Interview: Ken Rose (2025-12-07)
Ken Rose speaks with Alexander Rojas in this google meet interview for Sega Retro.
by Alexander Rojas with Ken Rose
Sega Retro · December 7, 2025
This Sega Retro interview with Ken Rose was conducted by Alexander Rojas via google meet.
AR:
Hello, Mr. Rose! Can you hear me all right?
KR:
Oh yeah. Hi, how are you? This must be Alex. Call me Ken.
AR:
Okay, Ken. Yeah, this is Alex. How are you doing today?
KR:
Good, how are you?
AR:
Good! I'm looking forward to this interview and I just wanted to say thank you so much for just giving me your time and agreeing to speak with me here. It's very exciting to be speaking to someone who worked at STI again.
KR:
Okay, well thank you. It seems kind of ordinary to me, but what can I say? [laughs] Anyway, what can I tell you?
AR:
All right. Just to get started, could you tell us about how you first got into programming - just your background in computers and what led to your later career?
KR:
Well, my high school had a computer, which was very unusual at the time. Actually, first, I guess I got interested - my mom was working on a master's degree when I was 10 or 12 or something like that, and she had a book about computers, and I remember going through it and reading that and looking through it and being slightly mystified by the whole thing, but curious.
KR:
The high school got a computer that was apparently a donation from a local business. Late in my freshman year, I managed to work my way in somehow. I wasn't taking a class that had it, but I kind of hooked up with some of the people that were there and started just playing on the machine. Learned programming in BASIC. It was a PDP-8 with 8K of memory.
KR:
Over the course of the next few years, learned a little bit of poking at FORTRAN, and I did some assembly on the PDP-8, and I hacked in a modification to the BASIC interpreter. The computer was on our campus, but they had two other campuses in the district - high school campuses. There was a Teletype at each of those with an actual - I think it was a dedicated phone line. I don't think it was dial-up.
KR:
So I hacked in a modification of the BASIC interpreter to what might've been the first multi-user chat room, I'm not sure. There were two Teletypes in the room with the computer and then one at each of these other schools. You could type in a command that I'd hacked into the BASIC interpreter. I took over something else that was there and not very useful. It had this four-way chat thing. You type something and when somebody grabs the Teletype they've got control of the whole thing, and then you get to the end. I don't remember what released it, but then somebody else could grab it and respond to you.
KR:
Anyway, after a few years of hacking around there, I went to college at Berkeley and majored in computer science. After I got out of that, I stumbled into a thing with Synapse Software that was kind of a big-ish name in video games at the time, and did several projects with them.
AR:
What did you work on at Synapse?
KR:
The first thing I did was a port of their game Chicken. You were getting eggs that were dropped out of some moving belts, and you ran around trying to catch them. Your character was this little chicken with a basket or something. I think it had been done originally on the Atari 800. This was a port onto an obscure NEC machine [NEC PC6001] that I don't think ever went anywhere in the US and I don't think it sold very well in Japan either.
KR:
Then I did a port of their game Protector II, which was, again, an Atari 800 game that I put it on the Commodore 64. Then I had the silly idea to do an original game. It took a long time and I eventually came out with one that's called Countdown - in the process of which I turned down doing a port of Blue Max, which would've been much more lucrative. I remember the guy who did do it getting a quarterly royalty check for $60,000 one day. That was a lot of dough in the early eighties.
AR:
How did you like working for Synapse in general?
KR:
I was a contractor. It wasn't exactly working FOR Synapse.
AR:
Working with, I should say.
KR:
Yeah. I was having a good time. I wasn't making a lot of money, but I was having a good time. It's a long time ago. I don't have very many real clear memories of it. Some good times, some conflicts with them about a couple of things that don't really matter anymore. A friend of mine started a little software house of his own. I worked with him for a couple of years. Likewise, I had a good time. Didn't make a lot of money.
AR:
Was that SofTalent?
KR:
Yes.
AR:
Could you tell us a little bit about SofTalent in your own words?
KR:
Like I said, this kind of long-time friend of mine started this software house. My biggest problem as an independent was I couldn't market myself very well, and he was better at that kind of thing and was able to bring in some work. At the time, the whole video game industry was based around "We will feed you a pittance to live on while you do this thing. When it's a huge success, you'll be rich." which really didn't work out well for most folks except publishers, of course.
KR:
Jack Thornton is the name of the guy that was running that. He was working at that level. Of course, he needed to pay for the office and pay for the office help and things like that. So there was even less left over for the rest of us. So we all kind of kept our fingers crossed and hoped.
AR:
I think you were an independent contractor from '86 to '90, looks like.
KR:
Yeah. Part of that was probably SofTalent. I did some non-video game work with a company called Servio Logic. I think it was the vanity project of the owner of a big tobacco company in Indonesia [Putera Sampoerna] who, I don't know, needed a tax dodge or something. We were in Alameda building what might've been the first of the PDAs, the personal digital assistants.
KR:
Somebody decided that it absolutely positively had to have a backlit screen. In the course of it, we ended up not putting out the thing we had ready - having to go putting backlighting in and rebuilding the hardware and all that. They ran off the end of the money and never brought it to market. It was ready to go without the backlight. I don't know who made that decision, but it was a mistake. It was a nifty little gadget.
KR:
As that wrapped up, I did a really short stint at Equilibrium in San Rafael, but then got hired on by Sega, which would've been in the middle of 1990. I was there until early '94, and I did a little more contracting then, and then got hired on at Atari. I was there in the Jaguar era and went from there to VM Labs.
KR:
I'd met Richard Miller because he had the office next to mine at Atari. I'd have met him anyway, but he was right there. He left and started VM Labs, and then they hired me on at the beginning of '96, and I was there until they got sucked into Genesis Microchip and was there for another six years, maybe, something like that. They laid me off in the beginning of '07, and then I went to Space Micro and was there for 17 years. Was it 16? I don't know. They got bought out, and the new management was somehow even worse than the old management who were at least people I got along with and could talk to. So I counted my pennies and decided I didn't need to work for them anymore. So I don't.
AR:
What are you doing now?
KR:
Talking to guys about Sega history? I'm not working anymore. I seem to have retired, though I'm not bound and determined to stay that way. I am doing some work with the IEEE Computer Society on doing some new software developer certifications, and I've been working with them on the testing for those exams. In fact, I just got back from a meeting in DC last week, and I had a delightful six hour delay on my flight home Friday night.
AR:
Oh no, I'm sorry to hear that.
KR:
It was kind of a comedy, really. It came down to it. It was like, leave the gate, sit there for a long time. Guy comes on the radio on the PA. We were having a problem with some valve in the number one engine, we're going to go back to the gate as soon as they find us a gate we can go to. So we sat there for a while more and then made a big loop around the airport and went into another gate, and they worked on the thing for an hour, an hour and a half or whatever it was.
KR:
Then we waited some more for the paperwork and they pushed us back again, and we taxied off and got partway down the taxiway and stopped and sat there for what felt like six years, but it was probably 20 minutes and started going again. We got out on the runway and the power comes up and the power comes back down, and we taxi off the runway, and we sit there for a while and comes on the horn and says, "We had a warning light that's distinctly not normal come on as we powered up there. So we're talking to maintenance, and we're probably going to be going back to gate here."
