that you already have a list of questions you want to ask that will drive us.
AR:
Yeah, absolutely. It's just going to be whatever you remember. I less like to ask specific questions - more I'm looking for an oral history, so whatever you remember in terms of the feel of working there, the atmosphere, some of the projects that stand out to you. And yes, you're right. I do have a bunch of questions prepared here, and I've written them in a way to assist in informing your memory and providing some historical context.
BD:
Cool, excited. Cool that you're doing this. Hopefully at some point you get to monetize it, turn it into a book, turn it into an interesting set of assets.
AR:
Thank you, I appreciate that. Alright, so just to quickly get started here, I did want to touch on your background. Did you have a general passion for technology and/or video games growing up that would have naturally led to Sega Test?
BD:
Yes, but I wouldn't have thought - it wasn't a time where people knew, I'd say, that the job of game testing even existed. If I unwrap my background leading into it, it made sense. A couple of data points about me that would maybe help frame this: I grew up in the Bay Area, so I was in the epicenter of technology at that time. My dad was a mechanical engineer. That's why he came to Palo Alto to get his master's degree early in the time when computer simulation became accessible. In a sense, we had engineering in the bloodstream and, I guess you'd say, a lot of technical artifacts around the house.
BD:
I will warn you, I've rarely been accused of being brief. In fact, I'm often called too verbose. One question may generate a long answer. I'm not treating it as a podcast, but more, like you say, to give you a bit of the oral history. With that background, there are a couple of other things I've uncovered about me and my brothers, who all ended up in the industry. We grew up in that environment in Palo Alto where we were surrounded by all this computer and tech history.
BD:
My dad was already an engineer in the tech industry. A bunch of my coworkers at PlayStation left to go work at NVIDIA early on. There are a bunch of things that led there, but for me, early on I'd say I wasn't directly super interested in tech, or at least I didn't know it. I always loved the earliest things. I loved the earliest boombox. We got the first Macs. I grew up in Palo Alto, so we had the first Macs in our class. I always tell the story: around eight years old, I took a basic programming class. I wish I had started then - a lot of my colleagues did. Later, I was jumped by two kids after one of my classes and never went back, so I didn't return to coding until 10 years later. Probably the key precursor was we found rap. My brother and I started making rap.
BD:
To go really weird - and you could always stop me if I'm going too far - at that time there was a guy, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and he was one of the first people to actually use computers to make hip hop music. He came to San Francisco, did a show, had a whole rack of computers and synthesizers on stage where he performed. Around that time we got a Macintosh, the original Mac, and started using a new technology called MIDI and early versions of what were Pro Tools to make music. That was really where we engaged with computers and, in a sense, entertainment. Later on I went to Diablo Valley College to be a sound engineer. I had always decided I was going to be a sound engineer and make electronic music.
BD:
Somewhere around that time I just couldn't find a job, and it turned out that a family connection worked at Sega of America in marketing and they needed testers. We had grown up on Atari. We had grown up on Nintendo. We had grown up on Sega Genesis. When someone said, "Hey, get paid - what was good money then - to test games at Sega," it was like, oh, that sounds great. My brother Marc got a job there over in Redwood Shores. Back at that time, Sega had marketing offices on one floor in a building and then they had a building that was primarily Test - some of the developers used to go visit it. My brother used to nag Steve Patterson, who is still around the industry, all the time for a job. Steve was later his manager. I used to nag him all the time too. I went in and talked to Steve one day, nagged him, and then eventually after about a year they needed people. That's how I got there. There were a bunch of blocks that set the stage, but it was happenstance that put me there.
AR:
Would that have been about 1993 you think?
BD:
Yep, it was 1993, definitely 1993. I can't recall the actual month - if I have it captured somewhere, it would show '93. It was probably later '93.
AR:
Just from a top-down perspective, looking back at all your years working with the department, what would you say working with the testing department was like on the whole? What's the first thing that comes to mind?
BD:
I didn't get formal training. I didn't go to university, but I would guess it probably felt a bit like a dorm or a frat house. Not that it was necessarily wild - I mean, there were some things you look back on that were wild - but at that time, testing wasn't a formal career. If you look at Atari, who set the precedent - and I've talked to old Atari guys - they would either just get some random kids off the street to come in and test, or kids would come by the office and say they wanted to test, or the developers would test. That grew more formally later.
BD:
A lot of us in Sega Test at that time were a random hodgepodge of people who weren't necessarily game programmers, and practically none of them were engineers or even technical. They were people who somehow stumbled across the job through family or a friend, or back in those days there'd be classifieds in the paper occasionally. That's why I say it's like a frat house - it was this odd mix of oddballs.
BD:
Most of us were young, and there were maybe older people in their late thirties or forties kind of shifting in life and finding their place. On one hand, it made it interesting and exciting, but also, as we talked about over LinkedIn, it made it kind of a breeding ground for establishing new careers for people.
AR:
Right. There's quite a lot of that. I'm surprised how much of that there is, but with what you're saying, with just such a kind of "creative," open environment, you're bound to get some of that there.
BD:
Yeah, yeah. We'd work crazy hours. I've probably clocked an over-24-hour shift, as many of us did. You get paid hourly, so you'd get double time and triple time, which equated to awesome money for that age. I don't remember what the hourly rate was at that time. Probably something like $12 an hour, which sounds insane now, but in the nineties, at double time and triple time... man, it's pretty good money.
AR:
I bet. Speaking of the name - because I've been calling it Sega Test - do you remember what the testing department officially called itself?
BD:
A funny thing is they probably have some documents or stuff somewhere with that. We just called ourselves Sega Test, and sometimes we were Test and sometimes we were testers. Now, there were titles within Test that I don't quite recall, and there may be official documents with the specifics. There might've been another name, but I think generally we all just referred to it as Sega Test and we were testers. It wasn't QA, it wasn't quality assurance, it wasn't quality engineering - just Test.
AR:
Okay, that's great confirmation. We weren't 100% sure on that. I think you kind of already answered this, but as for the offices themselves - you were there starting in '93, that was in Redwood Shores, but it wasn't the main Sega of America headquarters. It was down the street at 150 Shoreline, is that correct?
BD:
Yep, you got it. Exactly up on the frontage road there, little partially brick building, bunch of cubicles. It's where we started. We moved while I was there to across from what I believe was the main Sega headquarters, where the marketing department and the main business was. We ended up moving to a more traditional two-story office building and took a floor there. I don't remember that address. You probably have it.
AR:
Okay, that's good to know. Now, speaking of your specific responsibilities - because this has just been topical Sega Test stuff - could you walk us through your primary responsibilities at Sega Test?
BD:
That's funny. Yeah, this is going to be a good memory scraping, hence why it might not be a clean recording. I originally came on, and there were tiers. I'm not going to fully remember, but you would start as just a general staff tester, or junior tester - maybe that wasn't the title. You would come in during the morning or evening or afternoon as part of your shift. There would be shifts. As you came into your shift you would get a test plan. I can't remember - I'm sure we were probably using Lotus Suite to build out test plans. Either someone would pre-print test plans - I'm picturing an old laser printer - and you'd get a stack of sheets with test plans.
