Interview: Kenneth Hurley (2025-12-04)

Kenneth Hurley. Source image from Sega Retro. — Kenneth Hurley. Source image: Sega Retro / retrocdn.net.

This Sega Retro interview with Kenneth Hurley was conducted by Alexander Rojas via google meet.

AR:

Hi Ken! This is Alex.

KH:

Hi Alex.

AR:

Thanks so much again for speaking with me today. It's awesome to be speaking with you after all this time.

KH:

No problem, I'm looking forward to this too.

AR:

Thanks. So just to get started here, what were some of the early inspirations that led you to the software industry? And I guess, what were your inspirations with computers and technology in general?

KH:

So this is a fantastic story and hopefully I can do it in a few minutes. Basically it started out when I flunked out of my computer science class in 11th grade in about 1981, where the teacher was trying to teach me binary on a PDP-11. After two weeks he came to me and he said, "Hey look, I am going to flunk you out of my class. You're just not getting it." Back in those days, you would go to different classes to figure out what you wanted to do. You'd go to mechanic shop or engine shop or woodworking to figure out what you wanted your career to be after high school if you weren't going to go to college.

KH:

I really thought I wanted to have something to do with computers because between 1980 and '82, I had been going to the arcades a lot and playing Donkey Kong - that was my favorite. Pac-Man and Tron, I was really good at Tron back in the day. We were spending lots of quarters and stuff like that. The teacher flunked me out and I said, "Well, I kind of really think I want to do these computer things. What do you suggest I do?" He [indecisive gesture] kind of goes like this and goes like that. I'm like, [dejectedly] "Oh..." He goes, "Well in Oregon you don't pump your own gas." This was in Salem, Oregon at McKay High School. He was basically telling me I need to go become a gas station attendant. I'm like, "Oh yeah, wonderful."

KH:

So I dropped out of his class, called him an idiot and said, "I'm out." Then a friend of mine - we were spending so much money at the arcades, so he went out and he bought a VIC-20 for 300 bucks, which was a lot of money back then. He goes like this [handing off motion], and he gives it to me and he's like, "Here, you're smart. Figure out how to program this thing." I'm like, "Okay." So I started hacking around with it. Then I went to something called Chemeketa Community College and took a Pascal class and kind of got up to the general speed of how programs worked. It was super easy. I aced the thing and I was in the labs and these guys were hacking on Apple IIs. They were making these games and they were going into assembly language.

KH:

I was like, "Hey, what are you guys doing? That looks pretty cool. I want to do this." So I spent hours in the computer lab in the Apple II computer lab and taught myself how to do assembly language and how to program video games basically for the next few months. Then I just kept going from there. I taught myself C++, assembly language, all kinds of different languages over the years - I'm just an autodidact, is the big thing. The reason the teacher couldn't teach me was because his explanations were just so bizarre to me. I just couldn't figure out what he was talking about. So that's kind of how I got started.

AR:

You were at Activision from '87 to '89, I believe. How did you enjoy working for the company?

KH:

It was pretty cool. The story behind that is that I did a demonstration on the Atari ST for my company at the time called Monarch Development. It was this really cool demo. I had done this thing called the Shape Icon Editor, which I affectionately called "SHIET" and people in Germany were giving me a bad time about that. They're like, "You know what that means in German though?" I didn't at that time - it was just Shape Icon Editor. Believe it or not, I just found somebody on eBay had that the original. packaging. I developed that myself, on my own printer at home and the label. I bought it. It's a 40-year-old package that I had done in 1985 for the Atari ST, but it basically got me up to speed on graphics programming.

KH:

This demo that was basically - there was a serene kind of landscape thing that was modeled after something in Oregon, and all of a sudden the ground starts shaking. Then a metallic monarch (for Monarch Development) comes out of the ground and then this butterfly comes in and it kind of swoops. This was all hard coded, not physics, just me thinking of how physics work - [traces motions in air] float for a little while, flap, you go up for a little while with forward motion - and he landed on the M and then flapped his wings with some music in the background. It was just a tech demo.

KH:

I sent that to Activision, to a guy named Scott Orr, who's a good friend now. He's very infamous. I forget the name of his company, it was something Sports, but he went to work for EA Sports and was the producer on the Madden line. Back then he was working at Activision. He's like, "Hey" - and his brother was Keith Orr who I'm also very good friends with now - "can you do a game for us called Rampage?" I'm like, "Hell yeah, I love Rampage. It's at the arcades and I play that all the time." He's like, "Yeah, we need to port this to the PC and the Amiga and eventually the Apple II." I said, "Sure, I can do that. No problem." I said I'll do it for $17,000 back then. He's like, "Okay, $17,000 each." I was like, "No, I was going to do it for a full $17,000 for all three." But he, knowing better and kind of covering for me, insisted. That's how we became friends. I really appreciated that. He was like, "No, dude. You're way underbidding what this is." I was just happy to do stuff at the time.

AR:

Oh, that's very cool.

KH:

So I basically wrote the PC version in about two and a half months, a hundred percent assembly language. I did eventually get the code from the arcade that helped me with the dynamite throwing part and that physics on that because I didn't understand how he was able to do that without physics. But it helped reverse engineer the Z80 code so I could port that into the IBM code. Everything else I had written fine, but I just couldn't figure out how exactly he was making the dynamite hit the monsters or exactly what the curve was and all that. It was the same way I had learned with the butterfly thing. It was very similar. So I was like, "Oh, that's cool," but it wasn't really doing physical large floating point numbers. It was more along the lines of something called Bresenham's algorithm.

KH:

Anyway, so I did that and then to finish it up, I came down to California, back to California. I was itching to leave Oregon when I was 22. It rained so much. So it gave me an opportunity to come back to Menlo Park, California and work on projects. So I finished up the Amiga version in about a month, and then I did the Apple II version straight hand translating 8086 code to 6502 code in about three weeks. So I learned very quickly to use tools to help me port this stuff very, very quickly. So I did all three of those versions within about four or five months, just myself coding. Actually, I had a little bit of help: the graphics were done by a guy named Warrick Holfeld who I had met up there. I hired him for the IBM PC job.

KH:

We went into the arcades, filmed the arcades, and then he did the really cruddy CGA graphics and things - did some stippling and all that. So it turned out pretty good. So that really got me started in the gaming industry. But well, let me backtrack a little bit because actually, I worked for Dynamix at one point in Oregon for about three months. When I was doing that Shape Icon Editor, I ported Skyfox from - I think it was the Apple. It was either the Apple or PC to the Atari ST. So I had shipped that product in about three months. I'm very good at quickly understanding the whole entire project, and I can go to any area like sound or graphics or AI or anything like that, and quickly understanding people's code and translating that over to another domain. So I had done that.

KH:

I'm trying to remember the exact ordering of this because I worked on Rampage for the PC in 1985, '86 when it shipped. So prior to that, I was mainly doing Atari ST work and working on PCs for the city of Medford, Oregon. I had written them - what do they call that? It's sewer system management, or waste management or something - in dBase III. Database III, basically. That had its own kind of scripting language and things like that. So I just kind of gravitated to everything computers, and I just love learning. So it's like, "Okay, well, I'm going to go off and write Database III stuff. I've never done it before and it'll show me how databases work," and that's just how I've operated my entire career.

KH:

I wrote something called Copy II ST too. The genesis of that was back when I was hacking on Apple IIs and learning how games worked and writing my own games, I was actually pirating other people's games and removing copy protection from it. So I was a bad hacker.

KH:

I wrote Copy II ST because I figured out how the hardware worked and how the drives worked. That stemmed from the fact that I went to Oregon State University and started taking electrical engineering, but dropped out after about six months because they were trying to teach tubes and FORTRAN at the time, and I was already on Apple II with microprocessors, and I'm like, "This is going the way of the dinosaur. What are you guys still operating on tubes and COBOL and FORTRAN for? Everything's going forward with C." I just kind of saw the future, and I'm like, "That's so old school. You can't see how valuable this new stuff is." So for the last four and a half decades, I've always kind of seen 10 years into the future, and I can explain that later too. So that's kind of a mix of how I really got started back then with Activision and Dynamix and kind of my foray into the gaming industry, and then it just blossomed from there.

AR:

It sounds like you've had your hands in quite a lot. I also wanted to ask: it looks like you migrated to a position at EA in January of 1990. Could you tell us about how you were first hired and how that connection first happened?

KH:

So this is a great story, and I really appreciate this. I was thinking about writing a book more and more. That has nothing to do with this stuff, but you can fill in a few chapters here for me. [laughs]

AR:

Totally.

KH:

So what ended up happening was after I did Rampage, I was looking for my next project and I started doing contract work. I did contract work for a company called Data East, and we built Monday Night Football for them. I had one of the guys from the lab in Oregon. I hired him to help me write Monday Night Football for the Amiga, I think it was. His name was David, and he was one of the two guys that I had originally approached in the lab at Chemeketa Community College that was doing games. He wrote a little Q*bert clone back in the day. So it was fantastic working with them. Sierra On-Line had wanted to hire David, but he didn't want to go work for them in California. He was very happy being in Oregon.

KH:

Those two guys - the other guy was named Daniel - were the two guys that I approached in the community college lab about the games that they were writing and they were showing me how things work. Like this specific call on the Apple says "CALL minus one five one," which puts you into a machine code disassembler where you can write code in machine code, not like in assembly language - it's actually writing the load, the accumulator. Then you pop back out and you can save it in BASIC, you can save the memory in BASIC and then rerun it in machine code. Those two guys showed me these things.

KH:

So I hired David to help me work on Monday Night Football. We were also working on a baseball game for Data East, but Data East was having a lot of financial problems and not paying me. So I got depressed and was like, "Ah, I got to stop working with these guys. I'm not getting paid." So I started interviewing at Electronic Arts, and the best story about that is Trip Hawkins actually interviewed me.

AR:

Whoa.