KR:
So we taxi back into the gate, and we sat there for a while and like, "Okay?" "We're going to change airplanes here, everybody off, go down to gate whatever it was, get on the plane there." So we got on that one, and it took a while there. It had been planned to go to Newark or something like that, and they were doing some routine maintenance on it, so they needed to finish that up and do all the paperwork and then get it loaded and get the catering and fuel and everything on board, and the new flight crew. Then we finally got underway. We were supposed to leave just before six o'clock and wheels came off the runway just before midnight. [laughs]
AR:
[laughs] Which makes me appreciate you speaking to me now even more.
KR:
At this point, it's just a thing to laugh about, and I'm definitely in favor of "Don't take broken airplanes into the sky." That's a bad idea. So that's how my week's been going. How about yours? [laughs]
AR:
Pretty good. It's been a little busy with the holidays coming up. A little busy at work, and I've been running into transcription issues on my end. I have about seven or nine hours of untranscribed interviews I have to get to eventually here. But that's okay. It's fun, and I mostly like doing it.
KR:
Well, that's good. That's important.
AR:
Thank you. So I wanted to just start here with, you said you joined Sega Technical Institute in mid-1990. Do you recall how that connection first happened?
KR:
No, that must've been '91. Now I think about it.
AR:
Yeah. It says '91 on your LinkedIn.
KR:
Yeah, my son had just been born. That was in '91.
AR:
Do you recall how that connection happened or how you first got the job or got in touch with Sega?
KR:
Well, a headhunter put us together.
AR:
Then I'm assuming you had a meeting or you got in touch with, or you were put in touch with, Mark Cerny?
KR:
Yeah, and I went in and interviewed with him, and they hired me, and we kind of went from there.
AR:
Your previous game industry experience was a big part of that.
KR:
I guess you'd have to ask Mark, but probably. He brought me in as a senior programmer. Mike had been there before, and I had kind of bounced off of Mike previously. He also knew Jack Thornton. So I'd met him by way of that. Mike had left STI by the time I got there.
AR:
Mike Schwartz?
KR:
Yeah. Steve Woita was the other senior programmer. I don't remember if he was there before me or after me. I think we were fairly close together coming in. I think he was there already.
AR:
Let me see. Yeah, I want to say he would've gotten there just a little bit before you.
KR:
Yeah, that seems about right. Anyway, there's no real story in it. A headhunter hooked me up with a job that I got. There's no interesting story there. Anyway, they assigned me to be the lead [programmer] on Dark Empires. Scott Chandler was the junior guy working that one. He's very sharp, and I think he slightly resented not being put into the lead role himself, but he came around fairly quickly to the fact I knew more than he did, and he seems to have taken positive advantage of that. He's made a career of the software. We still talk occasionally. If in fact he did resent it, then he's gotten over it.
AR:
I'm sure. Yeah, it's been something like 30 years.
KR:
Yeah, I think he might have gotten over it in 30 days. He's certainly gotten over it by now.
AR:
That's a good point.
KR:
Let's see. So that was written in assembly language, and I kind of leaned hard and prevailed on getting source code control going on that, because I had experience with that when I was at Servio Logic. They had a source code control system, but they didn't use it very effectively. So I figured out how to use it reasonably effectively and fixed a bunch of their processes. Then when I got to Sega, it's like, "No, we're not going into that pit again." I know how to not be in it, and we're just not.
KR:
That worked very smoothly. I think everybody after that used a source code control because they were suffering through Kid Chameleon at the time, where they'd do a bunch of development and each of the programmers on that would go off and do some stuff. Then they'd have a week or so where they'd try to merge it all together. Everybody suffered. If you're doing that, if you do that with source code control, you just don't have to suffer like that. There are bits of minor suffering when you merge your stuff in, but mostly it's not a misery - usually. Of course, you don't even have to talk about that stuff anymore, just everybody knows to do it. But at the time, it was something of a surprise to people, I guess.
AR:
Myself and my researcher partner MDTravis are both very interested in the development process of Dark Empires and just tracking when and where and why. So we know that the game was kind of starting to be conceptualized in 1990, a bit before you got there, but then you arrived in 1991, you were assigned to the project. Do you remember about what time in 1991 that would've been, or is that a little too specific?
KR:
I started at the beginning of June.
AR:
Oh, okay. Awesome. Do you recall when that first playable prototype was completed?
KR:
No, sorry. If you're talking about the binary that I found on a floppy disc a couple of years ago, that would've been the final [most-recent prototype], probably. That's probably the binary at the point when they pulled the plug on it.
AR:
Right. Do you recall, were there multiple playable builds produced, or was it just that one playable?
KR:
These things turn on slowly and where you decide to say it's playable is kind of a judgment call. Like I said, once I got them to set up an RCS, it just kind of evolved from there and things would start working. At some point, somebody decided that it worked well enough to call it a playable. So I don't remember if there were official, "Hey, here's the playable thing, go play with it." There's some things that sort of work, and then more things sort of work and gradually it gets there.
AR:
Another question from MDTravis - I'm going to be shouting out a few community questions here. Was Dark Empires always intended to be a two player only game, or do you recall plans for a single player mode with some kind of AI?
KR:
I think we had plans for a single player mode. I can't imagine that it would've been reasonable to put out a must be two player game.
AR:
Craig mentions that the game might've been canceled for a bunch of reasons, but specifically that it was too niche, and that Cerny was trying to focus on titles that could "take off" in popularity more. Did you get any specific reasons from management as to why it was canceled, or I guess, do you agree with that outlook?
KR:
Yeah, the reason I remember them saying was that they wanted an A-title. I got the impression it came more from Sega corporate than from Mark personally, but they wanted more of an A-title, and they didn't see it being one. They were right. It was a niche kind of thing. So they didn't want to fund development anymore. I don't remember when that was exactly that they canceled it, but it must've been not too long into '92 because we felt like we had to put something quick for Christmas - that led to B-Bomb, which got its picture on a box for a little while, but never went very far. That also got canceled for not being an A-title, but it's like, "We weren't trying to do an A-title." We were trying to take this group of people and build something that would sell by Christmas, and we'd have been thrilled with a B-minus title.
KR:
There was Scott and me programming, and Craig and a couple of other people doing design. I don't remember how much Bill Dunn was involved in B-Bomb, but he might've left at that. He left kind of in that timeframe somewhere. I don't remember.
AR:
I didn't actually know you worked on B-Bomb. Let me check the- Okay, yeah, we only had Tom Payne and Brenda Ross working on that. We didn't know anyone else.
KR:
Brenda did some sprites, maybe some backgrounds. I don't remember. I don't remember Tom being involved, but I'm not saying he wasn't. Scott and I were coding, and Craig did some design. Rick [Macaraeg], it was his idea. I don't remember how far he carried it into working on things. He was doing other stuff too. Kinetix in particular he was working on, and it's kind of sad that didn't come out. Brilliant idea, Kinetix.