BD:
That test plan may include a bug report, so you may have a test plan that meant you were doing initial - what I would now call - exploratory testing. Like, "Play level one and achieve X, Y, and Z." Or you may be going through - we weren't calling it regression then, but what was basically regression testing. You'd have to validate a bug that someone had found earlier. Maybe you'd have to play till level seven. You'd have to unlock a given room and then go through a set of actions to see if you could recreate a bug.
BD:
A lot of what we would do would be handwritten. Your station would just be a Sega Genesis with an old-school industry professional monitor - you wouldn't be on consumer TVs - and a little flashed EPROM board that you would stick down into the cartridge holder. It was a PC board with flashed EPROMs on them, and it would have some red LEDs added to the PC board with a hex address. The job would be: you'd come in as a junior tester, you'd get those sheets, someone would've flashed up a bunch of EPROMs with the latest rev, you'd go check out a controller if there wasn't already one at your desk, you'd go check out the EPROM, you'd take your test plan, and then you'd just sit down and knock out as much of it as you could. When you found something, you'd either confirm it happened just as reported. There were some different scenarios: maybe you would find a new bug, and there'd be a format - an "if this, then that" - for capturing the bug. At the end of the day, either you or your lead tester would go in and enter those in a database.
AR:
You guys had to be very specific about making it clear what the bug was so the developers would understand. Is that correct?
BD:
Yeah, so the developers could understand - and you'd also really strive for a bug to be repeatable, right? In order to support regression or repeatability, you would have to capture it in a way that could get somebody as close as possible to repeating it. Hence the format of repeatability. The primary driver is going to be to help developers identify the fix and/or recreate it.
AR:
How much autonomy did you guys have in that regard? It sounds like there was sometimes a separation in communication with developers, but I can also imagine a scenario where you guys don't have too much say in larger decisions like speaking with the developers.
BD:
Yeah, I'd say it was hard to tell at that time. I was earlier in my career, I was young. As an individual tester: you were given a test plan, you went there and worked. I think things were well-defined. You grabbed your test plan, you sat down and you tested away. Within that - how you get there, what you do when you get up, when you sit down - you have individual autonomy.
BD:
At the other layer, the associate producers and the producers were the bridge between Test and the rest of the organization. This wasn't the world that I had experienced later on in my life at Sony, where the testers have some level of proximity to the dev team. You think about the EverQuest TV show, right? The testers are right there. No, your Sega producer was your primary liaison.
BD:
Aside from whatever came from the business via the producer, the people that ran the Test departments and the people beneath them had a lot of autonomy. To answer your first question: in terms of communication with marketing, I'm sure there may have been times that I wasn't privy to where marketing came in to do focus groups or ask questions or give feedback, but most of our critique from a gamer perspective - on what would make something fun, what would make something better - came through our bug reports. I don't remember the name, but I'm sure there was a class of bug for recommendations on general gameplay improvement. This is where you would seek to become an associate producer, because as an associate producer, that role was filled with somebody who had hands-on game experience and who was a tester. They were probably a game fan. Those would be the people that would be more likely to communicate with marketing from a user perspective.
AR:
Speaking of interacting with the development teams, do you recall any producers or the developers themselves ever being pushy or trying to get you to turn a blind eye to something so they could get their game through?
BD:
Not that I can recall at Sega specifically. Again, we were pretty detached from the developer, so I'd say not directly. The tension between QA and dev is not that different from the tension you'd see in non-game industries between formal QA and dev. There would be a lot of tension, of course, but this communication would be via paper or a printout as opposed to an organic back-and-forth conversation or debate. You would have a number of cases where it'd be pretty standard for a developer to come back and claim something wasn't a bug, or they couldn't recreate it, or it wasn't the severity you believed it to be. For me, specifically as an individual tester and eventually a lead tester, that wasn't a dialogue we had directly with developers.
BD:
For the producer, I'd add: at the end of the day, that's one of the producer's primary responsibilities - to make that call - so it wouldn't be us debating with the producer themselves.
AR:
Right. It would be in their hands. That makes sense. Now, there's a part in that 1996 Sega Test VHS documentary, This Is Sega Test, where they show what appears to be a PAL hardware room - like a European hardware room.
BD:
Oh, yeah, that's right. I forgot. Jeff Loney - a couple of the guys I mentioned were in that. Sorry to interrupt, you were saying the PAL room.
AR:
Oh, no, you're good. It's a fascinating little video. We know from that video that there was obviously some kind of testing to run games on a European console to make sure that it works or get some information on it. Do you know if the same happened for Japanese hardware or Japanese games, or if you ever worked with Japanese stuff at all?
BD:
Yeah. Wow. You're bringing some things up that I haven't thought about for a while. The first answer is going to be yes. We did test on Japanese hardware at times, and yes, we would run it through converters, switch the setup on the monitor. I believe most of the testing we did on Japanese hardware was at an early stage in a game's development, or when we were doing a port that maybe wasn't fully converted yet. If I recall, there may have been times when we were doing overflow testing where we'd be testing on Japanese hardware. There were times when we were just testing for compliance with the Japanese market. I can't actually remember the video output format now, but long story short, yes.
AR:
Okay, cool. We weren't super sure about that because the video only shows PAL, so that's actually very interesting. On this note, in that PAL room - I'll call it that - we believe that some of the development hardware in there is an early Sega Genesis development unit called the Super Target. Does that name ring any bell?
BD:
No, it doesn't ring a bell for me. What do you know about it, if anything?
AR:
The Super Target is essentially - I'm not super technical, so I don't really know a hundred percent here - but it's kind of a Genesis with extended development capabilities. It's like a Sega Genesis but with extra RAM, I think, so that you can develop games a little easier. The release version wouldn't have that much RAM. We never had an in-situ photo of it - it was just something we knew about on paper - but we think we saw a brief glimpse of it for two seconds in the background of that Sega Test video.
BD:
Interesting. That may be a conversation for some of these other names we mentioned, or my brother, if you end up talking with him - he may be more likely to have a memory of what that was. We had a whole host of hardware.
BD:
That was the other thing I was going to mention earlier. I'm forgetting some of the names of these things, but before it was the Sega CD... we had the Sega 3D add-on that went into the cartridge slot. Was that called the Sega CD? No, that was the console. I think it was the Sega 32X that Virtua Fighter was released with.
AR:
Yeah, I think that's the 32X.
BD:
Yes. I'm just checking. I thought we had the consumer name for it. Yeah, I almost have to Google to recall some of my memory, but the 32X I believe. Early 3D gaming. One of the most interesting things - jumping way back to an earlier question - as you talked about hardware, it triggered this memory. Being able to kind of upgrade this older Motorola chip-based, sprite-based console to develop and play 3D games was really cool. In a sense, that was our precursor to Sony PlayStation.