KH:

Yeah. He was one of the guys that interviewed me after I passed all the other engineering interviews and things like that. So Trip Hawkins was the last guy to interview me, so he actually hired me on and then I started working with a guy named Brent Iverson on the Chuck Yeager's Air Combat Simulator. If you remember back when I had done all these graphics, I had basically come in to help the PC version's graphics rendering for EGA and VGA and something called Tandy graphics and something else called Mode X graphics.

KH:

I was very up to speed on how the Atari ST worked in graphics. That translated over to the IBM PC with Rampage's graphics on the EGA and Tandy and VGA. So I was becoming quite the expert on PC graphics and the PC OS. This was DOS based, before Windows came out of course, but just the overall architecture - I had started out thinking I wanted to be a hardware engineer because I kind of understood hardware a little bit - I'd tear stuff apart and figure out how they worked internally. I had access to IBM's source code back in the day so I could actually go through their assembly language and figure out how they were interacting with the hardware.

KH:

So yeah, that's how I got started at EA. After Chuck Yeager's Air Combat Simulator (we did that pretty quickly) I moved on to something called The Immortal for the PC, and I did that in five weeks' time. The reason was because from my previous experience of porting stuff from the PC to the PC, I had realized there was a couple tools called Yacc and Lex - Yacc is Yet Another Compiler Compiler, and Lex is a lexical analyzer. So I dug in and figured out kind of what they were doing and how they were used for C compilers and stuff like that. I quickly realized that there's these things called transpilers that allow you to take source code to source code. So I developed a lexical analyzer and a compiler that basically took 6502 code and converted 90% of it into IBM 8086 code. Then the only thing I had to do was write the graphics routines, which I had done hundreds of times before.

KH:

I wrote something called the Borland Graphics Interface for 256 colors VGA 256 back in the day, all in assembly language too. I actually wrote a full graphic system and windowing system in 32 kilobytes on the IBM PC before Windows came out. I'm just kind of crazy like that. I'm like, "Oh, this new window thing. Let's just go write our own." I did that in three weeks. Once I know the direction I want to do, it's just typing to me after that.

KH:

We did The Immortal in five weeks. Funny story about that, there was somebody that was translating the sounds named Rob Hubbard at Electronic Arts, and I went to him and I told him, "Hey, I'm going to have this thing done in about three weeks." He's like, "There's no way you're going to have this done in three weeks." I'm like, "You don't understand." So after three weeks, I went to him and I said, "Look, everything's done and ready. I'm waiting for the sounds from you." He's like, "What?" So it took him two weeks to give me the sounds. I integrated the sounds into the game and I went to QA at Electronic Arts, where they had found one bug.

KH:

The way I write code is I write code and I test the hell out of it before I move on, right? It's called unit testing. They found one bug, and it wasn't a coding bug - the guy got stuck in a corner and it didn't happen on the original. So it kind of was a coding bug, but it was just like an off-by-one bug. It was one pixel too many, and he got stuck and couldn't get out. So I fixed that, accidentally created another one that was very similar, fixed that, and the game shipped.

KH:

The QA guys were like, "How the F did you do that? That is never - I've never seen that. We found no bugs in the code other than those two little ones that you fixed immediately." I'm like, "That's because I test everything as I go along knowing what you guys are going to run into and how you're going to test it." I used to play arcade games all the time and get flustered with the bugs that would happen. Sometimes the bugs were a good thing, but sometimes it would drive you crazy when the arcade game would reboot because you ran into some certain bug in there. So I'm like, "I used to test games and play them all the time. I know what you're going to do." So that's why I always did that. So we shipped that in five weeks' time from them asking me to do that.

KH:

Then they were like, "Okay, this other team on Bard's Tale IV is having a real problem finishing this up." So they took it in house and they had me and Steve Collier, who I had worked with prior - Okay, so hold on, let me back up here a second. I'm trying to think of the timing on this because… I did two stints at EA, and I'm trying to remember when Bard's Tale was.

KH:

Okay, so Steve Collier. I had hired Steve at Electronic Arts and we were going to work on Bard's Tale IV together. I interviewed him and got him in. He was a great guy. We ended up starting to work on the project and it was a complete mess, a complete disaster, and we're sitting at a meeting. Larry Probst and Bing Gordon are standing in front of me and Lisa Ching sitting next to me. I don't believe Collier was there. Larry Probst leans over to Bing and said, "What the hell is up with this Bard's Tale IV? Are these engineers just stupid? How come we can't get this game out the door?"

KH:

I'm looking up at him and I'm like, "Okay, I just picked this up. Okay, I agree with you. The other engineers somehow just were screwing the whole project up and not getting it done. I didn't understand either." But Lisa Ching fires off an email to Larry Probst - "How dare you. Ken was sitting right behind you." I wasn't actually offended. I was like, "Look, I don't think he's talking about me. I just started on the project." But she fires off an email and that just explodes the whole situation. "How dare you do this? Ken's a great programmer. It's not his fault." I'm like, "I don't think I can..." She just blew up the whole situation. I'm like, "Oh man, politics, I hate politics. All right, I'll work on this, but I'm going to go outside of EA and work on this. So let's write a contract up." So we wrote a contract up and I go out and I start the business and I start working on it.

KH:

Steve Collier is internally looking at this project and just going, "This project is going to take us another year to fix. They have screwed it up that bad, so we should kill the project." He did that unbeknownst to me. Shortly after he's like, "Hey, look, I got them to kill the project." I'm like, "Oh my God, I just quit EA and I was expecting to work on this for a while and I could have done it, Steve. You don't know how quickly I can fix things. I do that all the time." So I'm like, "Ah, great."

KH:

So Kevin McGrath and I basically started another company called Futurescape Productions. That's kind of the story. I forget what he was working on (a couple other projects) but he was kind of disillusioned internally with EA with the politics and all that. This was after Larry Probst took over as CEO, who didn't know how games were made. They used to treat every engineer at EA like a rockstar, but then Larry Probst came in and it all turned into, "Marketing knows best how to create games best. You're no longer a rockstar." That's kind of the reason that people started leaving between around 1992.

AR:

Interesting. If you look back at old EA, they're very artist focused and upfront about that. Then there was a change where now they don't have the best reputation. Would you say Larry was the start of that change?

KH:

Yeah. There's been another big, big, big change that happened when they went public. They brought on John Riccitiello, right? He exacerbated that issue. I know a bunch of people who heard him make a comment along the lines of, "I don't understand these programmers. Why can't we just put this on an assembly line and put a programmer next to each other and just feed it through? Then the software comes out the other end." We're like, "What? If only it were that easy. Holy crap." So Riccitiello is just one of the people that I'm not particularly fond of because of just that kind of talk. I mean, he destroyed Unity too recently, just because of that kind of mindset. He just doesn't understand. I had another person like that in marketing at NVIDIA who said to me one time, "How come it's taking so long to do this? Isn't programming just like writing a Word document?" He actually said that to me.

AR:

These people are in charge of big decisions too, especially in the software industry.

KH:

Yeah, yeah. But anyway, that was the kind of downfall, when they shifted more towards marketing and how they're going to best market the game. Hell be damned if it's a good game or not. We don't care about that. We just care about making money. That was the downfall really, in my opinion.

AR:

You kind of touched on this, but how did you enjoy working with Lisa Ching?

KH:

Oh, Lisa Ching was awesome. Oh, man, she was great. I love her. We still talk to each other once in a while. Whenever I see her, it's like hugs and all that kind of stuff. We became really good friends. She's a great person. I love her.

AR:

Oh, awesome. That's good to hear. I've been meaning to reach out to her one of these days. One last little EA question before we hop off EA, and this is just kind of like a silly question. I've seen and heard the name Fun Factory used to refer to EA. Did that ring any bells?

KH:

I heard that term, but when I was in my twenties, it was Fun Factory because you would go there and you didn't mind sleeping on the futon. You were doing great things and you loved your work so much. 16 hours would go by and you're like, "Oh my God, I need to get some sleep, but I can't. I just love that." 16 hours. After '92 though, it kind of got where it was expected, but it was very detrimental to my health.

KH:

Between '95 and '97 when I was working on Wing Commander for the Sony PlayStation, it came to be expected but it wasn't fun anymore. It just wasn't fun. It was just like, "Oh, hey, we're going to work on Wing Commander, but we expect you to ship this by Christmas, and so you got to sleep here 24/7 and pull up a futon." Because we NEED to ship this by Christmas, not "who cares if it ships by Christmas." It's like, "Look, we're making a fun game and we're bringing it on the second Genesis." That's where I kind of got really disillusioned with the game industry and things like that. It was all about profitability and shipping by shipping deadlines more than making a fun game that people enjoyed.

AR:

Could you tell us a bit more about the founding of Futurescape? You touched on why you had left EA, but I'm just curious what Futurescape looked like in its very earliest days.

KH:

What ended up happening was I was looking around for something to do and basically some kind of contract work. Kevin McGrath was also disillusioned with EA, and he came out to see me and talk to me. He's like, "Hey, look, I'm talking with Sega." He had worked on some Sega Genesis code at EA, but he's like, "I want to really kind of go direct with them. We should join forces." I knew him and worked with him back in EA days. I had worked with a lot of the Sega Genesis people because I knew graphic stuff and things like that. So I was helping a lot of the guys understand graphics - Dan Geisler from Road Rash fame and Kevin McGrath - and we would talk graphics and all that kind of stuff.

KH:

It was kind of like little powwows of us geeking out together on graphics and things like that. So I understood the Sega Genesis, but I wasn't working on any Sega Genesis projects. Then he came out and he says, "Hey, we have this guy over at Sega named Jesse something [Jesse Taylor] and he has these two projects he wants us to work on." One was called Monster Hunter, and the other one was called Nuclear Rush, and they were trying to promote the VR headset and the light gun for the Sega Genesis. We had the technology to do that.

KH:

I also had worked at Dynamix before, and Jeff [Tunnell] over there wanted me to port something called Sid & Al's...

AR:

Incredible Toons.