AR:
Yeah. You're not the only one who thinks that. Could you tell us a little bit more about the development of B-Bomb as a whole? We surprisingly don't have much information on the project.
KR:
Well, I told Mark I wanted to do it in C because I thought we could do it faster, and the goal was to get this done faster. He was hesitant, but he said okay. He trusted me enough to do that. Oh, I need to go back and tell the Dark Empires story. Early on when I was there, he was bringing me in because I don't know if you've seen the game such as it is, right? You've fiddled with it a little bit?
AR:
Yes.
KR:
I don't know if you've noticed there's a shadow under the dragons. As they animate, the shadow kind of moves a little bit, and so there's a little hack that basically just made alternate pixels black in a checkerboard under that. Mark had sat down and thought through exactly, "Here's the best sequence of code you can do that'll modify the pixels like this." He's showing me this, and I said, "Oh, I was just going to do this with a lookup table." He got this kind of panicked look on his face for a moment and worked out the cycle counts and how fast each would run. It turned out to be exactly the same cycle count.
KR:
He thought he had a scoop there and his way would've taken less memory. I've chuckled about that every time I've thought of it since. Anyway, I think I got a little bit of credibility from Mark with that comment. I'm not sure, but when I said I wanted to do B-Bomb in C, he's like, "I'm not so sure, but okay, give it a shot." A week later, I had blocks bouncing around and animating, like changing color or something. I don't remember, programmer art, no effort art, bouncing around on the screen. He's like, "Yep, okay." I'm not sure how quickly C spread through Sega from that, but it did.
AR:
Do you think your C code for B-Bomb was the first usage of C in STI for a game?
KR:
I'm pretty sure it was.
AR:
That's interesting because STI is definitely known for using C. That's incredible that it all started from you on B-Bomb. From what you remember from your role, could you tell us what the story and gameplay would've been for B-Bomb? We know something about a bulldog and a cow and a pig - I guess I should reformat this. Could you tell us about what the gameplay would've been like?
KR:
Yeah. Well, Rick's joke was it stands for Butt-Bomb. You're landing with your butt on the enemies to squash him or something like that. I really don't have much memory about it. There was a lot of vertical motion in it. I remember that. Platforms and stuff.
AR:
Like in outer space or something, and then there was a farm?
KR:
Something like that. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure they had come up with what's the backstory entirely. Sorry, my memories are pretty vague at this point.
AR:
No, no, this is super helpful. A lot of times in topics like these we're working with nothing, so everything you just shared is super exciting.
KR:
Yeah. Start pulling on a thread and see what you find.
AR:
So was it Dark Empires… Then Dark Empires was canceled and you went to B-Bomb after that.
KR:
B-Bomb was right after Dark Empires. Like I said, the idea was like, we've got this team, we're not going to do the game they've been working on, and it would be nice to get something useful out of them. What can we can throw together in the nine-ish months that we've got before the Christmas release season? This looks cute. This doesn't look real hard. Let's go.
AR:
Do you recall how long you were working on that before it was canceled, roughly?
KR:
Well, it wasn't the nine months or we'd have had a game more or less finished. I don't know, might've been five or six. I've been trying to figure out how to string the timeline together here, because I remember reading your interview with Craig and thinking, I don't think he's got the sequence right there, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure about the sequence between Treasure Tails and Sonic Spinball, but B-Bomb was definitely before either one of them.
AR:
Gotcha. Okay. Just before we hop off of B-Bomb, any kind of notable anecdotes about the project stick out to you?
KR:
Other than I pushed it into C, no, not really. It was a cute idea, and some of the concept art was cute, but it was never going to be a great game, and everybody knew it. That wasn't the goal. The goal was to have it be good enough to pay for its development, and that's better than not.
AR:
Moving to Treasure Tails, actually, do you remember your specific programming responsibilities there?
KR:
I was the lead. I think Earl - what the hell was Earl's last name? [laughs]
AR:
Stratton.
KR:
Stratton. Yeah, that sounds right. He was involved somehow too, and I have almost no memory of that. He may have been working on a bonus round kind of a thing. I really don't remember.
AR:
Did the game have (or was planned to have) bonus rounds?
KR:
I don't know. Sorry. Maybe I'm confused about that or wrong about him being involved.
AR:
No, I think you're right. Let me go to our Treasure Tails page. We've got Craig as Lead Artist, Hoyt as a designer, and then you and Earl as programmers. Anyone else we're missing from that list?
KR:
I'm not sure. Hoyt, actually, I remember. What led to it being canceled was Craig came to me one day and was disturbed at how much there was to get done and how little time there was, and he didn't have the resources just to draw the art. I had been taking some project management classes recently, and I'm like, "What we need to do is this: Go list all your animation frames and just take a big piece of paper and write down what you need to happen. It's going to be about that many frames for this thing to happen. It's going to be about that many frames for THAT thing to happen. List all that crap, and then go down it and put down how many days or weeks or whatever you think it's going to take to do each of those. We'll add them up and we'll see what that looks like, and we'll go talk to Roger [Hector]."
KR:
He did, and it came out that he needed four years or something like that. Four man-years of art, and we'd only have Craig to do it and maybe a little bit of Hoyt. So we went into Roger's office and we're like, "Look, here's this." As you entirely expect, he started trying to nitpick things a little bit, what anybody would do. I was like, "Wait, wait, wait here, Roger. Maybe you're right and we can chisel this down a little bit, but it still doesn't begin to fit. We either need more years or more people, or we need to stop pretending otherwise. He's like, "Yeah, okay. Let me think about it for a while." Then maybe a week later, Treasure Tails was canceled, which honestly was a perfectly reasonable decision under the circumstances.
AR:
A lack of resources, especially staff - was that a recurring problem at STI?
KR:
Probably, but I don't really have a solid memory of it anymore except for just that one case. I mean, everything everywhere is always short staffed.
AR:
True. Good perspective.
KR:
The work will expand to consume the staff.
AR:
Right. I like that. Do you remember who first came up with the idea for a spinoff game starring Tails? I think Craig said that he was the one that suggested the isometric perspective on Treasure Tails, but as for who came up with the idea of a Sonic the Hedgehog puzzle game spinoff starring a side character, do you remember who came up with that idea?
KR:
Yeah, I had thought it was Craig, but if he's claiming he didn't, then I don't know.
AR:
Oh yeah, I don't mean to say he didn't. I think that he said that he came up with the isometric concept after the project was created by someone else. Maybe it was Roger Hector, but no worries if you don't know.
KR:
It might've been. I generally don't have a lot of nice things to say about Roger, but he did have a sense for game design.
AR:
Speaking of that, how did you get along with Roger and what was your opinion of him?
KR:
Poorly and my opinion is low.
AR:
Gotcha. We don't have to focus on that, but you also aren't the only one there. A few people I've spoken to have expressed their general displeasure in working with him.
KR:
Yeah. He seemed to have kind of a personality-driven thing. There was somebody there that wasn't really involved in design that Roger would give a plaque for their participation in something. It was - I mean, not really the receptionist, but just somebody doing stuff that needed doing anyway. It wasn't making games; it was making the organization work. I'm not going to discount the people that make that happen, they're vital, but why are you getting a plaque for this?