AR:
In addition to working on Sega Genesis units from different regions of the world, we're curious - because the Sega Genesis went through a lot of internal hardware revisions, even in the same market and region - did you ever have to work with this model of the Genesis and that model of the Genesis, and test on them both?
BD:
Absolutely, but I don't recall the details of it. Going with my faded memory, I would say as an individual tester, aside from maybe region-specific hardware, we weren't doing a lot of cross-hardware compatibility testing. Take that with a grain of salt.
AR:
Of course. Another thing - this is something that you might not have handled directly - but do you recall how Sega Test actually received the games that they tested from other companies? Was it a file sent over a BBS, or did they send the ROM chips through the mail or something?
BD:
Yeah, if I recall generally, we had a ROM flashing machine that the leads would be responsible for, and sometimes you'd designate people to do this - all games were flashed on site. That might not be 99% true, but it is jogging my memory. If I recall correctly, they would generally be in a particular file format that I can't remember. I believe it was a .BIN file that would come over and get posted on a BBS. One of the people in the group would pull down the latest version and then they'd flash that to an EPROM. They'd throw it in the EPROM programmer, flash it - and then you had an EPROM copier - and to get enough revs for the rest of the team, you would copy that across a few boards, pull it out, put more in, copy that off. When a new game came in prior to the next shift that was supposed to test it, somebody's job that day would be to download the game, load it to the EPROM flasher, and flash a bunch of pseudo cartridges.
AR:
Now Sega Test was chiefly tasked with identifying bugs, and we did kind of touch on that. Sometimes there would be an effect on the actual game's content, but just in your personal experience, how often did you find that you had a direct influence on a game's mechanics or difficulty per se?
BD:
I don't know that I can gauge it, and I guess what I'd say may sound somewhat contrary. Via the bug reporting system and conversations with associate producers, Test quite frequently had some level of impact. Even though I kind of describe us as being a black box, there was a way feedback got to the developers. I could not say necessarily per game. Another thing I'm remembering is: lead testers were assigned to a game, so we had people that were, say, lead tester on Virtua Fighter or lead tester on Indiana Jones. Those lead testers would definitely have a material level of say in the game via the producer and associate producer. You could see the lead testers in the credits, and via the associate producer and producer, they would tend to have impact.
AR:
Speaking of your specific game testing credits, I noticed that you did work on the fighting game Eternal Champions. From our perspective, it seems like that was one of Sega Test's larger projects due to the sheer amount of testers they assigned to it. Do you recall anything about Eternal Champions?
BD:
Man, I don't, and that is more just a factor of years in the industry. I'm trying to remember Eric's name. Gosh, somewhere in my brain I can vaguely remember the lead tester. I think the associate producer was Eric. I'm not remembering Eric's last name. I think you triggered... Yeah, I remember Eternal Champions. If you were to name a game that strikes the chord of being a lot of work and being difficult to recreate bugs, Eternal Champions is probably the one that really drove that home. I'd also say that is likely a case where Eric, having been a former tester, ended up having a good amount of input into Eternal Champions, alongside all of Test.
AR:
That was Eric - oh! I'm sorry, go ahead. Please.
BD:
No, ask the question because you'll help me.
AR:
Eric Rawlins?
BD:
Yes, sir! I was going to say Hopkins, so thank you for that. Eric Rawlins was one of the people that made it from Test to actually being a producer on a game.
AR:
Yeah. It looks like he started around '91 or '92 or so. He might've been there a little earlier.
BD:
Do you have that he was there in the single-story building on 150 Shoreline? I do know that. Who do you have as lead tester on that?
AR:
On Eternal Champions?
BD:
I'm going to say I think it was Jeff Loney, but I don't know.
AR:
Let me take a look here... We do have Jeff Loney listed. The lead tester on this is Ben Szymkowiak.
BD:
Yes, I vaguely remember Ben. I think Ben and Eric were actually friends, if I recall correctly. That is the other thing about the culture. Like I said, practically everybody that came on was a friend of somebody, so it ended up being like this family of sorts during that time period.
AR:
Right. Looks like Erik Wahlberg too?
BD:
Erik Wahlberg, yes.
AR:
Chris Cutliff, Janine Cook, and Joe Cain are the head people on that one.
BD:
There we go. Joe's the name. I was trying to remember my buddy Joe. Chris Cutliff - we worked at Sony together. Janine, I just came across. Joe Cain and I worked at Sony together. Yeah, so those are all people I know well.
AR:
Oh, awesome. Let's see - because I do want to be considerate of your time here. There was a game called Racing Aces for the Sega CD. It was a 3D flying game, if you remember that one.
BD:
I vaguely do. Yes, I remember it by name. Do you have a specific question about it? I'm also looking to jog my memory.
AR:
Just recollections. The final game is kind of a mess, and I can only imagine the in-development one was too, because that game is very slideshowy. The frame rate was very bad, but we were just wondering what you can remember.
BD:
Oh my god, yes, I remember. That's funny. I don't have any specific recollections, and I can probably trigger some when I look at the screenshots, but I absolutely remember this. I do remember the 3D games generally, at least from a testing perspective, were problematic. It was an early time. As I look back, people were still learning how to deliver 3D. I don't remember specifics around this, but I'll see if I can recall and come back. I can say that game was a mess.
AR:
If you look back on it, what game or games stand out the most to you in your memory?
BD:
Oh, man, there's a lot. That's a hard one, and I'm trying to think about Sega specifically. It's interesting - for some reason, and I can't explain the reason, Indiana Jones always stands out. It's popped up in my mind multiple times during this conversation. Some of the Sonic ones are ones I'd honestly say stand out too. For obvious reasons - because Sonic - that pops up in my mind, but I'm going to have to go back through my credits and jog my memory.
AR:
Yeah, absolutely. You do have a pretty good credits listing here, but a lot of times they won't list all the testers. We have a system where we can go in and manually add someone to credits so that it shows up on their profile.
BD:
Oh, nice.
AR:
Bringing up Virtua Fighter on the 32X as an example - you tested on that one?
BD:
I tested on it, whatever the first games for the 32X were. I probably tested on all of them. We as a group - as that kind of "Class of Sega Test" - all tested on them at some point, and I probably tested them all at some point.
AR:
Interesting. I'll have to add your name to that. As for the Sonics, which of those do you recall testing on?
BD:
I'm looking right now trying to remember.
AR:
Might've been Sonic the Hedgehog 2, given the years.
BD:
Yeah, I'm sure Sonic 2. I'd actually have to go back and look closer at the version and recall. I can promise my credits are incomplete at this point. I don't remember which ones are missing, because sometimes you just would not get included. If I recall correctly, sometimes the lead tester would kind of have a quasi core test team and those would be the people that would get on. Or marketing would cut the credit short and the lead or associate producer had to make a decision. I'm going to absolutely look to see what I can identify.
AR:
Yeah, that'd be great. You said Indiana Jones - which of these two names rings more of a bell? Was it Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, or Instruments of Chaos Starring Young Indiana Jones?