KH:

Incredible Toons, yeah, over to the Sega CD. Since we both had a bunch of experience, we were going to do that. Since I knew hardware, we had developed our own plugin board for the Sega Genesis that was just this big RAM board and hooked up to the parallel port...

AR:

The Romulus, right?

KH:

Yeah, the Romulus, yes. Another guy named - he had the debugger, what was his name? I have his...

AR:

Ray Tobey.

KH:

Yeah, Ray Tobey. Yeah. Ray Tobey had the debugger and all that kind of stuff. So we took his debugger code and built the hardware for it, and then we basically had this really cool debugger for the Romulus system.

AR:

Oh, awesome. So Kevin had the Sega connections and had worked with Sega before, and you'd also worked with the Sega Genesis.

KH:

Yeah, Kevin knew Jessie [Taylor] who was a producer. I'm trying to remember his last name. Jesse... Jesse...

AR:

I'm sure we have it on the Monster Hunter page that we have. It has a credits list.

KH:

He went from EA to being a producer over there [at Sega] and he was looking for developers internally. So we ended up forming Futurescape Productions and signing two contracts with them, and I became the CEO and Kevin McGrath became the CTO (but we were really both just software engineering). It got me up to speed a lot because I had started businesses before, like Monarch Development. We just kind of throw it out there: "I'll be the CEO because I have some experience running businesses before" So then we started on that, and what ended up happening was Kevin got disillusioned because we had finished the Nuclear Rush game, and they decided not to ship the VR headset for fear of medical problems with it being too close to your eyes. So they basically shelved the project and we're like, "Oh, well that's great."

KH:

"We were expecting that thing to ship and earn some royalties. We had to cut our development costs so we could earn some royalties and now you're not going to ship it?" Kevin was like, "I'm out. I'm tired of the game industry and tired of this happening." He didn't even tell me. A couple weeks after Sega did that, he's like, "I got a job at Microsoft. I'm moving into Oregon or to Washington, and you're going to have to shut down the business and all this." I'm like, [sarcastically] "Oh, thanks Kevin," but we're still good friends. I only kind of shut it down at first. I tried to keep it going for a little bit, but then I decided, "Oh, this is not going to work. The contracts are canceled. I have no income coming in. I've got to shut down the business."

KH:

There's no real assets there other than our technology and a few computers and the office space. So I shut that down. Then EA had some work for me to come back and help them. I think this is the order: PGA 486 in 1995, and we shipped that. Then I went to work on the Sony PlayStation version of Wing Commander III, I believe, with Steve Collier, who I had known from Bard's Tale.

AR:

You had mentioned working on 3D Genesis code for Monster Hunter. Did any of that experience influence your later 3D engine work on Wing Commander?

KH:

A little bit, but not enough because I wasn't real familiar with something called matrix multiplication and how that worked. At the time, everything was 2D-ized and faking a lot of the 3D stuff. I understood shearing, which is a lot less than matrix things to make 2D things look like they're 3D, but I didn't understand real 3D calculations when I went to work on Wing Commander III. It took me a couple months to come up to speed because everything was going towards hardware. Before, everything was software rasterization. I understood rasterizing, I understood the 2D part of it, but I never understood how you could take a vertex and transform that. I didn't understand the mathematics because, like I said, I almost flunked out of my geometry class in high school too. I had been sitting next to a cute girl and was cracking her up all day long. [laughs]

KH:

My teachers never explained to me why I needed to use geometry. It was just like, "Memorize these theorems" and I need to know why. I need to tear things apart and know why I need to do something, so I never got up to speed on linear algebra until I taught myself. When I started looking at the Wing Commander III code on the PC and understanding the hardware and what they were doing with matrix multiplies, it helped a little bit from the rasterizing perspective. When I started on tearing apart the PC code and seeing what they were doing in software, that's when the pieces all fell together on 3D graphics.

AR:

My research partner, MDTravis, was digging through the source code that you preserved. (Thank you so much for doing that, by the way. Very invaluable.) In that source code, there's a roughly 3D mockup section of a stone hallway. Is that representative of the 3D in the planed final game?

KH:

To kind of back up a little bit, what ended up happening was - alright, so this is kind of an interesting transition back to Bard's Tale IV. I worked on it at EA for about two months before I was leaving. There was this guy named Luc Barthelet who was a really smart French guy and a producer. Back in the time, we were trying to figure out how they were doing Castle Wolfenstein and Doom level graphics. It's not really 3D.

KH:

He was talking to me and we were trying to figure out how they were doing it so fast because Bard's Tale had the dungeon stuff. So he kind of worked out some of it, but it wasn't correct. He knew math and 3D math and matrix multiplies, but you couldn't do it at the time back then. But Kevin and I, we kind of were starting to figure out how they were doing Doom and things like that. So the hallway thing was really us trying to recreate - was it Doom or Castle Wolfenstein? Was there something before Doom that...

AR:

Wolfenstein was before Doom and there were other raycast 3D engine games before Wolfenstein, but Wolfenstein was the first big one.

KH:

Okay, yeah. So I think it was Wolfenstein that we were - or maybe Doom came out or something came out. We were trying to figure out how they were doing this raycasting stuff. It was so new to everybody, even the mathematics guy. The problem was he was approaching it from a math perspective while the raycasting stuff was a hack from people that may or may not have known math, but understood kind of spatial things. That would've been me, but I couldn't connect the math to the raycasting side of things back then (I didn't know linear algebra really that well). Now you can ask me anything about linear algebra and I can tell you how matrices work and hardware and NVIDIA, because I went to work for NVIDIA. After doing Wing Commander III, I was pretty up to speed on 3D graphics and how you could do 3D graphics with vertices and all that once the hardware started coming out.

AR:

Do you remember what the gameplay in Monster Hunter would've actually looked like? Because when we see that stone hallway, we think, okay, well maybe it was a bunch of mazes, but the pre-release screenshot that we have is outdoors. Would that have been an open world 3D game or would we have been looking at mazes?

KH:

So what's hilarious about this is I was given free leverage to design that game. So they was like, "Hey, we want to use the light gun and we want to have it called Monster Hunter." I was given free rein to design everything else. What Jesse (the producer) was originally saying is we should have these outdoor worlds where you're shooting monsters. I'm like, "Well, this would be great, but if you take this into kind of an RPG thing where you have to go into these dungeons, and then you have the gun, it's like a first person shooter again, but you're killing monsters." The goal was to have an outdoor world, but you would have to go into these dungeons to track 'em down and stuff like that too. That was my idea. That's where I was leaning to try to get Monster Hunter to.

KH:

Kevin wasn't really working on Monster Hunter at the time. It was almost entirely me. Then we had another guy who was helping named Tom, I forget his last name. And another guy named - oh God, what's his name? I've got his face in my head. He was helping too. So we had two other guys that were helping both Kevin on Nuclear Rush and me on Monster Hunter things. I was kind of designing it, and I used the other engineers to help me do that indoor side of things. So that was the attempt. But once they killed Nuclear Rush, they also killed the other project because there wasn't enough money. They were starting to defocus off the light gun stuff because either they weren't making money or they weren't getting enough traction with the light gun. Once they killed the VR set, they're like, "Okay, we're going to kill the light gun too, and any projects that are associated with it, because it's not really making us money and people aren't really adopting the light gun very well."

AR:

I believe, for Nuclear Rush, you weren't actually provided a VR headset. Was the same true with the light gun on Monster Hunter?

KH:

No, we had the light gun, that worked pretty well. You can remember back in the day, the old Nintendo game with the dog - Duck Hunt - they had the light gun. So I can't quite remember if they provided us hardware, but since I'm a hardware engineer, we've probably hacked the Nintendo light gun to work for it more than likely.

AR:

So you may have been testing that with an NES Zapper.

KH:

Yeah.

AR:

To quickly touch on Nuclear Rush. I was going to ask if you could give us a postmortem on it.

KH:

Well, Kevin was really the lead on that particular game. Like I said, I helped out - we're co-programming everything pretty much - but he was really the designer of it too. We had started designing other games that we were going to work on as well. But the postmortem on that really is it was ready to go. We were ready to go with everything. That's what kind of turned Kevin sour was, "Hey, I completed this game. We did everything you wanted. The contract's finished, let's ship this so we can start earning royalty so we can continue to make games."

KH:

So what the postmortem REALLY is: don't count on royalties, whatever you do. Don't reduce your cost to count on royalties. That's what they used to do back in the game industry. "Hey, you do this for half price because you can earn royalties on the backend and make a lot more money than you can if you just charge us." Back in the late eighties and early nineties, that worked, but not anymore. You never should reduce your costs. You should have your costs covered and you should get royalties. So that's really the postmortem of that. Don't sell yourself short.

AR:

I think you got a completion bonus for that, but did Sega of America ever make up the money that you had reduced in your development costs?

KH:

No. So because it was going to be royalty based and they killed the project, we never got anything. We got a completion bonus. But yeah, the royalties far outweighed the money that we received on the completion bonus. We were fully expecting this thing would ship a million units and we'd make almost a million dollars on it. We probably ended up getting paid, I don't know, roughly $67 thousand or - I don't know what the exact amount is, but it wasn't a lot, let me just put it that way.

AR:

Especially when you had planned around it. How did you enjoy working with Sega of America as a whole?

KH:

Sega of America was good. The biggest problem was that there was a lot of tension between the Japanese and the American guys. In fact, they used to call, I forget his name, but they used to call him Mr. Hollywood. He was in the Bay Area in Redwood City basically. He was completely Japanese, but he was very Americanized in his thinking processes and things like that. The name is like Hiro, maybe? H-I-R-O... [Shinobu Toyoda]

AR:

Hirokazu Yasuhara?

KH:

Yeah, I think that's probably what it is. He was a great guy and it was great to work with them. The only time that we really had a problem was when the Japanese came over and would get involved. They'd mostly let him just run with it because it's like, "Oh, silly Americans over there, we'll just do our Japan stuff and you guys do your stuff." But then when I think about it, they got a little bit irritated when the US really was taking off much bigger than the Japanese on the Sega Genesis, and then they were like, "Oh, hey, you guys are being successful. Let's pull that back in, let us have control of this." And maybe it was a language barrier or something, but just working with Sega America was pretty good when working with him.