AR:
Right. And then kind of turning a blind eye to some of the needs of the artists and programmers and the actual staff.
KR:
The morale really was very bad in the Roger era. I had some things I thought Mark did really badly, and I owe him an apology. Mark, if you read this, I'm sorry. He had his shortcomings. We all do. But Roger? I don't have much nice to say about him, and I suspect he doesn't have much nice to say about me.
AR:
Speaking of, a lot of people have said that about Mark as well, that they generally look back and they enjoyed working with him and their time with him.
KR:
Yeah. His shortcomings were probably more as a group manager than in any other way. He was pleasant, and I haven't talked to him since he left, and that kind of saddens me. We weren't buddies or anything, but he was nice to be around and good to work with. You could talk to him about technical stuff, and he knew what you were talking about and didn't think you were trying to pull the wool over his eyes.
AR:
He was pretty respectful too, right?
KR:
Yeah, for the most part on the whole.
AR:
He seemed like he really valued his staff.
KR:
Yeah. I should have cut him more slack than I did.
AR:
To hop back to Treasure Tails really quick, do you recall if there was a producer assigned to the project?
KR:
I don't, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was probably Sugano.
AR:
Oh, interesting. How did you like working with Sugano?
KR:
I liked him a lot.
AR:
Just in general, how did you enjoy working with both Japanese developers and the Japanese side of STI?
KR:
Well, once Naka got there, it really pulled away, but there were several of the Japanese fellows who I really enjoyed working with, Sugano certainly being among them. Yasuhara was good to work with. Oh, there was another artist…
AR:
Yamaguchi?
KR:
Yamaguchi was cool. He got a '73 Corvette that he took back to Japan with him.
AR:
Oh, I've heard that story.
KR:
I wonder how well that worked out.
AR:
Thank you for remembering the year. I wanted to ask him about that eventually.
KR:
Oh, I might be off by several years. It didn't have the big bumpers, so it was no later than a '73, and it had one of the shark nose things, so that puts it later than late sixties, I think. You can look that and Wikipedia will answer that question. I'm not sure exactly which year it was.
AR:
Sure. Could you tell us a little bit about Sugano's involvement in your work?
KR:
Well, he did a really good job in his manager role in that I hardly remember what he did. I'm not sure how effective it turned out to be, but it was the kind of light steering touch that's inoffensive and isn't obviously screwing anything up. That puts him in the top half of managers in my book.
AR:
Do you recall Treasure Tails having a story or if one was ever planned for it?
KR:
I mean, you were trying to get through this kind of maze-like world, this isometric view that Craig's mentioned. I was playing around with Knuth's literate programming at the time, and I was doing it with CWEB.
KR:
Excuse me just a second. There's a funny noise in my house. I feel the urge to go investigate. I'll be right back. Probably. [laughs]
AR:
Take your time.
KR:
We got the cats a new climbing structure. I don't know what they're up to. They always doing their own thing.
AR:
Do you recall what your programming on Treasure Tails looked like? We only know this project from five screenshots. What was the actual - were you able to actually move Tails around?
KR:
Yeah. None of that stuff is hard to code. The screen moved around and the background animated a little bit, and the character animated as you walked.
AR:
Oh, okay. Interesting. We didn't even know it had progressed that far. Did the concept of Treasure Tails being a spinoff Sonic the Hedgehog game go on to influence the later Sonic Spinball also being a spinoff Sonic game?
KR:
I really couldn't tell you. I kind of got dropped on it. It must've been; they canceled Treasure Tails and then they put me on Sonic. Really, it's the only sequencing that makes any sense.
AR:
Craig, he would write down in a daily work journal what happened on that date. So we actually have the exact cancellation date for Treasure Tails. It's April 16th, 1993. Then you guys were moved to Spinball after that?
KR:
Yeah, that fits.
AR:
This next question's from another one of our researchers, Kak. What did your programming duties on Spinball entail?
KR:
I did the bonus rounds. I also tuned up the scoreboard thing. The guys that did the scoreboard, their names escaped me. I remember getting along really well with one of them and really disliking the other one, but I couldn't tell you at this point who it was.
AR:
The two guys from Polygames, there was Lee Actor and Dennis Koble.
KR:
Yeah. I don't remember which one of them I liked and which one of them I disliked, and I don't remember really why. I think I kind of felt like one of them was sort of an arrogant SOB - he probably felt the same way about me. I am known to have some rough edges. The other guy I got along with pretty well. There was a lot of resentment because - I don't know if it was a fact, but the story that was circulating made it sound like they were getting several times as much money as any of the rest of us.
KR:
Anyway, so the scoreboard thing in the main rounds, they'd had that code from something else that they'd done, and they just tweaked it a little bit and it ran really slow. It sucked up like a third of the processor time or something like that. It just didn't leave enough time to do anything. So I set about optimizing it. Optimizing compilers were not particularly good then, but I had a professor once that said C was designed by a bunch of guys who didn't want to write an optimizing compiler, so they wrote a language that you could optimize yourself. I just set to it and applied optimization. There's stuff that's loop invariant, so get it out of the loop. For some stuff, we can do some calculation ahead of time, so let's do it ahead of time. I probably spent a week or two doing it, but gradually tuned it up to where it's at. I don't have any quantitative number anymore, but it was much, much faster and it freed up enough of the processor for the rest of the game to actually work.
AR:
Was this optimization in the main pinball games or specifically the bonus game's scoreboard?
KR:
That was in the main pinball game, and then separate from that, I wrote the bonus round code, and Hoyt did the art for that.
AR:
This question is from ehw, a veteran researcher with Hidden Palace. He had hypothesized that Spinball was perhaps once intended for a larger ROM size but later had to be cut down, necessitating cutting things like the map screen and for example, Brenda Ross' stage. Does that ring any bells - a memory size issue?
KR:
We were always arguing for bigger cartridges, and Sega always wanted smaller cartridges, so I wouldn't be surprised if that were true, but I don't have any particular memory of it.
AR:
Gotcha. Another question, this one is from our site's sysop Black Squirrel. He noticed that Spinball had eight programmers counting Lee Actor and Dennis Koble of Polygames. Six STI programmers on a single project is quite a lot in 1993. Do you recall a certain reason for that?
KR:
They were probably just trying to hurry. The bonus rounds obviously are kind of - you need a little coordination with the main game to get there, but it's largely an independent game. You could just drop - I knew there was a whole lot they threw at that, but I don't know. I was kind of trying to keep my distance from management at that point. Like I said, Roger and I didn't get along very well.
AR:
Craig did mention that you eventually had some issues with management. Do you feel comfortable sharing what those specific issues were?
KR:
I had come to the conclusion that Roger was an idiot, and Roger didn't care much for me either, and I got really irritated at him. There was somebody that they brought in - I remember we all interviewed him and the programmers talked among ourselves about him and decided he was probably fit to be just an intern. Roger hired him as technical director.