BD:
Last Crusade.
AR:
Last Crusade. Gotcha. I did want to touch on you working with and alongside your brothers, Marc and Chris. You kind of already went over how that happened, but I'm curious if you ever collaborated with each other on any projects or testing at Sega.
BD:
While at Sega, I was there with my older brother, Marc. I'm sure we are on some credits together. I would have to go see if you guys captured them, but I'm actually thinking - I'm sure I was on some games where he was a lead. I just don't remember. My younger brother Chris - no, we didn't ever collaborate on anything. I would have to go back to remember when he joined or entered the industry. He ultimately ended up spending most of his career working in games.
AR:
Do you happen to remember the name of that band that some of the Sega Test staff formed?
BD:
Rollo's Kitchen. There are actually still some YouTube videos out there. They're hard to find, but yeah, Rollo's Kitchen.
AR:
How do you spell Rollo?
BD:
I think it was R-O-L-L-O. I'm just going to check real quick. It's hard to find, but it does show up. Yeah, I'm pretty sure R-O-L-L-O. A couple of years ago I was searching YouTube and I actually found Rollo's Kitchen - a couple of videos and a couple of their songs.
AR:
What would you say are the biggest skills or experience that you acquired at Sega Test that went on to influence your later career, or that you still use today? What was the most important to you?
BD:
Actually the most important - I'll go with what I think is the most important, but not necessarily a direct answer.
AR:
Sure, anything.
BD:
It was at Sega Test when one day I asked everybody what that red LED readout on the board meant. I asked everybody that I could find in the office at that time and nobody knew. That caused me to want to understand what it was. It's why I went and learned how to program, because I wanted to understand what the address error on the address checker was. Had that not happened, I wouldn't have my first job at Sony on the PlayStation. I went into their Test for a little bit before moving to become a software engineer. I was able to move from testing to being a junior software engineer in what was our R&D team at that time. Frankly, had I never seen that address there, had I never spent hours sitting there trying to look at games closely and understand how they worked, I wouldn't have decided to learn how to program games and I wouldn't be here at all.
BD:
Sega Test gave you an inside look into this black box to understand generally how game development flowed. This idea of release cycles, flashing PROMs, bugs, different severities - some may get fixed, some may not - and their ship dates. It just gave me, as an outside person, a general understanding of what game development looked like in a corporate context. That was something I was able to go forward with.
BD:
If I was to really stretch from a qualitative standpoint, it influenced the way that I think teams and companies should be built, honestly. This was a group of people from all different walks of life, all different skill levels, that were passionate and were organized through having a level of corporate process - learning how to bring this free spirit and operate in a corporate environment to drive outcomes. Yet at the same time, retaining your own unique identity, and actually building personal relationships with people. Bridging in your personal world in a way that has positive outcomes. I never would've thought about that unless you asked me, but that has also probably wholly informed the way I approach work today and the way I approach building teams.
AR:
Right, right. It's just funny to think that it all started at Sega Test. That's a very cool story.
BD:
Yeah, it's crazy. I appreciate you asking that question. These other questions get me thinking about things that I haven't.
AR:
Kind of the formative base - or part of the formative base - for where you are now. I think that's always very important to someone's career.
BD:
Yes, yeah. I'll say one of the prides, and one of the things that I can mention to practically anybody now, is I can say that I was somewhere between employee 90 and 100 at Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and I was involved with the launch of PlayStation 1, 2, and 3. Still to this day, people will be impressed with that and I can be proud of that, and that would not have happened if I hadn't serendipitously ended up working at Sega Test in 1993.
AR:
Right. Oh, that's so cool. Thank you for both being patient with me and giving me your time and just the opportunity to ask you all these questions in the first place, by the way.
BD:
No, likewise. I appreciate you asking. This is good for me to think about some of this stuff. As I get time, I'll go dig up some of my old memories around the Sega portion. No need to thank me - I appreciate you for being curious, I appreciate you for documenting this, and I appreciate you asking me some questions to give me some thinking.
AR:
Absolutely. Before we move onto Sony, I had a few more Sega Test questions here real quick and then we'll swing back around. Do you recall which 32X games you had tested? I think you had said Virtua Fighter, but there's also Doom, Star Wars, Space Harrier, Cosmic Carnage, and Virtua Racing.
BD:
Yeah, so all of those as listed are accurate. It's funny, after last time we spoke, I went to go verify some of my credits, but I can't recall them game by game at this point anymore. The ones you listed are correct.
AR:
Did you say that you tested a few of the Sonic games? Sonic 2, I think?
BD:
I did, and I think it was at least Sonic 2. Let me confirm. You did not have me tracked as having tested that, right?
AR:
No. We can always add that manually if it's not already listed in the credits, which we'll be doing for the 32X games as well. That's going to show up in your production history on the website.
BD:
Gosh, we worked on so many versions of Sonic that I don't recall each one. If we can take that as an outstanding question, you can possibly just send that over to me and I'll look to verify later. If there's any of these other things that I don't remember in terms of titles worked on, just flag those as well and I'll do the research myself.
AR:
Okay, perfect. Thank you. On the note of the 32X, do you recall if Sega Test ever performed any hardware durability tests, or was it just games?
BD:
I only worked on games, because using a console beyond just playing a narrow game was a novel experience around when the early PlayStation came out. That's part of what drove me to Sony - for instance, simply playing a music CD and navigating how to do that. Now, there were hardware durability tests that, if I recall correctly, went on in the lab.
BD:
I guess we didn't talk about soak testing, which of course became a pretty standard thing to do. We did have a full soak test lab where you would rack up industrial racks with a bunch of machines and tables, and you would regularly run soak tests and then come in the morning and make sure that they didn't crash out, put it on the game home screen, put it in various places, and then just leave the game there to soak to see if that main loop broke out at some point.
AR:
Okay, cool. We did not know that. Another thing: the building that you were in - did you happen to share that building with Sega of America's marketing department or any other company departments, or the call center, or anything?
BD:
At the time that I was there, as far as I can recall, no. I'm pretty confident that we didn't have that in the 150 Shoreline one-story building. When we moved to the two-story building, I still believe we were the only Sega department in that building.
AR:
After Sega, you worked at Namco. It looks like you were doing QA for both Sega and Namco at the same time, or at least LinkedIn has an overlap with some dates. Was it common for Sega's testers to also test for other companies at the same time?
BD:
That could just be some sloppy recordkeeping on LinkedIn on my part. It would not be common, it would not be standard for people to work at both. However, because a lot of people were brought in through an agency on contract, the workforce would expand and contract, and so that group of people would always say, "Hey, we need people over here." As a standard operation, I don't think it was very common, but I absolutely think it happened just because there may not be work at Sega at a given point, but within that timeframe someone may be at 3DO or someone may be at another game company. There was a bit of: once you got in, you became a testing mercenary.
AR:
I like that analogy.