KH:

We could go into the Sega building and just meet with him and he would talk to us. It wasn't like he was the senior level, more a C-level executive that wasn't highly involved in everything, so that was pretty cool. But like I said, there's all that tension between Sega America and Sega Japan that was a little bit disconcerting. I think that may have been what killed the VR headset because they were all worried too much about medical issues with it being too close to the eyes and all that.

AR:

The Japanese were worried about that?

KH:

I believe so, yeah. They were worried about the repercussions of health issues by having the video [screen] too close to the eyes and things like that or that they would have some kind of legal implications from that. That's why they killed the project.

AR:

When you were working on Sega VR, did you overhear any discussions about the product or the headset or the games being released in Japan at all?

KH:

No. No, there was nothing about that at all.

AR:

For a third-party development studio, you have a surprisingly great beat on what was going on inside of Sega of America's headquarters.

KH:

When you're going and meeting with them and you're meeting with Jesse, the guy who's right under Hiro, and he's telling us what's going on the whole time, he's like, "Look, we're working on the project." Then at the end, he's like, [exasperated] "Oh my God, they're worried about that?" He was in those meetings and he was very forthcoming to us because we had worked with him at Electronic Arts before (he went over to Sega after that). I forget his last name, Jesse. I keep wanting to say Jesse Taylor?

AR:

Jesse Taylor, yes.

KH:

Taylor, yeah.

AR:

And he served as producer on BOTH Nuclear Rush and Monster Hunter?

KH:

I think it was both, yes. Pretty sure.

AR:

I think that about makes sense. How did you enjoy working with Jesse as a Sega of America producer?

KH:

Jesse Taylor is an interesting fellow. He one time came into our office and was talking to me because he said something interesting about him being really "slimy" himself, and we always knew that about him. He's kind of a swarmy, slimy, "climb the ladder" type of guy, but at least he's honest about it. He's like, "Yeah, I'm slimy." I wasn't going to say it, Jesse, but okay. [laughs]

AR:

Made it easier for the both of us.

KH:

Yeah, when he was working with Carl Mey back on, I forget what they were working on back then - that might've been Road Rash. I think it was Road Rash. Jesse Taylor was also on Road Rash or something in the Sega Genesis days. He was actually a programmer once, I believe. Yeah, I'm pulling up his MobyGames… Yeah, let's see. He was a project director, special thanks, executive producer, full credits. There's a lot of them here. He goes technical director. A lot of 32X games as well.

KH:

He was a programmer on Sub Battle Simulator in 1988, but that was the TRS-80. Yeah, so maybe Genesis programming. [reading] So yeah, Lakers versus Celtics. Oh, that's right. He was working on the basketball game. That's right. I actually - yeah, Hardball, Amiga, Genesis, Genesis, technical director… Yeah, he turned into a technical director. He was an engineer, but he wasn't a good engineer, so he turned into a technical director.

AR:

He's been on my list for a little while. We're kind of curious because we know how the producers were involved with a project. We know that Sega of America would assign them to a project, but curious about what that interactivity actually looked like. Was he emailing you back and forth with stuff? You said that he did come out to the office. How frequently did he come into the office?

KH:

Well, we were really close. We were in San Mateo off of 101 and they were just down a couple exits, so it was just as needed type of thing. So I think he probably came three or four times over two years, but we'd go to the [Sega of America] offices. It was more mostly email and things like that. He wanted to take some shortcuts that I didn't want to take in the designs of. He also wanted to help drive the design more than we wanted him to because - there's this old story, and this is going to be funny. I don't know if you know Cynthia Hamilton, who is Brent Iverson's wife. She was an artist at Electronic Arts, and she had this really great thing where she would always add a blue dog into any game because then a producer would come by and say, "Oh my God, I love everything about this game except for that blue dog. You got to remove that blue dog." You'd be like, "Okay, no problem." She would do that on purpose. Every single game, she'd put a blue dog in there so that the producer would come and feel like they've contributed to the game.

KH:

That's what I felt like with Jesse. We were just trying to go, "Okay, Jesse, what do you want to see now? Okay, yeah, we'll put that in there." Then the next month he'd be like, "Eh, I don't really like that. Rip it out." We're like, "Okay, we knew you weren't going to like that, but we kind of just put it over on that side." That was kind of the running joke in the industry with producers and game developers a lot of times, or even the artists. You know they're going to want to come and say something and have their input, so just put something dumb in there that you know that they'll want to remove and then they'll feel like they're contributing.

AR:

Did you feel like his involvement in the project - not to single him out, but did you feel like the involvement of a Sega of America producer in your guys' projects aided them more or hindered them more?

KH:

I would say it was probably fifty-fifty because he gave us the benefit of being internal [with Sega of America] and to let us know what's going on and what the moving pieces are a lot of times. That was good for us because we wanted to make sure that they liked what they were seeing and that it was sellable both in Japan and the US and that it would show off their hardware - because Nuclear Rush was going to be one of the five games that shipped with the VR headset.

KH:

It also helped because he was responsible for making sure we got paid when we hit our milestones. We were all milestone-based. So that was good. A lot of times that was good that he helped get us paid, but sometimes we'd have to fight with him because he would add a bunch of stuff to the milestones like I was saying, and we're like, "We're going to need more money if you want to change all this stuff at the last minute." So it was good and bad. It was like fifty-fifty, really.

AR:

Interesting. That's a really interesting perspective because if you hear it from a Sega of America producer, they'll tell you that they steered the entire project and it wouldn't have happened without them. There are a lot of great producers out there, but it's just kind of interesting to hear an outside perspective on that.

KH:

Yeah, and I've worked with producers that are like that at EA. There are producers like that. Scott Orr. Scott Orr is an awesome executive producer. He does steer a lot of things and gets things done, but he also understands that if he's going to come in there and turn over the apple cart, that there's going to have to be some cleanup and some additional cash thrown at that and the project's going to be delayed. Jesse was more of the mindset of like, "Well, you guys just double your hours or triple your hours and don't sleep and then it should be fine." That's easy for you to say.

AR:

Yeah. So another thing we're curious about when it comes to Sega of America is the SDK that they provided. Do you remember when you first got it? Was it fairly early into Futurescape's existing pipeline and what your first impressions of it were?

KH:

Well, so let's back up a little bit. At EA, they weren't allowed to get the SDK. So they started to reverse engineer the Sega Genesis. I don't know if you know that. But when we got out and we were working directly for them, we got the Sega SDK right away. The biggest issue was the fact that they [Sega of America] were slapping the Sega CD on top of it and then the 32X stuff and all that stuff. So they made this Frankenstein of a thing and they wanted games for it from us and it was still in prototype phase, a lot of it.

KH:

Sid and Al's Incredible Toons was supposed to be on the Sega CD because there was more memory and another set of GPUs on there or graphic stuff on there and things like that. So it would help. I could have fit it in the Sega Genesis cartridge, no problem, but there was just this push for CD-based games now instead of the cartridges on the Sega CD side of things. So it was kind of an in-process SDK that was pretty messy because of first the CD and then the 32X on top of that.

KH:

It was just all prototype stuff when we were there. It's like, "Hey, prototype on these 32Xs." Then it's like, "Oh, but all the documentation's in Japanese." I was like, [sarcastically] "Ah, thank you." We have to translate it and figure out all that kind of stuff. I love that stuff. That's cutting-edge, bleeding-edge stuff for me. I'm excited to do that, but it was a pain in the butt to make games because you're trying to figure out everything - all the hardware that's coming over and what do they really mean by this and what is this doing?

KH:

It's the same thing that happened on the PlayStation when it was new hardware. I fixed an audio bug on the PlayStation hardware without the source code for their software development kit. Because I started out in assembly language and knew how compilers work, I was able to reverse-engineer where the bug was, walk into Sony PlayStation in the US and say, "Hey, it's in this function (that is, the audio) and the parameters are probably this. I don't know exactly what the function or the function name is. I know what it is. It's probably somewhere towards the end of the function (because I knew how compilers worked and it was doing this) and here's what's happening with your audio thing."

KH:

The Japanese guy's sitting there and he's pulling up the source code - which we don't have access to, to debug it correctly - pulls it up and then he's like, "Oh, it looks very interesting." He got on the phone to Japan, "Hey," and then blah, blah, blah. After about five minutes, he looks over at me and he is like, "You're right, that's a bad bug." They fixed it and they're like, "How did you find that?" I'm like, "Well, necessity."

KH:

I did the same thing at NVIDIA but I had access to the source code. I was in technical marketing helping people implement GPU drivers and GPU hardware in their games and their engines. This one game kept crashing after 24 hours on AMD only. I went and debugged the code and looked at the source code and found out that they had written some assembly code in AMD only in x64 to optimize something and they forgot to pop off some bytes on the stack, two bytes on the stack. That's why it took 24 hours for it to blow up only on AMD. I went to the driver guy and I said, "Hey, here's the line, here's the bug and here's what you guys forgot to do. You need to pop off four off the stack instead of popping off two." The guy looks at me and he's like, "Who the hell are you in technical marketing and you're coming here and showing me and debugging drivers?" I said, "Yeah, I started out in assembly language," and he was like, "You should come work for the driver team." I'm like, "Eh." I actually ended up kind of working for them at the end a little bit.

KH:

I kind of understand how entire systems work and I'm very good at digging in. In fact, you can look on my LinkedIn profile and Steve Collier actually mentions that whole thing about that Sega [Sony] sound bug and driving into that without source code or anything and just reverse-engineering to figure out why the bug is in the source code. Yeah, it's like acting like a sleuth basically. Investigate until you find something. It goes back to the days when I used to investigate software and figure out how they were doing copy protection on the Apple II discs and stuff like that and removing that.