KR:
He was an ethnically Japanese guy. I think he'd been born in Japan and lived there until he was five or six and then moved to the US. I remember hearing from somebody that while he spoke Japanese, he spoke Japanese at the level of a five-year-old, which makes sense. He left Japan as a five-year-old. None of us were that impressed with him, and I can't remember his name.
AR:
Treasure Tails, and later Spinball, were your first times working with the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Did that present any additional hurdles in terms of working with marketing and branding people, or were you not privy to that kind of stuff?
KR:
That didn't really hit me other than occasionally they might've said, "We need to do this because marketing wants it like this," but nothing. I was mostly insulated from that kind of stuff.
AR:
Here's an oddly specific question about Spinball. Were you at the game's wrap party at all?
KR:
I don't remember. I don't remember a wrap party.
AR:
Maybe it wasn't a wrap party. Just to kind of contextualize this: there's a funny story with Spinball where right at the last minute, they had finished the gold master and everything was looking good, and reportedly the studio or some parts of the studio had a little party and they were playing Sonic Spinball in the background. One of the Japanese side of STI walks up and says, "Hey, that song that you have playing in Spinball, we don't have the rights for that." The Spinball title theme, and I want to say one or two other songs in it, were originally remixes of Sonic the Hedgehog 1's music. That music was written by someone else, Masato Nakamura, and you'd have to license out his music. It's not actually owned by Sega. So at the last minute, Howard Drossin had to run off to his studio and compose a few replacement tracks. I wanted to know if you were there for or saw any of that.
KR:
I don't remember a party particularly, but I remember it hit the fan about the music and had to be redone really quickly. I do remember that part.
AR:
Okay, interesting. The reason I ask in particular - we kind of know most of the story, but the early ROM with the Masato Nakamura music was eventually leaked to the internet as a prototype, but people weren't a hundred percent sure if that either had actually released to store shelves and then Sega noticed the music after the fact, or if it was noticed before it even went out the door.
KR:
I'm pretty sure it was noticed before it went out the door. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was before it went out the door.
AR:
What was it like working with Peter Morawiec? I don't know how to say his last name.
KR:
Morawiec, I think is how I remember it being pronounced. I didn't do that much with him directly. It seems he'd taken a dislike to me somehow, though I have no idea why, and I didn't really return the dislike. He was just kind of another guy that was there in the distance.
AR:
So following Spinball, it looks like you worked on the demo for Craig's Segapede pitch. Now, that pitch demo, were you assigned by management to go program that demo, or did Craig come up to you and say, "Hey, I have a pitch, I need to throw together a demo. Can you help me out with this?"
KR:
We wouldn't have put weeks of my time into it without management approving of it, of course, but I don't remember exactly how it came about.
AR:
Okay. Now, that came out as a pretty straightforward side scrolling platform, but its also got a trailing, centipede-like physics system, and Craig said that was all thrown together pretty quickly. What do you recall about that whole process?
KR:
Yeah, it did come together pretty well. I remember there was a lot of conflict in various things. I remember a conversation with Dean [Lester]. I don't remember very much with Dean, really, except a couple of points. He made me some English tea at one point, which was kind of him, but I really can't say I went back for any more. If you like it, you like it, and if you don't, you don't. That's just kind of how the world is.
KR:
But at some point he was also telling me about how he wanted me to redeem myself, which I thought was a curious way to say something. It's like, "Hey, I work on this project until you guys decide you don't want it, and then I work on this other project until you guys decide you don't want it, and then I work on this third thing until you guys decide you don't want to put the resources into it. Then I work on another thing that comes out like this. Now I'm on this. What is it exactly that I need to redeem myself for? Other than having bad managers?" Of course, I didn't say out loud, but probably should have. If I'd gotten out the door sooner, then I wouldn't have done Segapede, which would've been kind of sad because I liked it a lot.
AR:
Holy crap that is not a cool thing to say to someone.
KR:
Yeah. No control over any of that. Where were we going before that diversion?
AR:
We were just quickly touching on Segapede, which I believe was your last project at Sega?
KR:
Yes, yes. Roger fired me on the release day of Sonic 3, actually.
AR:
No way. Do you feel comfortable sharing the reason that he gave? If not, you totally don't have to share.
KR:
I had come to the conclusion that he was an idiot, and he had noticed that I had come to the conclusion that he was an idiot, and I had been doing some looking for other work, and that was part of the excuse - [sarcastically] because of course, the way you keep somebody that's looking for other work is you fire them. Of course, everybody knows that, and we just had never really gotten along very well, and it was not getting better, and I threw a little fit over the hire of the technical director that we were talking about earlier, which was unprofessional of me.
AR:
It was unprofessional of him to push you to that point.
KR:
Yeah. I have a couple of points of my own behavior that I regret and there were things I shouldn't have done, but afterwards, I called my wife because Roger wanted to talk to me in the afternoon. I went out and I took a long walk in between, and then I called my wife and told her, "I think they're going to can me." They did. I can remember getting home and getting out of the car, and she came out with the kids who were all small at the time, and I kind of sighed. I looked at her and said, "I don't have to go back to that place." So I miss the people, but I don't miss working for Roger.
AR:
You're not the only one.
KR:
No, I remember we had a little party when they got rid of him.
AR:
[laughs] Were you going to say anything else on that topic?
KR:
I don't want to get sued by Roger.
AR:
No, no. I mean, I know you won't, but you're all good. I did have a few more questions on just the general working environment at STI. So we discussed Spinball, Segapede, Dark Empires, Treasure Tails, and then B-Bomb. Outside of those five, did you work on any other pitches or projects at Sega?
KR:
I don't think so. I was never a game designer, which was kind of part of my problem. I needed somebody else's design to do anything with. We kind of touched on Segapede and then went off topic. In some ways it was the most interesting thing. The physics of the springiness in between the segments was kind of entertaining and all that. But yeah, that all came together in three or four months, I think.
AR:
Would you be able to give us a, I guess kind of like a postmortem or just a summary of Segapede's development for us?
KR:
Well, like I said, it all went pretty quickly, and I don't specifically remember anybody else programming on it though. Earl, I think, did the title sequence and that kind of stuff, because I don't think I did, and I'm not sure what else he did. I think he must've been doing some other things too. I can't imagine that that would've consumed him for four months. I think I could teach somebody to program that wasn't any good at it and have them knock that part out in four months. So he must've been working on some other things too.
KR:
The bring-up came along fairly quickly, and I did some programmer art stuff for an up and down hilly kind of thing to get the motion right and to get the underlying data structures to do the motion and constrain the motion. You want him to fall until he hits the thing and then stop, except he's kind of got this round surface, so it needs to be in contact correctly. Then the physics of the springs and the dampers between the segments. I don't really want to do a physics lesson, and you probably don't want to hear one.
AR:
Whatever you have to share, I'm all ears.
KR:
All of this was 30-something years ago, and I don't really have detailed memories of much of it, but I remember really enjoying it and thinking it was going to be a really fun game, and being disappointed that the downside of getting fired was I didn't get to finish that game. I think it would've been a great game. It would've been a lot of fun.