BD:
There's another Greg - I cannot remember his name right now. I don't know if it shows on my resume anywhere, but some of the titles I tested, I tested at a place called the Bug Police. When Test was in the two-story building, one of the leads eventually went out and - taking advantage of this expansion and contraction in testing staff - built his own contract test shop called the Bug Police. Games would be shipped in-house or we could ship people on site. We had a little room in a building on 2nd and Brannan in San Francisco, and we'd test titles for multiple different publishers and developers there.
AR:
Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. Then the Bug Police, I'd assume, was one of Sega of America's preferred testing contractors?
BD:
Yeah, definitely. I think our largest client was Sega. Greg was definitely in a position at that point - Greg Fleming is his name, actually - to capture some Sega contracts.
AR:
Can I get his last name one more time?
BD:
Fleming.
AR:
Fleming. Gotcha. We had assumed that the whole point of Sega of America establishing their own in-house testing division was to handle it all, but it sounds like they worked with outside contractors to test fairly regularly.
BD:
This is just a constant thing, as you've probably come across in the game industry - because it's such a boom and bust with your release calendar, with your game cycle. You didn't keep many testing staff on full-time. In fact, a number of the leads - I do not remember the details - but there was a tier where you would convert to permanent and you'd be Sega staff. You'd have to ask somebody else the details, but a number of the people I'm mentioning and who are seen on the titles were actually on contract.
AR:
Oh, interesting.
BD:
They were effectively temp workers. A lot of us - contract may even be mischaracterizing it. An industry comment there is just to say: obviously there was a lot of game history prior, but what I've got from talking to Atari people and other people, that was pretty much the standard early on. Before games were a bigger business, you may have had a handful of kids - or just game aficionados - that kind of found their way in and you had them on staff. Before that, you would see a lot of developers themselves testing. Then there's another version of: I've heard stories from people I know that are in the industry who just walked in and knocked on the door of Atari headquarters in Sunnyvale and ended up testing.
BD:
I did not really start to see extensively staffed internal test teams until... well, let me say this. In my experience in the early industry - the early nineties - there was always a core of testers that were kind of staffed, but most of your testing body was done through a staffing agency. Sony and Microsoft, when they got into the game industry here in the States, that's when we had pretty much all of the testing in-house.
AR:
Okay, interesting. I didn't know there was so much contract work.
BD:
That's the nature of the industry, the boom and bust.
AR:
Did you have a specific reason for leaving Sega Test, or was it exactly what you mentioned - just schedules and games, and there wasn't always regular work?
BD:
Yeah, just games and schedules. I have - other than just working a lot - no negative memories of my time at Sega. I have great memories of my time at Sega, so I don't recall any particular reason for departing. I think there just probably wasn't work at that time.
AR:
Gotcha. Then when you went to Namco, was that Namco Hometek in Santa Clara or Namco-America in Mountain View?
BD:
Namco Hometek, off of First Street over by Seagate if I recall correctly, but yes. A friend of mine - I think it was Jeff Loney - was there. There was really only about five of us, and I think we maybe scaled to nine at some point, but other people you'll see on Sega titles - Jeff Loney, Mike Madden, I believe Greg Beckstead - were all there for a bit at some time testing. That's the first time we saw a PlayStation 1.
AR:
Oh, wow. That must have been a trip seeing a CD game console like that, although I guess you had worked with the Sega CD.
BD:
We had been working with the CD console and the various names it had at Sega Test. It had another name in the US, but our first time testing a CD game was at Sega with this CD console attachment thing.
BD:
I'll just run with a bit of a story from here that may run into your next question - but this was the migration. One of us would - I think either the agency would find a place for us, or one of us would get shipped out to a place - and then somehow, at least a few people we knew would end up going to that third party. That would be a third party from the console perspective, doing some testing. In this case, this was entirely testing Tekken on the PlayStation. It was the first time we'd seen anything like that. We had just come off of testing Virtua Fighter with the shredding and the seams and big single-shaded polygons, and that was really the first time that you saw textured 3D in a console.
AR:
Did you enjoy working for Namco?
BD:
I think the tech was cool. Namco wasn't really like working at Sega. You showed up and you went in a room and you were just testing. We weren't very integrated into the larger organization. It wasn't like we experienced a company culture. I'd say I liked the experience because if I had not gone to Namco, I likely would not have ended up at Sony before launch.
AR:
Could you tell us how that connection happened?
BD:
We were one of the few people testing on Japanese systems for a Japanese release. It was releasing in Japan first - they would get the hardware first. Now that I think about it, we were really a handful of the first people actually getting hands on the PlayStation before they had even completed the design of the American version.
BD:
The technology was amazing. As I told you before, I had just started taking programming courses because of what I learned at Sega with the address errors. By the time I got there, I was still in classes. I saw the technology, I thought it was amazing. At that time, I decided I was going to develop for Sony, so that was really the key for me. It was around that time that E3 started and I went to the first E3. I guess it was in LA. I took myself down there on my own money - maybe a couple of us went - and Sony had a booth there. I went and hung around the Sony booth and nagged people to figure out how I could get a job.
AR:
Oh, that's so cool to just do it yourself, walk right up.
BD:
A lot of us, having grown up at Sega Test - that initiated at least our professional maturation. It started me on deciding I was going to be a game developer, but that was also kind of the first time in my life that I said, "Hey, I've got a target. I'm going to make a five-year plan. I love this PlayStation thing. I'm going to work there and eventually I'm going to transition this to a career and get a job as a software engineer." That was a five-year plan that landed and worked. It was a pretty cool experience for me.
AR:
It sounds like it. Could you describe your responsibilities with Sony and the stuff that you directly had a hand in?
BD:
When I joined Sony, I joined as QA. At that time, I was maybe the fifth person to come on, and you would've come across some of these names: there was Tom Gillen, who ran "Sony Test" for a long time and who I had not met. He came from Atari. There was Scott - I'm forgetting his last name right now. Joe Sousa; Joe came on later. He had been at Atari with Tom. There was Mark Vitello, who I met at Sega. Then there was a new guy from another company - he may have been at Sega - named Frank Coles.
BD:
We were in a building that is now occupied by Qualys on Hillsdale Road in Foster City. At that time, Sony was one floor on the third floor in that building and a half of the bottom floor. We were all hired on permanently - it was the five of us in a little room. At that point, Joe and Scott became the lead testers. All of us were second line testers, but it is that group that then started the hiring of temp workers. That's when lifelong friends of mine, like Sean Potter - you're going to see a lot of Sega names show up. At that point, we really started to bring in people from Sega.
BD:
Another thing - if you're interested in game history, what was really cool at that time is we were three exits down from where Sega was. We were roughly four exits down 101 from 3DO. We would sometimes walk over the 92 to the first EA building and go visit and hang out with some of our friends there. John Madden was coming up, motorsports and celebrities started to come by their building. It was really cool. It was this small community and we all knew each other - we were a hop, skip, and a jump away.
AR:
That's awesome that you guys stuck together. You don't see that happening too much anymore. What was working with the early PS1 like? How stable was the platform then? I'm curious about your QA recollections from that time.