AR:

The cracking days.

KH:

[in confirmation] The cracking days. I know how to reverse-engineer stuff - I know how other engineers are thinking, what they're putting together there, and so I can reverse-engineer that very quickly and undo or change things and stuff like that.

KH:

Yeah, just very interesting stuff. That's kind of why I wasn't too bothered [by Sega of America's hardware]. I didn't think they would ever make a good product out of the 32X and the Sega CD, but I didn't really care because we're getting paid to develop the game. If it took off, then we'd get royalties. If it didn't, that's fine. We at least got paid and we'll move on to the next, whatever the next thing would be. That ended up being the PlayStation.

AR:

Right. Did Futurescape ever work on any tangible work on the 32X?

KH:

No tangible work. They had given it to us and they wanted all the games to start to work on there. Our next projects were going to be on the 32X until they killed the current projects. Then we were like, "Well, we can't start on something else unless you give us a guarantee to work on this stuff." Since they had shut down Monster Hunter and Nuclear Rush, it was just like, "Okay, Kevin got disillusioned. He's leaving. I'm left here to clean up the pieces of the company, and so I'm going to be doing that for a few months." I don't really want to sign a contract with you guys for doing 32X stuff. After that, I went back to work for Electronic Arts instead because it was a steady thing and I knew whatever they were working on. It didn't matter whether it's PC or going onto the PlayStation or stuff like that.

AR:

Right. You weren't going to be screwed out of half of your resources again because someone at Sega of America got cold feet about something.

KH:

Yeah, exactly. That's one of the reasons I jumped back and forth between companies and starting my own too. It was all resources. I jumped into Google for four years, and that helped fund my new project, the Genius project, because they gave you a shit ton of stock and a really high salary. Then they told me I could work on my own stuff in my spare time and they only wanted me to be a project manager or a product manager. What is it called? A technical product manager or technical - TPM, technical program manager, I believe that's what it was. It was like, "Okay, I can do that with my eyes closed." Then at night I can go and do the real stuff - the real programming stuff - and feed my inquisitive brain. That other stuff is just really boring. "Yeah, okay, have a meeting, figure out where you are, unblock you." That to me is really boring and easy stuff.

AR:

One last question on the SDK. When I was speaking with Kevin, he mentioned that Futurescape picked and chose different parts of the SDK to use. He says that the company started with Sega's built-in image editing software, but then you guys moved to Deluxe Paint, but you retained the GEMS music system. How modular were the individual components of the SDK?

KH:

Pretty modular, but split up by type. They're easy to take out. I mean, since it's an SDK, you just link to the parts that you need and then it won't include the parts that you don't need. It was pretty modular to a certain extent. Yeah, so pretty good, in my opinion. It's kind of hard to define the modularity of something like an SDK because it's just compiled source code. If they're kind of more higher-level APIs and they don't connect with each other directly - and that's usually how I program - it's called loosely coupling. That means that if you're doing a 2D paint thing or rasterization stuff, we actually had our own set of SDK modules that kind of enhanced what Sega was doing. I forget, I think we might even have source code for that still. I have a box in here that has these - yeah, I think I have the source code for that, but there's also, I have a bunch of tape drives still sitting in my closet here from Futurescape.

AR:

Oh, wow.

KH:

Yeah. Don't know how to get it off of there. Actually, I bought a tape drive and I'm going to take it over probably to the computer museum over in Hayward or somewhere in the East Bay here. He said he worked with a guy who redid the Nuclear Rush simulator.

AR:

Oh, okay. That would be excellent. I'm sure you've absolutely got some gold on there.

KH:

Yeah. Yeah, there's just so much stuff. I mean, I even found a Rampage disc and my ST tools source code that I kind of uploaded. I've been uploading stuff where I can to GitHub. There's some stuff up there. In fact, I uploaded Nuclear Rush on there as well onto GitHub. Just as I find this stuff, I wish I could find the Rampage source code. That would be awesome.

AR:

Heck, yeah.

KH:

40-year-old source code. [laughs]

AR:

Hey, if it still works. In the SDK, I want to say the image editing program was probably called Sega Character Creator or SCAT - unfortunate acronym there. Do you remember what was unpleasant about working with it or what you didn't like about it that caused you guys to move to Deluxe Paint and develop your own tools?

KH:

Because most of the artists love Deluxe Paint and they've been using it for years. To have some other kind of pixel editor type of thing - it was annoying to them to do the things that they're so used to doing, and Deluxe Paint was so easy to use. We just wrote a plugin to export basically in our own format. That's mainly the reason because they were using Deluxe Paint back at Electronic Arts and all that. The artists that we brought on board were back there using Deluxe Paint for everything. Same thing with 3D Studio Max. We would use 3D Studio Max over there, and I wrote an exporter to export out of 3D Studio Max because that's what the artists were using. Some of them were using Maya, but most of them were using 3D Studio Max.

AR:

Oh, wow. Now, those tools - now, forgive me if I get a little off the mark here because I'm not incredibly technical, but when we actually had someone dig through the source code, they were very fascinated with your work. That was MDTravis. He found stuff like ANM2PCX, ANM2FPA, DUMPFPA, CVT.SE. Were those the tools that you were talking about?

KH:

Yeah, those are the ones that we developed. That basically took the DP files - since we knew the format from Electronic Arts and the artists could do that, we could take those instead of SCAT - SCAT had a bunch of problems with how to do animations and stuff like that, and that was already built into Deluxe Paint. We basically made the .ANM format from Deluxe Paint and then extracted it directly instead of us having to use their SCAT tool. You'd have to ask them why they hated it. Maybe it was just because they had used Deluxe Paint for so long. Deluxe Paint, and the format for Deluxe Paint, was really super simple and easy to parse and do things with where SCAT was just - yeah, it was a terrible piece of work.

AR:

Interesting. We have very little information on SCAT, so this is invaluable.

KH:

Until you mentioned it, I had completely forgotten about it because we were like, "No, all our artists are using Deluxe Paint. We can do this a heck of a lot faster with them already having all the animations and characters in Deluxe Paint, and then we'll slice it up in the .ANMs and just put it in the game" instead of going with your SCAT and figuring it out and going with your format. Their format, I believe, didn't allow us to do some tricks that we had put together. You probably can look at the code and figure out why we were using .ANM because there are certain tricks that we could resolve that they couldn't resolve with the SCAT thing. I think it was mainly 2D. It's like talking about the pseudo-3D stuff. I'm trying to remember back exactly, but there were multiple reasons we had to just make these tools for ourselves.

AR:

You guys also developed a proprietary FPA image format. I think that was the one output by ANM2FPA, which converted Deluxe Paint Animator .ANM files to Futurescape's proprietary FPA image format for scaling sprites.

KH:

Yeah.

AR:

I wonder what that stood for. Futurescape Proprietary .ANM? [laughs] I don't know.

KH:

Oh, Futurescape Productions Animation probably. Yeah, maybe that's what it is. I mean, that was the '90s .Long time ago. I'd have to go look at the code and go, "Oh yeah, yeah." By the way, Futurescape Productions was a name given to us by Susan Manley when she was a producer over at Electronic Arts and worked with both Kevin and I. When we went out and started our company, we were trying to think of names and she said, "Hey, I like Futurescape." We're like, "Oh yeah, that sounds good. Futurescape Productions." That's how that came about.

AR:

It's funny how larger things can be built on things that are just offhand.

KH:

Graffiti Entertainment was the same thing. Roger Arias, who I'd worked with for years, he's like, "Oh, I really like the name Graffiti Entertainment. You can have it." I'm like, "Hell yeah, I'll take it." [laughs]

AR:

Let's see. To hop back to us, we already talked about that part. It looks like Chris Cole of Dynamix provided some programming libraries to Sid and Al's. How involved was Dynamix in the development of Sid and Al's?

KH:

Well, they developed the original one, so we were basically porting it to the Sega Genesis. It was his code. They developed the whole thing internally at Dynamix. Jeff Tunnell came to me and hired me to basically put it on the Sega CD, and it died at the end because they killed the Sega CD really.

AR:

Was that port to Sid and Al's virtually complete?

KH:

I think it was about 75% complete. We were still trying to finish up Monster Hunter and all that at the same time, so there wasn't a huge amount of time. Then starting to get shut down caused pretty much havoc on everything. I have the PC code up there somewhere too.

AR:

So when it comes to the Sega CD, unlike the 32X where you didn't really investigate it too much, you did have tangible plans to work on the Sega CD. I asked Kevin a similar question and he said that the company had kind of investigated it and looked into the feasibility of it, but ultimately decided to not go with it. This was also nearing the end of Futurescape where there were a lot of other factors going on. But what were the plans for Futurescape on CD? Did you have any plans of your own to migrate to Sega CD or was that Sega of America?

KH:

Well, Sid and Al's was supposed to be on Sega CD and we thought that the next iteration of the Sega Genesis was going to be Sega CD because the bigger games can go on there and things like that. It enabled better porting of bigger games that wouldn't fit on a cartridge like Sid and Al's. I personally was going that way knowing that a device that had a CD on it would eventually be able to play videos and things like that.

KH:

I saw that coming and said, "Okay, well, the next console's going to be CD-based instead of cartridge-based because it's going to turn into this home entertainment system." That's when the PlayStation started to come out and they were on CD.

KH:

3DO started that way too, but never liked 3DO, by the way.

AR:

What did you not like about the 3DO?

KH:

Okay, so I was invited to go over to 3DO. I refused for good reason. I didn't think it was going to be successful for several reasons. One, back then, paying $500 for something is audiophile top-end stuff. I'm like, if I'm not going to pay for it and I'm technical and I love games, you are not going to have any customers. It was very clunkily built too and the prototyping - I'm like, "You guys are going to be spending way too much money on these games" because it was bleeding edge. I almost was tempted to go over, but I do not like to work on products that I know are going to fail. I like to work on stuff that I could ship and I know that can ship and that will make money.