KR:
I had a binary of it at some point that I could burn onto a cartridge EPROM, and I remember showing it to a friend who had been a producer at Electronic Arts, and he's like, "I'd order a million cartridges just on this part." I think we had a hit, and it's a shame that I didn't get to finish it, and it's a shame that they totally fucked it up and nobody finished it.
AR:
Yeah. Craig was pretty enthused about the project too, and he was pretty sad to see it left hanging.
KR:
I'd still like to do it. If I could be sure about the rights, and Craig was on board, it's like, "Let's go do it." Okay, not for the Genesis, but I bet we could make a good version for a phone.
AR:
Right. Then at least get some return on it too.
KR:
Not that that's the end all be all, but it's kind of the end of the road for a lot of this stuff.
AR:
Yeah, definitely. Or just to see it and have people having a good time with it, that's worth something too. While you were at Sega-
KR:
[pauses to listen]
AR:
Cat again?
KR:
I hope so. Otherwise, we got really big mice. Where are they?
AR:
[laughs] While you were working at Sega, do you recall the software, the hardware, the tools that you were working with?
KR:
When we started off, they had Amigas for workstations. They were 2000s or 3000s, I can't remember, tower case kind of things, not the little keyboard doohickeys like a lot of them were. That apparently was something Mike Schwartz was really into, so they did them that way. At some point we switched over to PCs to actually write code on and various cross compilers, of course. On an Amiga, a 68000 machine, so we could use its native compilers, and we had cross compilers on the PC. The artists had these nifty workstations to produce the art on.
AR:
Digitizers, I believe.
KR:
Yeah, it was called the Digitizer. I'd worked up a little kind of micro language for Craig to do animations with, where he could schedule the animation loops and things like that and not involve me, and then check in his little script and it'd get sucked into the build and set them up that way. Cool. They had a variant of the Genesis hardware that, I can't remember what it was called, but it had more memory.
AR:
Super Mega Drive? Does that name ring any bells?
KR:
No, it doesn't. I thought the Super Mega Drive was just the other name for the Genesis, the non-US name for the Genesis. Am I wrong about that?
AR:
That's the Sega Mega Drive. The Super Mega Drive was Mega Drive development hardware. There were a lot of Genesis development systems over the years, like the SNASM68K.
KR:
Yeah. None of these are familiar.
AR:
Sorry, I'm taking you off track.
KR:
That's okay. My mind was kind of on, "What the heck was that thing called?" Anyway, it doesn't matter. It was basically a Genesis. It had 128 - 256K of RAM instead of 64, if my memory is coming up with it right. But I was thinking it had four times the RAM, which gave you a place to drop… What was that number? I think it had 256K of RAM on it.
KR:
64K overlapped with the Genesis memory, and then you had some more that if you wanted to write out a trail of breadcrumbs or something and then suck it out later; you could do that for a while. I had an in-circuit emulator for the 68000 on my desk, which was a delight to work with because it's like, "Okay, watch for it to write this value to that location, and when you see that stop and tell me the last thousand instructions it ran." That was really handy.
KR:
It was a $50,000 machine or something like that. I'm not sure how it came to be on my desk, but I was happy that it was, and I had the pleasure of using it for a while. That was nice.
AR:
I'm sure. Speaking of the Digitizer, I just want to see if this specific program is familiar to you. Does the name CMM slash Super Character Maker slash Character Maker Mark III. Do any of those names ring a bell?
KR:
No. Nope.
AR:
Gotcha. Speaking of your coworkers, how well did you know Alan Ackerman? He unfortunately passed. We don't have an opportunity to speak with him, and I'm just kind of curious about what his friends and coworkers thought about him.
KR:
I guess I've never been good at making friends at work. I have done it a couple of times. We weren't close, but he was certainly a pleasant fellow and a really good artist. I just wasn't good at hanging out with my colleagues. Partly I had young children at the time. Priorities.
AR:
Did you know Rick Macaraeg very well? I might be getting his last name wrong.
KR:
No, Macaraeg is how I remember him saying it. Again, no, He was a pleasant fellow to work with; had a unique art style and was really brilliant at a lot of stuff. But no, I didn't know him particularly well. Didn't know him outside work.
AR:
For sure. Here's a project that you absolutely weren't related to, but I'm going to ask if you know anyways. Clive Barker apparently visited Sega Technical Institute at one point to discuss a potential video game. Do you remember anything about that at all?
KR:
Who's that?
AR:
Clive Barker?
KR:
Yeah.
AR:
Oh, he's a horror author. He did- what was that movie with the pinhead? [Hellraiser]
KR:
Not my genre. I have no idea.
AR:
No worries, no worries. Just asking about obscure projects here.
KR:
If I was anywhere near it, it made no impression at all on me.
AR:
So looking back at your work at Sega, just everything you did over your three or four years there, what had the greatest effect on your career? Or, I guess, what affected you the most from your time at Sega?
KR:
Well, I hadn't thought about this.
AR:
Curve balls.
KR:
From a professional standpoint, it reinforced to me the importance of good software revision control and a good solid build system, which I felt like was the case before, but it really pushed it at Sega. Some of the people there I'm really fond of and still keep in touch with. Craig and Scott and the rest of them. Apart from small elements of management, most of them would be people I'd be happy to be in contact with. I guess it kind of pushed me along toward ending up at Atari where I met Richard Miller, which got me into VM Labs, which was a big deal. If it had been successful, it would've been a bigger deal.
AR:
To quickly touch on your time at Atari Games, this is the area of your career which I know the least about, but you did tell me you started working at… Atari Corp or Atari Games.
KR:
Atari Corp, not Atari Games.
AR:
You were at Atari Corp, got it. I'm sorry, I'm not super versed with Atari. I know there were two of them at that point. So you weren't in Milpitas, you were at the other location?
KR:
Yeah, in Sunnyvale.
AR:
Sunnyvale, gotcha. You were still doing Jaguar stuff though?
KR:
I did some contract stuff for Atari in the 8-bit era, starting off with a piece out of SofTalent, which had a contract to do a port of a Battlezone that probably would've been better off to just rewrite it from scratch as it turned out. They liked the gameplay of the VIC-20 version that somebody had done, and that ended up in my lap after one or two other guys at SofTalent. I finished that up and was really pleased with it, and I was proud of myself at that because one of the Atari people said it was the best Battlezone since the coin-op. That made me feel really good about it. It's also the only game I ever worked on where I actually enjoyed playing it the day after it was finished. You're usually just so done with the thing by the time it's finished. "I've been swimming in this for months and I just don't want to look at it anymore." I never used to understand actors that didn't go to the movies, but it's got to be the same for me. You've been just buried in this for ages and it's just time for something else.
KR:
I guess the contract went through SofTalent, but SofTalent was collapsing at that point, and I ended up just kind of finishing it myself. Then they had me fix a European release called Thunder Fox, something like that; I've got the box upstairs. They gave me a couple of them that worked fine on a PAL machine, but failed on an NTSC machine. So I figured out what was going wrong with that and fixed it for them. Then I did a port of Desert Falcon that had been on the 7800, I think - I can't remember now, one of their more expensive machines. I ported that onto the XEGS. They were marketing the XEGS at that point, but it's just another Atari 800 repackaging.