BD:
I can't remember the name of the game right now. Effectively, it was pretty stable, because as I noted, we had already been testing games months prior to that. We were a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony. We were actually a separate company from SCEJ - Sony Computer Entertainment of Japan. Japan developed the tech first, then it came to us to get it ready for the US launch - to bring it into the market. Things were pretty stable by that point.
BD:
However, those early launch titles were very Japanese launch titles. There's a particularly zany game that I can't remember right now that, aside from it and Tekken, were the only initial launch titles we initially had. What I also remember is the hardware was pretty stable. The games were pretty stable, but at that point we had no third party developer program. The controller had not even been finalized. We were doing a lot more than testing. We could literally walk across the hall, go past the bathroom, and we'd be in there with the engineers and the R&D team.
AR:
Oh, cool.
BD:
I'll go a little long on this. Then you'd walk across the hall the other way and you'd have our first party development studio, Psygnosis, that did Warhawk and a couple of other well-known titles. When we'd have company meetings upstairs, one side of the office floor was just empty - we would all fit in that space. I specifically remember the president of Sony coming down one time, us all fitting into a single room, and him telling us that Sony was going after Microsoft. We learned about the BIOS and we were told the PlayStation was going to play a role to that end.
BD:
On the testing side, there was no memory card interface. I was tasked as a lead with testing the memory card interface and proposing design changes. We were the first people to work with a consumer removable storage device. "Sony Test" actually defined the procedures that went into the third party development guides for how a game needed to handle a card being pulled out, for how you loaded memory, how you saved memory.
BD:
The circle, square, and triangle button symbols weren't finalized. We were also validating and giving design feedback on the controller, and we'd reject controller designs or approve others. That was really the first time that - as I told you, on the journey with Sega - we became a core part of the organization. Because it was so early, we were also - unlike you see a lot in the industry with testing groups - a respected part of the organization. I remember in our conference room, you would literally go sit with the president of the company and you'd have eight or nine people in a meeting talking about how we do marketing.
BD:
There was a marketing campaign, "U R NOT R E." The lead testers had an active role in approving that campaign. There was a strategic decision behind it. That was really the first time that I'd say the initial batch of us from testing were actually helping build a system - forming the marketing campaign, forming all of the processes and procedures, what the manuals looked like. Everything to take a game to market. Glad you asked me because I actually forgot a lot of that.
AR:
Oh, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing all that. A lot of this is new information. I've read that elements of management - whether in Japan or in America - some of them didn't have a lot of faith in the American launch of the PlayStation. Did that affect you at all, or did you even see any of that?
BD:
We saw the other side of it, right? As the story goes, Ken Kutaragi was in charge of a deal. He was an engineer - I can't remember his exact title - but he was the godfather of the PlayStation and in charge of a deal with Nintendo for a CD-based system. They later scratched the release of that. Ken managed to convince Sony that they should compete in the console market. This was pre-launch of the PlayStation 1, right? It was effectively a test product - it didn't necessarily have a ton of support.
BD:
As an aside, we had Ken Kutaragi, we had Shinichi Okamoto-san - who I would really call the Godfather of the PlayStation because he was responsible for the design of the chip that made the PlayStation different from anything else. Early on, I'd say maybe we didn't have a ton of support, but we didn't really know it or feel it. We knew we felt great once we became a double-digit percentage of Sony's revenue and Sony was struggling otherwise. Then when we saw how much we mattered to the larger Sony Electronics, I think you could contrast the difference between the early days and later days.
AR:
Right. What would you say the biggest challenge was in your work around that time?
BD:
From a testing or technology standpoint, there weren't huge challenges. The big challenge is it was a small team of people. Even with that, it was good that it was a small team - many who had never launched a system - actually building a launch from the ground up. That challenge was actually a blessing. We had a launch date announced not too soon after I got there. I think I probably got there in '94, and we launched in '95. We had less than a year's runway. As I said, they weren't technical challenges - there were business challenges.
BD:
For a small amount of us, our big challenge was that third party developers didn't know about the system. They didn't necessarily believe in it. There was a lot of work and a lot of giveaways and a lot of strategizing to get third party developers on board. That was one of the reasons why very early on, there wasn't really any first party Sony studio. We were dealing with Namco and the other penguin game that I can't recall, both studios out of Japan. It was hard to convince American studios to invest. That really started the early strategy of having a really strong first party. At that time, Namco and Sega, as you would assume, had the lion's share of developers.
AR:
Right. I mean, you kind of just gave us the answer, but do you have any recollections about dealing with third parties?
BD:
My job ended up transitioning - I switched jobs a bit while I was there and became a junior software engineer in R&D. R&D was developing a lot of the tech with Japan: the US was laying on top of it. We would work with third party developers to go show off the tech and, to a certain extent, support them with the tech. Later on we reorganized a couple of times. We created something called Third Party Developer Relations, or Third Party Relations. Developers were the most important in the vertical stack of the development support business, so I moved to Third Party Developer Relations.
AR:
How did you like working there?
BD:
It was the best. That was sort of the real launch of my career. Once I moved to Third Party Developer Relations, we were responsible for testing the lower-level libraries and creating the developer manuals once we got a tech writing team. At that time, driving third party adoption was important. I remember flying out to what became Sucker Punch and Insomniac Studios - we eventually bought them - and going back and forth from Seattle to LA sitting with developers, supporting them and training them on the tech. That was a joy. As you can tell, there's a lot more I can tell you about that time, but I know I'm going to extend this too far.
AR:
Oh totally, I just super appreciate everything so far.
BD:
It's you keeping it focused. I'm remembering things as I talk, so if at any point you're interested or able to go deeper, I would be happy, but I'll try to not give you everything.
AR:
One last question before I hop off the PS1, and then we'll just move on to the PS2 and your later work with Sony. That zany penguin game that you were testing alongside Tekken - could you tell us everything you remember about that so we can maybe track it down?
BD:
You can ask me and I'll be able to find it. I can try to look on my phone. To the extent that I remember, it was like a zany side-scroller game with a penguin. It would have been one of the handful of PlayStation launch games. It was not Penguin War. I would have to look. I believe it had a penguin, but it would've been one of the first launch games. In the Wayback Machine, you would probably find discussions about it.
AR:
Moving onto the PS2 - you have a very interesting career in that you had a very hands-on role in the launch of the PS1 through PS3. Could you tell us about the launch of the PS2 and your involvement there?
BD:
During that time, we launched PlayStation 1 and were preparing for PlayStation 2. I'm going to have to think out loud to get to some of those memory points. At that point, we had launched PlayStation 1. PlayStation 1 was a massive hit. Shortly after, we started getting new chips - we were getting new chip specs for the PlayStation 2 - and we got these big massive metal-cased dev kits, which will come back into the story later.