KH:

I did the same thing on this other thing called Athos Wear. It was this muscle and electrocardio something. You put these - not patches, but they were kind of like these patches that were signal catchers on how you were working - on your muscles. It was in a suit type of thing. I was helping with the software and I was working out heavily at the time and I'm like, "Okay, I'm going to go try this thing out." I went and I tried it out after about five minutes, the thing was like a wetsuit that you were wearing while you're working out, with these little things inside. I'm like, "This is never going to sell."

KH:

They offered me a job and I said, "No. I'll help you with a software, but I'm not going to come to work for you because this product's going to die in two years or whatever." They raised $50 million and three years later, no sales and out of business.

KH:

By the way, that was Chamath Palihapitiya (or however you say his name) that's on the All-In podcast guy. He's the one that funded that. He got Joe Lacob from the Golden State Warriors to invest about a million dollars too. They invested about $50 million to build that suit. I'm just like, I can't come work for you because that thing's never... If I'm your target audience and I can't stand the product, you're not going to be able to sell this thing.

AR:

Right. That's a great point. [checks questions] I apologize for hopping around with these questions.

KH:

I'm enjoying this, so it's all good.

AR:

Oh, awesome. I'm glad to hear that. This is a question from MDTravis. He was looking through your source code and he noticed that all or almost all of what we can see of Futurescape's games were written in C, except Monster Hunter, which is in 68000 assembly code. What was the reason for that?

KH:

Just me trying to optimize it. I can write in C just as well as I can write in 68000. In fact, a lot of my assembly code looks like C++. What do they call that, object-oriented code? In fact, when I wrote my Windows system that I told you about before, I went back and looked at that source code and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is object-oriented assembly code, which is what C++ generates, and objects and things like that. It's just the way I think.

KH:

C didn't have object orienting, so I was writing in 68000 in object-oriented code and optimizing it. Part of the reason also for that was that it allowed me to try to make the speed of the pseudo ray casting run really well. If you do it in C, then you can't really optimize at the machine level and do these tricks that I've learned over the years. Same thing with NVIDIA. We started out in assembly language in the shaders, and then it turned into C language, and now it's C++ language for CUDA and all that. So it's the same thing. I was comfortable with C, but to me, it was better to use C for business stuff really. I was so used to trying to fit everything down into a really small area (like on cartridges) that you had to write it in 68000 most of the time.

AR:

That makes a lot of sense. Rick Lucey, who's absolutely on my list, mentioned a planned second CD game that you guys had planned called Carnage for Crystal Dynamics. He created some concept art and mock-ups, but the project never went beyond that. Do you recall anything about Carnage?

KH:

A little bit. There were two games. We had another one called Relentless too. Do you have that on your list?

AR:

Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely.

KH:

Yeah. Yeah, that was a great one because that was based off of the Harrison Ford movie that we all loved at the time, which was called The Fugitive. It was kind of the same type of thing. We've always tried to shy away from... I mean, Carnage was good, but I always try to shy away from death and destruction. I don't like first-person shooters personally, with the guts and horrors. I don't like really either. I love stuff that challenges your brain and makes you think. I don't even watch horror films that much because it doesn't entertain me. It shocks me sometimes. "Okay, it startled me." It doesn't do much else.

AR:

I'm right there with you.

KH:

Yeah. We were talking to Crystal Dynamics because we were trying to build Futurescape, so we were talking to different people like Crystal Dynamics and we were giving them game concepts. We had a bunch of game concepts that we were trying to shop around and let these companies let us... We like to design this stuff too. We didn't just want to be a dev house, and that's kind of hard to do when you're a new startup and you've done things for Electronic Arts, but you're not usually the designer of the game. It's like you're porting something or you're working on something where they already have a bunch of designers at Electronic Arts.

KH:

Kevin and I both wanted to design the games because we're just in there all the time and we're making all these contributions, but we never got designer credit. We just got programmer credit. Kevin and I both had designed a bunch of parts of these different games. We're like, "we really want to start making our own games and designing them and be like another Electronic Arts" - back where we were working with producers and they were designing that shitty stuff. [On those EA projects] we were like, "No, we can't do that. We're going to redesign it this way," but then they went and they got the producer credits. Then they're like, "Look what I did. If it wasn't for me, this project would've…" We're just like, oh, come on. We battled you so much to show you what you shouldn't have been doing, and yet you're taking all the credit for it.

KH:

I think Kevin and I were both like, "This is ridiculous." You don't almost need producers - well, it depends. There are a a couple good ones. But in most part, it was just like Jesse Taylor who would kind of get in the way of getting a project done, and making a good game because he thought that - it's a blue dog story again. I don't have a disdain for producers in particular, especially the ones that understand that they're not the whole thing of the project.

KH:

We had game designers. Now, Scott Orr is a completely different animal because he was a good designer and his brother's a good designer, and they're both good producers too because they know what they know and they never tried to step on my toes from the programming side of it. It was very collaborative and they would listen and they wouldn't say, "Hey, let's just do this." When the producers did I'd be like, "You know that's going to take three months and yeah, it might look cool, but what's the point?"

KH:

I have another friend named Wolfgang Engel who worked at Rockstar for a while, and he pinged me one time and he was doing shaders. He's like, "Hey, look at the shader I did. They were requesting this at Rockstar. Look, the guy's sweating while he's playing..." I'm like, [facetiously] "Oh my God. Yeah, great shader, but who the fuck cares? A sweat shader. All right, Wolfgang, great." I love the guy and he's done so much for the industry, but when he showed me that and how Rockstar was so proud of their sweat shader, I'm like, how does that add value or make the game more fun? You can zoom in, you can see him sweating, okay. That's the kind of thing that producers do that it's just like, "Why?" He must have spent two months on that shader and it added no value to the game.

AR:

Oh, of course. I feel like the game industry either had or has both a lot of tunnel vision and a lot of pipe dreams. Maybe that's how you had to do it sometimes.

KH:

Yeah, I guess to be creative, but sometimes I understand people wanting to be creative and stuff like that - and build cool stuff and build visually appealing stuff. I love visually appealing stuff, but I'm more of the mindset that if the person loves to play the game and it's doing something to trigger their brain and give them endorphins or whatever, they really enjoyed it [regardless of graphics]. I always used to enjoy when people would play my games and just be going, "Woo, whoa, cool," stuff like that. They weren't looking at the graphics. They were just enjoying the gameplay. That's how I grew up. Playing games was about things that were fun to play, not just "visually appealing but also fun to play [as an afterthought]", that gave me entertainment or challenged my brain.

KH:

I used to play Wizardry when I was a kid. I played some Doom, but when it just became, "Hey, go shoot the next guy and blow his brains out." - Or, I played Castle Wolfenstein, because there was a lot of puzzles and challenges to it and things like that? More than just running around in a first-person shooter blowing people's heads off. I really hated it when people were like, "Headshot, headshot, headshot." Come on, is that really fun? For some people it is. For me, it's just like it doesn't challenge your brain to watch somebody's head [head exploding motion]. That's the same thing with gore effects. It doesn't challenge your brain or make things fun just because it's gross, at least to me.

AR:

On the topic of Relentless, we know a surprising amount about the project, that's in part because of your work preserving it with the source code. I'm interested in your recollections on Relentless as a whole.

KH:

Kevin and I - he started designing it and writing the code for it. Like I said, we were wanting to turn into another Electronic Arts where we were developing our own games and then shipping them and things like that - or any other studio like Bullfrog or any of the other ones, that's what we were looking to do. Relentless was our attempt to basically make a game for ourselves instead of writing games for other people. We brainstormed a lot about it and it was very collaborative.

KH:

I was doing the hardware side of things a lot to develop the Sega Genesis boards and things like that. I laid out the boards for the Romulus myself because I had an engineering background. Kevin had a little bit of knowledge, but I had all the tools to do that and more electrical engineering experience.

AR:

When I built the Futurescape page, I was looking around for any other projects that you guys had done, and I noticed a credit on Ballz 3D on the Genesis. Specifically, Futurescape was given a special thanks on the game. I believe Matt Hubbard, one of your staff, had worked on it. Does that ring any bells?

KH:

Yeah. So we hired Matt Hubbard. Besides us contracting to other companies to help them build stuff, Matt Hubbard was working for us and we hired him out on certain projects. He was also working on our Sega Genesis stuff as well. Like I said, we were trying to steer away from that [contract work], but our bread and butter at the beginning was being hired out to help on different things. Matt Hubbard had a mathematics degree and very good at math. Kevin and I weren't that great at math like Matt was. That guy was just a mathematician. So that's why he was given the task to work on that [Ballz 3D].

KH:

There's another guy named Tom who was a programmer and he helped on something, but I don't know which Tom... There's two Toms. We used to call them the Toms.

AR:

There was Tom DeBry and - where're my notes - yeah, Tom DeBry, and then Tom Collie was his name.

KH:

Yeah, Tom Collie was the artist guy, and Tom DeBry was the software engineer guy that was helping.

AR:

The most obscure reference I could find of Futurescape was on some archived list of some old IBM programs or something: game called QuizQuest. Does that ring any bells? Maybe someone had mislabeled that. I wasn't able to find much better info.

KH:

No, no, no. [thinking] There's something there. There is something there. It was something… I think we gave everybody on the team the ability to give us ideas about games that we could do. I don't know if it was Matt Hubbard that was designing that. We were just looking for different things that we wanted to do next, like Relentless. (Matt Hubbard would help with Relentless.) The team would be like, "Hey, what about this game? What about this kind of idea?" We were really trying to push our employees and everybody that worked for us to be collaborative and think-tankers for what we were going to build. Like I said, we wanted to build a studio more than a dev house.

KH:

Is Futurescape still on archive.org at all? Maybe it was too early for that.

AR:

Oh my gosh, I would love to have a - I do not have an official website listed for you guys. What was your URL back in the day? I'll look around for it.

KH:

Futurescape.com, I believe.