KR:
That was before Sega, and it went from that to the Servio Logic PDA thing that we talked about early on. Then from there, with a quick bouncing off of Equilibrium, then I was at STI. Later after I was out of STI, I did some contract stuff for the ImagiNation Network. I can't remember which software house was doing that but it was an online kind of thing. They had a PC-based thing and they had a modem or something that would plug into a Genesis, and they wanted the software done for that. So I worked on that for five or six months and then went to Atari as an employee on the Jaguar.
AR:
Okay. Wow. Sorry, I'm writing down a lot here. My first question was, and this might just be my misunderstanding of Atari at the time, but I had understood that it was Atari Games in Milpitas that was working on the Jaguar, but you said you did Jaguar work while working for Atari Corp, correct?
KR:
It was Atari Corp because - so there was Atari Incorporated, Pong and on, and they did the 800 series home machines and got - I'm not exactly sure of the sequencing, but Time Warner bought them. I remember one quarter where Atari was Warner's only unprofitable division, and Warner as a whole lost a quarter of a billion dollars. [rapid pattering noises] I'm sorry, a cat just came running through the place. I don't know what's gotten into him there. So yeah, Atari was losing money hand over fist, and that's when the Tramiels took it over. Leonard [Tramiel] told me one day that it was losing $2 million a day when they took it over, which is of course why they laid off a billion people.
AR:
Yeah. Holy crap.
KR:
Atari had apparently been growing at, I don't remember, some ten percent or maybe a hundred percent a quarter, and they were staffing for two years out under the assumption that growth would continue. When it stopped, things got bad really fast. So anyway, Atari Corp was Tramiel's slice of Atari. Then Atari Games was the coin-op division, and they were something different corporately. I don't remember what it was. I was working for the Tramiel's piece of the company, both as a contractor earlier on and then as an employee.
AR:
How did you like working on the Jaguar?
KR:
It was an interesting piece of hardware. It had a couple of problems. I was hired for Black ICE\White Noise, but they put me for a time on figuring out some problems they were having with. They had a modem that did voice and data simultaneously, if I'm remembering it right. There were some problems with it, and I helped figure out what was going on with that. It turned out to be a silicon bug in the Jaguar, which was a nuisance: the data would get one bit off in the data stream under certain circumstances and it caused data corruption.
KR:
I did Black ICE\White Noise until that was canceled and then worked on their GameFilm stuff for a little while as it was all going under. The other guy working on that talked about it feeling like a couple of peas rattling around a boxcar. It was a fairly good-sized building, and there were about 50 people still working in it at that point.
KR:
In the course of that, Eric Smith called me from VM Labs. He'd been at Atari and we'd known each other there. He called me one day and was like, "Hey, you want to come talk to Richard about what we're doing here?" I was like, "Yeah." I'd worked directly with Richard on this modem problem - he had the office next to mine and Leonard's was the next one over after that. I knew both of them reasonably well. So it wasn't so much an interview as a, "Hey, please come work with us. We already know you're good at this stuff." It didn't take a lot of effort to talk me into it either because Atari was clearly dying.
KR:
I went over there and was there for a long time and it was a wonderful job. I've regretted that Richard didn't start another thing for me to come work with him at. That kind of winds up where I was involved with video games. VM Labs got bought by Genesis Microchip, which was doing digital video, which was interesting. They had a bad earnings call one day, and I was one of the ones picked to be laid off. I wasn't real happy there though. Then I ended up at Space Micro and wound out my career there. So I'm sure I've run past what you wanted to ask about, so reel me back in.
AR:
You're all right. Honestly, I appreciate you speaking more than me asking. At the end of the day, this is more for you to share your perspective rather than me force a direction.
KR:
Yeah. Well, steer a little bit. [laughs]
AR:
Okay. Let's see. I'm going to work back a little bit here, and then we'll return to VM Labs for a Bit. Did you work on Kinetix at all? You had mentioned it, but I don't know if you actually worked on it.
KR:
I couldn't swear that anybody ever wrote any code for Kinetix. They might have. There was a lot of artwork done and a lot of level design stuff done, but I certainly didn't write any code for it, and I'm not really sure anybody did. I don't know.
AR:
Did you have any other involvement with the project?
KR:
No.
AR:
Gotcha. Yeah, let's see. Scott Chandler says he did do some programming work on it, and we do have some assets, but I am not actually sure if it ever reached a playable point.
KR:
Playable… Yeah. I'm pretty sure it never reached a playable point, but again, I was just across the room saying, "Oh, that looks like that's a clever idea." It did look really good.
AR:
A lot of people were very behind the project. I might have said this earlier, but it's unfortunate, that one specifically. A lot of people were super enthralled with that one.
KR:
Yeah. Rick had a really clever idea that the whole idea of there not really being any enemies as such - it's all just playfield interaction - was really novel. I don't think anybody has tried that even yet.
AR:
Oh, we didn't actually know that. Would you be able to quickly tell us what you do know on the project? Because what you just told us is new to us.
KR:
I know so little. I'm not really sure. I can't bring the pictures out of my brain that I saw on the Digitizers stuff, but I assume you've got some art samples at least.
AR:
Right. We have some art, some graphics.
KR:
The idea seemed to be that you're running around this landscape that's trying to murder you, but there aren't any active enemies. It's more like a game of Mouse Trap or something where just kind of stage hazards built around squishing the clay guy. Just comedy, splattering things. But that's really about all I know.
AR:
Gotcha. Thank you for calling it Kinetix - We only had one prior source for that, so that's cool to have secondary confirmation of that name. The world and the internet knew it as Jester for the past 10, 20 years here.
KR:
Yeah, I'm not sure where that came from. It really was not what it got called internally. It was Kinetix with a K and with an X. I remember it being called Kinetix and Jester was the character.
AR:
Okay, gotcha. It was the internet that got it wrong.
KR:
I think so. Yeah.
AR:
I think you're right there. It's just great to have confirmation. Also, really quickly, you said that you were doing some work with - I forgot the company that was doing something a modem that would plug into the Sega Genesis.
KR:
The ImagiNation Network?
AR:
Oh yeah. Yeah. Sorry, was THAT modem on the Jaguar on the Genesis?
KR:
I did some work with the Jaguar modem at Atari, but no, this is a different thing. This was on the Genesis, and they wanted to match their display on the PC, which was kind of a bitmap graphics thing. The Genesis doesn't really do bitmap graphics, so I had to figure out how to do a proportional font and display all of that and some stuff like that. It worked pretty well, is the way I remember it. It wasn't released, but it was mostly working. How did the modem plug into the Genesis? I really don't remember. Is there an expansion port on the back of a Genesis?
AR:
There's an extension port on the back of early Model 1s, a proper expansion port on the side of all of them. Most of the modem devices I've seen were going through the cartridge connector on top.
KR:
Maybe that's how they did it. I really don't remember.