BD:
It was brand new technology. We were now pushing full 3D mathematics simulation. A lot of my work there was actually proving out some of the technology, benchmarking the CD, benchmarking the geometry transformation engine, and then training developers. One of the things I do remember is I had the opportunity - it was my first time speaking to a crowd of a thousand people - to be one of the opening speakers speaking to the development community about the features of the PlayStation 2 with 3D and ray tracing, et cetera. Interestingly enough, this small group of us, the original Sony team, put together our first DevCon. It was at the new Santa Clara Convention Center, literally a short walk away from Namco.
BD:
I just remember the tech being amazing. The press was really big on the technology. I'm going to jump around a bit if you're okay with this, because it was such a cool time. We were at Sony, we were by all of these other places like EA seeing what they were doing, regularly still talking to our people at Sega where my brother still was. One of the memories that just popped into my head from '94 or '95: after the long nights, we'd be regularly meeting at the 7-Eleven down there in San Carlos and having Mortal Kombat tournaments on the arcade machine with our guys from Sega. We all used to get together after work, go have pizza. I was just thinking about fun times.
BD:
The PlayStation 1 turned out to be a smash. I really got to dig in and help define the technology. As a result, we acquired or founded 989 Studios, named after the building. We also started to spin up a first party development studio in San Diego, largely based on the acquisition of a company called RedZone Interactive. We needed to get into sports and RedZone had created RedZone Football. I went down there to San Diego to give a technical talk to the team. When I was leaving, a guy named Dwayne stopped me and said, "Hey, we're looking for a technical director. Are you interested? We want to start a technology team."
BD:
This was middle of PlayStation 2 launch, if I recall correctly, but it was basically all set up. I made a transition down to San Diego and created a team called the Tools and Technology Team. Now in this role, while I had started in helping prime the system launch, get documentation, and train developers, I then moved over to first party work - basically to do the same thing, but for our first party studios. I created a team called the Tools and Technology Team. We inherited a team called our Maya Team because we were doing a lot of 3D cut sequences, rendered cut sequences. I worked within that group, managed the guys that did that tooling, coordinated all of our shared launch technology for PlayStation 2, and our feedback to Sony Computer Entertainment through that role.
BD:
For the PlayStation 2, my role was both rolling out the initial technology to the overall dev community and, to a much lesser extent, marketing. Of course, we had some input, but by now we were a couple hundred people, probably pushing 500. Then I transitioned to being responsible for ensuring that we had all of our hardware distributed to our first party studios, signing our compiler deals, signing our technology licensing, and then making sure that we were all using a degree of shared technology. I'm proud to say that I did a lot.
BD:
It was actually really fun. Some of the things I created there - the Tools and Technology Group - was later globally consolidated into Sony. It's now called the Worldwide Tools and Technology Group. Something I created we call the Sharing Information Portal is still there, but it actually led to me leaving the company. I was talking to a guy from Sony that we were doing a deal with in a completely unrelated business, and they're still using the Portal - there was one other thing of note I was going to say about that time, but, well, that's the PlayStation 2.
AR:
Did you run into any challenges getting third party studios acquainted with the PS2?
BD:
Generally, no. By the time we got to PlayStation 2, the adoption was wide. One of the things that had been really different with the PlayStation 1 is on other systems you had to program in assembly. On other systems you had to have your own tools. One of the things we did with the PlayStation 1 is we released the developer interface - there were C libraries. There were more advanced chips versus your standard off-the-shelf Motorolas, right? They were custom Sony chips. That was a bit difficult, but what really unlocked it was that your SDK and your interface was in C.
BD:
What that also enabled us to do is: while I was in Foster City on the PlayStation 1 team, I ended up creating our tools and middleware program as part of our developer adoption efforts. Our tools and middleware program was where Criterion came about. That was before you had a Unity or Unreal engine. We were really the first people to enable third party developers to write engines - like physics engines - for PlayStation 2, or 3D engines for PlayStation 1. That was really one of the things you'll see on my resume: tester to engineer to tools and middleware manager, then founder of the Tools and Technology Group.
BD:
Development was a lot easier by the PS2, but with each iteration of the platform at that time - and Sony still does this - we were really pushing the bounds of technology. The challenge was getting developers to understand the technology and use the hardware. The traditional games programmer was not a mathematics major, but a lot of the work on the PlayStation, as you dealt with 3D, dealt with a lot of matrix math. I had to train myself up on a lot of math. It used a different chip architecture. The real challenge was getting developers to understand how to use the maximum potential of the hardware as early as possible in that hardware generation cycle.
AR:
Could you summarize your involvement in the PS3 in your own words and just bring us back to what it was like launching that?
BD:
My involvement with the PS3 - I was still involved as the Tools and Technology manager. We now had some major first party studios. We acquired Naughty Dog, we acquired Insomniac, we acquired Sucker Punch, and these were the people that really got the earliest access to the hardware so that they could push it as far as possible. We had showcase titles that we had control of, and I and Tools and Technology would be responsible for ensuring that they were enabled with their developer kits, with libraries, with licensed tools, with in-house tools. I was acting as a liaison in the area of all things tech between our mother company and our studios.
BD:
One of the most interesting things there was shifting to motion capture technology with our motion capture studio. A couple of the coolest things I'll call out from that era: that's when we started working with Naughty Dog. If you're familiar with Naughty Dog and you think about Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank and then The Last of Us - the impact that Mark Cerny and Andy Gavin had on the system at that time was really cool. They were also just one small floor in Santa Monica that I used to drive down to all the time. Andy Gavin, if you're not aware of him, is a genius - did a lot of amazing things, as did Mark Cerny. Andy just had a sparse office with computer screens all over in the back, still very reminiscent of garage coding, except they were building these massive, amazing 3D games.
BD:
The other thing I did around that time was working with Seth Lewis, who was a producer on a number of our first party titles underneath Connie Booth. He was in charge of a game called SOCOM. I'd argue that was one of the first - oh, I guess that was the other thing. We also had the network. Man, there's so much that we did in that short amount of time. We also had the PlayStation 2 network adapter. The networking team - the first true networking team for console gaming - spun up next to me while we were there.
BD:
Anyway, I'll just get to SOCOM again. Another first party title. A cool thing I was able to do there is I worked closely with our R&D team to identify technologies for the tech features of the game. I played a key role in bringing voice recognition technology to the system, building and negotiating a deal between an outside company. They ended up moving over to our R&D and developing the in-platform voice recognition technology that was used for the live network chat system on SOCOM. Those were the type of things I was doing.
AR:
Wow. Yeah, you had your hands on a lot. I'd keep you here for five hours and run a million questions by you. I appreciate what you've given us so far.
BD:
Again, I'll go ahead and apologize - hopefully my verbosity is not too much. I actually really enjoy this. It allows me to sort of unpeel the memories, so that's cool.
AR:
Absolutely! Out of everything that you accomplished with Sony over the PS1, PS2, and PS3, what do you consider the most rewarding?
BD:
There's a lot. I named a lot of them that were particularly rewarding, so I'll give you two. One thing was I was able to do things I had never done in my career, so I learned a lot and was able to do a lot of those individual things. Now, from a macro standpoint, across all of those platforms, what was the most rewarding is having a hand in putting something out there that eventually the whole world recognized. At some point, it was up there in brand value next to Coke.