AR:

Oh, really? Awesome. MDTravis was also able to pull out the spinning Futurescape logo from one of the source codes that you had preserved, but we didn't find the website. We did find Rick Lucey's website, and that's actually where the Futurescape Productions logo came from originally. The logo that we have from your guys' company was originally from Rick's business card. Then it came from Kevin's business card. Thankfully ou guys did business cards. [laughs]

KH:

Yeah, we did business cards. I see that on Sega Retro. Yeah, that's Futurescape Productions. I see that undocumented dev kit [Romulus]. I was trying to see if - let's see if it ever got the - [typing out loud] archive.org…

AR:

That'd be super cool. I love looking at old websites like that.

KH:

Yeah, I think because archive.org probably doesn't go back to 1990. I think that website's- [discovers website is unarchived] Oh well, that website's probably not lost entirely. I'll bet you it's on one of those tape drives. I backed up everything all the time. Everything.

AR:

I was going to say, you definitely seem like the type of person that would archive and back up everything that you had worked on.

KH:

[laughs] Yeah.

AR:

Oh, and really quick, was QuizQuest developed BY you guys, do you recall? Or was that a collaboration with another company where you were working on contract?

KH:

I don't think that ever saw the light of day, did it?

AR:

That's a great - I want to say it did? From what I recall… I remember doing research on QuizQuest. I was looking up the name Futurescape just for anything I could find. I want to say I found it somewhere? So it may have been released in some sense. It might be a prototype, but I should actually run that… I don't know, I'll make a note here to see if I can find it again, because I can usually go through my same mental routines and find it that way.

KH:

Where did you get that code from? Did I send you a big thing or did Kevin? How did you get the QuizQuest stuff?

AR:

No, not the code. I found mention of it on an old archived website. I don't remember… Let's see if I was a good boy and I put the reference on the page… [reads Sega Retro's Futurescape page] QuizQuest… I did! Let's see. Oh gosh. This is a text list. It's a list of someone's collection of DOS programs. If you go to the Futurescape page, you can Control-F QuizQuest. There's a reference following that. I think it's a 9. Click that. It'll take you to the bottom of the page, and that should take you to the archived link that I have there. Let's see. QuizQuest is a sample.

KH:

Oh, okay. [reading Futurescape page] So '92 to '94, that's right. Oh yeah, La Selva Drive in San Mateo.

AR:

Yeah, so this page is kind of interesting. I tried to pull as much information [on Futurescape] as I could find and consolidate it. If you do look at this page and anything's wrong, just shoot me an email. I'll be happy to correct it.

KH:

Oh yeah, no problem. [reading] So Mega Drive, Chameleon, Monster Hunter, yep. Oh yeah, Balls 3D, at least some programming.

AR:

Are we missing anything there? Even pitch projects, we'll document anything.

KH:

Yeah, I'm not sure. This is so cool though, because I couldn't remember some of the names of some of the people, their last names anyway, but yeah, I forgot about Rick Lucey.

AR:

Do you remember Bill's last name there? He's the only one we don't have the full name for.

KH:

Oh, Bill Gibbons. G-I-B-B-O-N-S. Yeah. I don't know if I should tell you the story about me punching him in the mouth.

AR:

I won't push you - even though that sounds like a super funny story. [laughs]

KH:

Whether you use it or not, it's going to be up to you. All right. Bill Gibson, G-I-B-S-O-N, I think is his last name. Yeah, Bill Gibson. Yeah, he was at Menlo Park at Menlo College, and he was recommended by a friend as a business guy. He came in and he started to help with the financials and stuff like that. Instead of using the correct way to do financials in the spreadsheet, like using formulas and stuff like that, he would just type in the numbers. Then the next month, he would do them on a calculator and type in the numbers instead of doing the formulas inside the spreadsheet. I'm just like, "Bill, what are you doing?" He had an MBA out of Menlo College.

KH:

We had a party with everyone. Tara Packard… I don't know if Connie Bratt ever worked for us, but Connie was Kevin's girlfriend at the time. She might not have worked for us, but there might've been one other woman that was helping us out (or maybe we just interviewed her and she never came to work for us). Anyway, so we're having a party for everybody because it was getting to Christmastime and we had basically - I'm not sure if we had finished Nuclear Rush or there was just some reason to celebrate and maybe it was just a major milestone. Bill and I had previously partied together and polished off a fifth of Jack Daniels before. Well, he gets very belligerent when he gets drunk and I wasn't drinking much. I was in the bathroom and he kicks open the bathroom stall door, all drunk again. He's like, "You got to talk to Kevin and blah, blah. You should be running this company." I'm like, "Bill, what are you talking about?"

KH:

I was just looking at him and he's just getting kind of in my face. I'm like, "I just got to knock this guy out. He's so drunk, he won't remember it." I knocked him out for about 10 seconds and he pops back up and he's like, "Come on, dude!" I'm like, "Oh, shit, that didn't work." I said, "Calm down, calm down. I was just trying to get you to calm down. I was knocking you out to help." I split his lip and all that. The next day we had to fire him. He just became so belligerent and political, and was trying to pit Kevin against me and me against Kevin and the rest of the team against each other. We're like, "Dude, you're just supposed to be doing the finances." He wanted to run the company, but he was clueless with his master's in business. He was a fun six months of alcohol abuse for the company, really. It was 30 years ago, so it's probably okay now. I don't even know where he is anymore.

AR:

Before we hop off the topic of staff, would you be able to spell Connie Bratt's last name?

KH:

I think it's B-R-A-T-T, I think. Let me look her up. B-R-A-T-T, just like Bratt.

AR:

B-R-A-T-T. Gotcha. Okay. Is she a game developer as well? I don't immediately recognize her name.

KH:

She was an artist and yeah, it is Connie Bratt. [reading] She's on MobyGames. Windows credits… Wait. No, that's not her. Yeah, I'm having trouble finding hits too.

AR:

I could always shoot Kevin an email.

KH:

Yeah. That was his girlfriend while they were at EA. I don't think she ever joined us, but she might've helped a little bit here and there.

AR:

Speaking of helping, and this is touching back on something that we just talked about: in terms of the technical assistance that you guys were offering to other companies, just the smaller contracts to keep yourself going, there was obviously the Balls 3D that we mentioned. Off the top of your head, do you remember any other technical assistance that you guys provided for other companies?

KH:

We were trying to sell the Romulus and we actually provided it to other Sega Genesis developers. The first iteration of it worked pretty well, but then something happened with a RAM upgrade and it would no longer - we had this little switch on the top, and when you flipped the switch, it had these battery packs that would back up the RAM, but it would fail with the new RAMs and we weren't sure why. We just stopped selling it because, look, this was mainly made for us, so that we didn't have to spend $25,000 for the Sega Genesis development thing when we were already working on it [the Genesis] at EA outside of their development systems. I think you had to pay $25,000 per system and we had five developers and it's like, "Okay, we're not going to spend $125,000 on a $100,000 contract to get Sega's development systems."

KH:

EA did the same thing. They reverse-engineered it, made their own dev systems because Sega wasn't very forthcoming on those things.

AR:

Right. Do you remember what companies you sold the Romulus to? We already know that, or at least Kevin said that Sega of America and EA both got some. Did you sell them to any others?

KH:

Yeah, there was a couple other smaller companies, but I don't remember who the smaller companies were.

AR:

Were all of your games developed on Romulus, or most of them?

KH:

All of them were developed on Romulus. Yeah. You might want to ask Kevin because they might've given us one development kit, but I don't know. I don't remember. I remember just working on the Romulus a lot personally.

AR:

Gotcha. Were Futurescape's games ever officially tested through Sega of America through their quality assurance division?

KH:

I think Nuclear Rush was.

AR:

Oh, neat. I'm still so surprised that Sega of America had you developing what would've been the launch title for the Sega VR headset, and they didn't give you a Sega VR headset. It's just astounding to me.

KH:

Well, that's because they were still developing it.

AR:

Right. I suppose somewhat normal.

KH:

Yeah, it's normal. They were still developing it and they wanted the software at the same time they launched the hardware. I mean, I think at the end they gave us some prototypes, but this was way towards the end when we had already done most of the work.

AR:

Did you guys ever get sick developing that, like motion sick?

KH:

Oh, yeah. I can't even... Yeah, even to this day, I get motion sickness after about five minutes on any of them [VR games]. I haven't tried the latest, latest one like Apple's one or anything like that. I actually wrote a very negative article about the VR industry called "VR Made a Disaster" or "Fifth Time's a Charm" when it turned into Meta. If you go to kennethhurley.com, you'll see some other stuff there that I've written blogs about VR stuff and things like that.

KH:

To me, VR is a solution looking for a problem, and that's how I evaluate whether I'm going to work on that stuff. Nobody needs a VR system. It's not solving any problems - other than in the military it helps. In medical [applications], maybe it helps for remote stuff, but not in games. It's a toy.

AR:

On your LinkedIn, you mentioned designing hardware allowing 128K of - you said save ROM for Genesis games. Was that a development thing or what was that?

KH:

That was basically a hack on their cartridges so that you could burn - I think it was an EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory), maybe it was just EPROM - but it was basically to upgrade cartridges so you could use 128K instead of the 64K limit.

AR:

What were the plans were for that? Whatever you can recall about it.

KH:

So now that you bring it up, I think what it was was this is one of the reasons we were moving to CD - the memory limits of the cartridge I think were 64 kilobytes at the time. We had this technique where we could toggle and get another 64 kilobytes of memory in a kind of page switching type of scenario that we had developed. We were going to move forward with that, but then Sega was like, well, we're going with a Sega CD, so it's no longer a problem - the CD added more memory and then the 32X on top of that, the Frankenstein thing that added more memory. So we're like, okay, well, I guess ROMs are kind of going on the way out, but little did I... I didn't think the 32X was going to work and the CD was going to work.

KH:

By the time we were getting around to making 128 kilobyte cartridges, the Sony PlayStation was coming out shortly thereafter. So it's kind of one of those things where: now the 3DO is coming out with their bigger memory and it's all with CD. Cartridges are kind of a thing of the past, so we don't really need to build the 128 kilobyte EPROM thing that we were working on.