AR:
There was the Telegames modem, which was Sega of America's first party option. Then there were two third party options: the Edge 16 by PF Magic and AT&T, and then there was the Teleplay, which was by a company called Baton Technologies out of Arizona, I believe. Do any of those ring a bell?
KR:
I've heard of the Edge 16 before, so maybe that was what it was, but I don't really remember. Do you have contact with Mike Kawahara?
AR:
No, but I'd love to.
KR:
He was at Electronic Arts, and then he was my contact with this ImagiNation Network stuff. I don't have a current phone number for him or anything like that, but I'm sure you could find him on LinkedIn. He was a producer at EA, which is where I met him. We were fairly close for a long time, and then we just kind of drifted away for no particular reason. Stuff happens.
AR:
So on VM Labs, you were a part of the Nuon team.
KR:
The only team there was.
AR:
I guess that goes to show how little I know about VM Labs. How was coding for the Nuon? I guess I'm just curious about recollections from that whole project and your time at VM Labs.
KR:
It was a really different process. The VLIW processor is kind of a brain twist. The program assembly language for - I ported GCC [GNU Compiler Collection] to that processor, and I led what they call the BIOS development. That was kind of somewhere between a BIOS like a PC has and an actual operating system. They made the chips and then sold them to DVD player manufacturers, and the rest of the hardware was different on every one. So the point of the BIOS was to abstract all of that stuff and provide a bunch of system services for all this hardware. I was lead on that part. Then various other tools over the years - I ended up doing a GDB [GNU Debugger] port late on. We'd had a previous debugger, but nobody liked it. But that was kind of in the late stages of VM Labs.
AR:
How strongly did you believe in both the Nuon and Richard Miller's DVD-based market penetration strategy?
KR:
Well, it seemed like a really good idea really at the time. The decoder things were unstable enough that a software decoder made a lot of sense, and it also made a lot of sense to use those transistors for something other than DVD decoding. I think it had potential. I think if we'd been a year or two earlier, I might be a gazillionaire and Richard would have more money than God probably, but it didn't play out that way. We were slow for various reasons. Some of those we could have done something about, and some other ones maybe not, but stuff happens.
AR:
Yeah, you play the hand you're dealt.
KR:
Also there are dice rolls involved, but I really enjoyed working there. I went through kind of a psychological slump in the middle of it where it's like, oh, I embarrassed myself over this or that and I don't like this. I got over that and I continued to have a good time with it. If Richard called and said, "Come work with me on whatever it is," I'm like, "Okay, when do you need me there?" Apart from a summer job working for my dad, Richard was the best boss I ever had. Your dad is kind of just not substitutable. [laughs]
AR:
What were the biggest lessons that the game industry taught you?
KR:
Make the upfront deal worthwhile because the royalties are not reliable and they should be gravy and not what you count on to eat. Coding covers a lot of areas of computing and it forces a broad capability, at least if you're any good at it. I mean, there are a lot of people writing code who really shouldn't be allowed out on the street. [laughs] They're just terrible at things. But if you're going to be a good programmer - now maybe it's different. Now I see modern games that I don't really see very much that I like. It's a graphics extravaganza, but I have a hard time seeing a game in most of them. On the other hand, I'm an old fart now, so what do I know?
AR:
It was just an interesting time back then. I think as time goes on, it's getting more and more difficult to capture the spirit and just what it was like to be a developer back then.
KR:
Yeah. People have asked me if I wanted to do another game, and it's like, "I'd love to do another game. In 1983." Games are different now. A lot of them are just the blood and guts thing. That has never appealed to me, but there's this incredible world building and huge, huge amounts of art and 3D modeling and all of that. Is it a game or is it just a graphics extravaganza? What's the actual game here? If you got rid of the graphics, is there a game here? Spinball would still be fun if Sonic was a blue square.
AR:
That's a good way of putting it.
KR:
But would Call of Duty be worth even looking at if it was just blocks moving around?
AR:
Right, absolutely. Compared to any of its contemporaries.
KR:
Yeah, Portal had a great premise and it was a lot of fun. Before that, what was another truly great game? ToeJam & Earl was a long time ago, and in between them… I'm not real sure. Since then I've been like, "Well, okay, time to get off of my lawn. I'm an old fart now."
AR:
What games do you like playing in your free time? Outside ToeJam & Earl and Portal.
KR:
I don't play very much. Solitaire is more my speed really. Part of it is I don't see the appeal for these things. I'm not typical. I get it. [laughs]
AR:
[laughs] I'm kind of right there with you. I can completely understand. I'm not personally too drawn to most of the games coming out nowadays. Just looking back on ALL of your time in the game industry, whether with Sega or after Sega, before Sega - what are you the most proud of?
KR:
Well, the work we did at VM Labs was really, really good. It's sad that it didn't work out. Segapede was really cool and I wish it had happened. All the way through, that was a really good idea. I'm proud of Battlezone. It was a port and I didn't invent the game, but I'm proud of the version that I did of it and learned a lot and mostly had fun doing it.
AR:
Yeah, you've definitely had quite the long career and in a very interesting time. Something we didn't touch on is that you saw firsthand how just many transitions that the industry had going: from smaller home computers to then the console market and the Sega Genesis and then past the era of 3D computing into something entirely different with VM Labs. You've seen quite a lot of the industry in various forms.
KR:
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm not sure how to help people with career progression kind of stuff. It was such a young industry when I joined it - there weren't any elders. It's like I was an old fart at 30 because there was practically nobody who was 40 that was doing that stuff. Now there are people that you can go ask how this works or that works. We had to work it out ourselves.
AR:
It was almost like the edge of the map hasn't been filled in yet, and you still have that spirit of exploration. Is there anything that you would like to say as long as we're speaking here, anything you'd like to wrap this up with?
KR:
I can't think of anything. I've pretty much tossed out my thoughts as they've come upon me here.
AR:
We have covered quite a lot here. Again, I just really appreciate you giving me your time like this and having occasion to let me throw all these questions at you.
KR:
It's nice to get it out in the world. It's like, since people are interested in it, they might as well know more about it. It doesn't do any good for it to be just stuck in my brain.
AR:
Right, right. Yeah. Get it onto paper, get it onto the internet or something where your words and all of that stuff can more positively at a larger scale affect others, especially programmers who are up and coming.
KR:
Yeah. If people have questions about it, it's like, well, 50 years from now, it ain't going to still be in my brain. It might as well be somewhere.
AR:
Right, right. Yeah. Ticking clock here, but let's not think about that.
KR:
Nothing we can do about it. Here it is. Welcome to the world. You're going to leave someday.
AR:
Yeah. All right, so thank you so much. Once again, I genuinely appreciate this whole interview.
KR:
Okay, cool. If you have other questions, you know how to reach me.
AR:
Awesome. I'll shoot you a message if I think of anything else. Gosh, this was just so cool. Thank you so much for sharing all these stories with me. You took me back to another place and I appreciate that.
KR:
Well you're welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.
AR:
Bye-bye.
KR:
Bye.
Transcript sourced from https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Ken_Rose_(2025-12-07)_by_Alexander_Rojas and migrated into devquoted with linked people, tags, source metadata, and media where available.