BD:
What I haven't experienced in my career since then - that I'll always hold dearly - is: we did things that affected everybody. When I have the ability to turn on a sitcom and someone's playing a PlayStation, our marketing team was doing an awesome job, and I see the controller, I can go, "Hey, Frank, Mark, and I informed the final pick on the controller design." On one side it's very vain - yeah, yeah, cool, look, I did that! On another side, it was one of the biggest opportunities in, I think, all our careers - that we were able to truly impact such a wide amount of people. Of my time at PlayStation and my time at Sega, but more so at PlayStation, what I hold most dearly is the breadth of impact that we had on people at large.
AR:
It did have a huge global impact. Then you stayed with Sony until 2004. Do you recall the reason you left?
BD:
At that point I had actually been working with and reporting to Shuhei Yoshida for a while, but he was later put as head of our first party studio. Eventually the company grew and became more corporate. It was a natural time for me to explore new opportunities. That's when we started to spin up a networking team. We worked very closely with one another. Testing was on one side, and the MLB team was on the other side. You always had a lot to do. Oh my gosh, it was an awesome company with awesome people but you always had a lot to do.
BD:
I had built out the entire office. I created the departments, I created the concept of the departments - literally started it from just being me. Eventually, someone else was brought in to handle that. It was hard for me at that time to have somebody come in and take over. He was very uniquely talented, so it wasn't a horrible get. The reason why he was a big get and they put him where I was at was that he was the CTO at Maxis.
BD:
Even though I had grown up in the game industry, I really questioned whether I knew everything about it. I decided to try myself in the larger industry. That thing we called the Sharing Information Portal was built on some open source software I found from a company called VA Linux, and I ended up going over to that company to focus on open source technology and developer tools. That sort of set my next career path.
AR:
It's unfortunate to hear that there were so many cliques at Sony, but that does make sense.
BD:
Like we talked about before the interview about the graphing of developer movement - people like Jeff Junio. There was always one of us that was a first mover at a company. I was one of the Sega cohorts that became one of the first people at Sony. Eventually over time, a lot of people from Sega came over to Sony. A lot of people that were at Sega in Foster City eventually came down to Sony and you'll see them show up on Sony's first party titles and credits. Greg Beckstead, I believe Joe Cain was there for a bit. Guys like Jeff Junio, who were at Sega on titles as lead testers back in the day - some that stayed at Sega when I left are now actually still in positions at Sony Computer Entertainment.
AR:
Oh, that's wonderful that they at least stayed in there. Definitely. You're not the only one that the game industry's given a bad rub.
BD:
Yeah. A lot of people are still there. I think about Aaron Drayer, who ended up going into marketing, big on esports, oversaw esports for Logitech. Would always run across Sean Potter, Steve Patterson - and oh, Mike Mika was the big guy that was the head of our test studio. It's really cool for me to think about all these guys that were once just kids kind of figuring things out. A lot of these people are now... man, I'm going to give you one other thing to get it out and then I'll stop.
AR:
Totally. No, you're all good.
BD:
Eventually at Sony in Foster City, we grew. In this building on Hillsdale, there were buildings on one side and then on the other side, and in the middle was a shopping center. In that shopping center there was a Safeway. We would all always just go through regularly. We'd get lunch, we'd have our regular thing, we'd be there on the weekends. We came to know all the checkout people. What was really common there is people would go, "Oh, you worked for Sega, you worked for Sony. My son would love to learn how to test games." I remember giving this mom information about how her son could test games, then meeting her son, then giving him some more advice and helping bring him on as an intern. That guy was named Eric. I don't know if Eric remembers, but he's at Sony now. I met somebody at Safeway and later on that person's son is a director or VP at Sony 25 years later. Some very cool stuff.
AR:
Yeah, it seems like everyone has humble beginnings and it's just cool to see how many people got their start at Sega Test.
BD:
Yeah. I think I'm getting into the business now with AI. Shoot, I may just go for fun and see what comes out of it. I think it would be really interesting to see that Sega Test branch of visualized staff movement. I have no idea what it actually looks like, but from my personal perspective, it's one of those Atari stories with people from Atari going everywhere. It's one of those eBay stories - not in terms of venture capital - but you could draw a line from Atari to NVIDIA, and you can draw a line from Atari through to Sony to NVIDIA.
AR:
Right. The final question I wanted to ask here: what are some of the biggest top-down lessons you've learned from your time in the game industry? What's affected your current work the most?
BD:
Man. I think it's more of the qualitative, about how you work. There are a couple of nuggets that I picked up early on as I figured it out. I'll hit a couple: cultural, technical, and marketing.
BD:
I'll start with cultural. One thing I learned culturally is that the personal part of things - the human interaction, the emotion quotient - is really important. Get some smart people, put them within some infrastructure, give them some funding, and they can do some pretty amazing things.
BD:
If I talk about the technical, I've learned it's really helpful - and you can do a lot with it - when you're able to think about the stack holistically. Personally, myself and a lot of us had the ability to look all the way down from chip level up to shared libraries, up to the tools. We needed to do that to be successful. From a technologist standpoint, it taught me: do your best to understand every layer of the stack, because it's going to help you master the technology and help others master it. An adage I took away from all that is - and it's still changing to this day - never say things you don't know. With technical people, your biggest risk is to undercut their confidence in you. There are a lot of smart people. When you don't know something, say you don't know it and say you'll figure out what it is.
BD:
From the marketing standpoint, this was my first time in the role. Where the PlayStation was a success above other systems was its intersection of technology and marketing - being able to take impressive new technologies, market those to the technical people that needed to be marketed to, and enable them to use it. Then also being able to translate that technology into something that the rest of the world can understand. Sony did an amazing job at translating what was complex technology into what really mattered to the gaming community first, then expanded it out to the larger gaming audience and made it cool in a way that people hadn't done before. I picked up a lot of lessons there. I'll just say: understand the stack, when you don't know say you don't know, be real, support and work with other people, and understand that marketing is about the user - it's not about the tech itself.
AR:
That's a super cool perspective. Thank you so much for sharing. That's incredibly valuable. Thank you. Alright, so that's kind of all I had for the moment. I've said thank you about 10 or 12 times this conversation, but I can't thank you enough for giving me your time, for sharing all of this with us. This is just such an incredible perspective on a very important time - a very formative time for where we are now - but it's not as documented as it should be. I really appreciate you giving us a little bit to progress that forward.
BD:
Thank you for checking with me. Thank you for involving me, Alex, I appreciate it. I think this is really cool work.
AR:
Absolutely. Thank you again, Brian. Can't thank you enough for our time here. You have a wonderful weekend.
BD:
Thanks, you too. Bye.
Transcript sourced from https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Brian_Dawson_(2025-12-13)_by_Alexander_Rojas and migrated into devquoted with linked people, tags, source metadata, and media where available.