AR:

I'm going to assume you mean Hirokazu Yasuhara when you said Hiro because you said he was a Japanese, but very Americanized. Assuming that IS Hirokazu Yasuhara, could you again describe the extent of working with him and his involvement with Futurescape?

KH:

Actually, I think we probably had three or four meetings with him and he was super nice guy, but it was more through Jesse Taylor than direct access to him a lot of times. He was more kind of a shit shield for us from Sega of Japan. That's mainly what it was. He understood what we were trying to build and he agreed and he wanted to build that for Sega America too - these little studios that could develop products and things like that. But Sega of America wanted to control and build everything in-house. That's one of the reasons EA started reverse engineering the Sega Genesis was because they wanted to own everything and wouldn't allow anybody to build on it. That's why they did a clean room on the Sega Genesis. That's where Kevin McGrath actually was reverse engineering the Sega Genesis back in the day (at Electronic Arts) in a clean room because they were trying to keep control of the games and the development of things so that they could make all the money in developing games for the Sega Genesis.

KH:

He being more Americanized was like, well, that's ridiculous, because Sega of Japan make great Japanese games but the Americans want Madden. So that's the beauty of interacting with him is he understood what we were trying to do and the games that we were trying to build. He was trying to bifurcate Sega of Japan and Sega of America because they made totally different types of games. Now we're into anime, but back then they were doing a lot of anime games and things like that. Then we were doing football in America - sports games. He understood that needed to be split up like that. Most of our conversations were of, "Hey, I appreciate what you guys are doing. We're moving forward with this." It was more his coordination with Japan and him talking to us about how to move forward with Americanizing or putting out American product for the Sega Genesis.

AR:

Wow, that's really cool. We knew that Sega of America - that was one of their central tenants: to produce their own distinctively American software. It's very cool to hear that, assuming we have it right. Hirokazu Yasuhara was a part of that?

KH:

Yeah, let me look it up. I know what he looks like. Sega of America CEO in 1992.

AR:

Oh, it might've been Toyoda. I wonder if it was Shinobu Toyoda.

KH:

[in confirmation] Oh, yeah. Shinobu.

AR:

Shinobu Toyoda. Oh, interesting. Okay, cool.

KH:

Tom Kalinske came in right after that, and that wasn't great. I think he came in... When did he come in? Because I think he was there.

AR:

I want to say Kalinske was there from... I'll look it up right now. [checking Sega Retro] Kalinske was at Sega from 1990 to 1996.

KH:

Okay. Yeah. So we never... Because we never interacted with Tom Kalinske very much. I think we met with him one time.

AR:

Did you like him?

KH:

No, but we didn't dislike him. It was more that, "He's a CEO type and had no idea what we were doing" type of thing. He's just all about shipping product and all that. So he wasn't a gamer. He was a businessman. We never had an issue with him because he never would come and try to put his thumb down or say, "Hey, why don't you just put this on an assembly line and make these products?" He wasn't like that. He was just more the business kind of guy and getting the games distributed and all that. So that's where Shinobu was better. Shinobu wasn't the CEO. What was he?

AR:

I think he was COO, but he was also just one of those company players that would move around [and do lots of things] because he was an executive. You had to move around and have a very hands-on role in everything that the company was doing. You're correct, he was there a year before Kalinske.

KH:

Even Jesse would interact with Shinobu as well a lot of times. Maybe he interacted with Tom Kalinske, but I think we were kind of shielded from that because like I said, I don't think Tom Kalinske knew much about game development. He just more was the business guy. How do you spell Shinobu?

AR:

S-H-I-N-O-B-U, and Toyoda is T-O-Y-O-D-A.

KH:

[looks up Shinobu Toyoda on Sega Retro] Yeah, that's definitely him. Yeah. Awesome. Wait. No, wait. Wait. No, that's the game guy, isn't it? That's the Japanese tech industry, former Sega - Yeah, that might be him.

AR:

He was a lot skinnier one. Yeah, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there's a photographs link, which will take you to a category that has a bunch of photographs and there's some younger ones of him. I don't know why we don't have a photo of him smiling because he smiles in nine out of 10 of his photographs. He's got a very distinctive smile.

AR:

If that's not him—

KH:

Oh, that's... The first one [photograph] there with Nilsen, Toyoda, and Kalinske, that's definitely him.

AR:

Did you work with [Al] Nilsen at all or did he work with you?

KH:

No, I don't think so. I don't remember working with him at all, but yeah, definitely Shinobu Toyoda. Yeah. And now that you're mentioning it, I do remember that I was always misspelling his name, like the car. [laughs]

AR:

[laughs] You're not the only one. In your own words, and just in the course of this interview, we've kind of already touched on it multiple times, but in your own words and a single answer, what led to the closure of Futurescape more than anything? Or I guess it's just a bunch of things.

KH:

Yeah, it was kind of a bunch of things, but the main driving factor was the disappointment by Kevin McGrath in the industry. I didn't want to run a company by myself. I wanted a partner, but with a contract being canceled and stuff like that, it became too much for him to put... He had put two years of his life into the project, and he surprised me with leaving, but that's because I have a tendency not to give up so easily, and he just got dejected so much that he went to Microsoft. When he did that, I was just like, "Look, I can't handle this myself. I can't come up with the payroll for everybody and make sure everybody's running okay and do programming. I want to do programming and not just run a company from a business perspective and do that."

KH:

His leaving - I'm just like, "Okay, well, we're going to need to shut it down and split the assets. He calculated some exorbitant amount for the assets. I'm like, dude, you're not counting the liabilities. We're both going to end up with pretty much zero from the assets after I shut all this down. Maybe that's just his naivety about businesses in general, but he thought he was going to come out of there with 50 grand or something like that. I'm like, "Dude, you're lucky that we're not both paying 50 grand to shut this down." I showed him the numbers and he was very disappointed about that, but he just got dejected after they shut it down. That was the unraveling and the start of the end basically. Then I was thinking about keeping it going and I just couldn't bring myself to another year of struggle in that much.

KH:

That's when I decided to go back to EA and do contract work where I could do programming instead of fighting to keep a business alive, especially because I didn't know what Sega was going to do and if they were really going to move forward [with their hardware plans]. Of course they didn't. They got displaced by Sony PlayStation. So it was kind of a good move for me to find a temporary thing to work on (PGA Tour 486) and then move to start working on the PlayStation stuff and get my chops up on 3D stuff and 3D hardware. So that was kind of a pivot point for me really. It was a good decision actually, looking back on it, because when I got up to speed on 3D hardware and 3D graphics, that led to me working at NVIDIA for four years, and working at Intel for a year on their i740 and their graphics chips because I loved graphics stuff.

KH:

It was a good experience and I wish it kind of worked because I wouldn't mind doing video games, but it has expanded my expertise tremendously because of me moving into other areas and keeping exploring after shutting down. If I was just writing games and I was doing another game, another type of game and doing that, I'd be happy because that's kind of expanding your mind and creativity and stuff like that. If I can't do that, I would rather find new hardware and new ways of doing things and new creative ways and AI and stuff like that. So I think that even though the unraveling was because of the dejection that Kevin felt and then him going to work for Microsoft - for four years or something like that, where he then retired because he got enough Microsoft stock to retire. Great for him.

KH:

I'm at retirement age here on December 14th and I'm like, "I'm not going to retire." I mean, I'm going to take social security, [laughs] but I'm not going to retire.

AR:

Of course not. You've got to keep challenging yourself, right?

KH:

Yeah, or else your brain will die and then you die.

AR:

Just the last game industry question here. Following Futurescape's closure, obviously you mentioned you moved to a senior software engineer role at EA, and this was just when the industry was starting to move from 2D to 3D. Was that kind of a challenging time? No one really knew what they were doing yet.

KH:

Yeah, it was. Everything was written in software. In fact, when we were working on PGA Tour 486, I developed a system that was very much like Rampage where you'd hit the ball and it would spike up into a curve and come back down. It wasn't exactly 100% mathematically accurate, but it worked well. They brought in this guy that was on the Macintosh and he rewrote it with correct mathematics and all that. It looked exactly the same. To me, I was just like, "Who cares if it's... It's probably mathematically correct underneath." This is exactly what Rampage did with throwing the dynamite. It was the same concept: throwing the dynamite, come up at a curve, and then land on the monster. Same thing, hit a ball, blah, blah, blah, [makes an arcing motion] come and land on the grass.

KH:

Same concept, but they didn't like it. They brought in this guy to rewrite the ball physics and all that. It was exactly the same. Whatever. I did it once. You guys can redo it. But that was kind of my first foray into 3D graphics because now instead of just a 2D arc, it was in 3D space. Brent Iverson had written a lot of this stuff and we were starting to do something called Janes' World War II Fighters that was completely 3D. This guy named Nicholas Fuller, a kid fresh out of college (a great math guy) knew all about 3D graphics. I started picking his brain to learn 3D graphics, but he didn't explain it very well. Then we started working on Wing Commander III, and then I started to understand how the hardware worked and what a matrix was and how to invert matrices and all this other stuff - that basically has to do with linear algebra.

KH:

After that, I went and challenged a lot of courses at the University of Maryland University College to get my computer science degree. Some of the stuff that I gave them was how I figured out how 3D rotations work and cosine and sine and all that stuff. That was part of my getting some credits waived so that I wouldn't have to take a bunch of classes for my computer science degree. So as trial by understanding and working with other people and programming and 3D graphics - I always do it first and then go back and get my degree.

AR:

It means you're prepared at least.

KH:

Yeah.

AR:

Could you tell us a little bit about Stellar Giant?

KH:

It was almost a Futurescape type of thing where I had - me and another guy were going to start trying to start up a studio to do some games again and things like that. It turned into me basically doing a lot of contract work and doing miscellaneous things that had nothing to do with games a lot. What ended up happening was when I took Signature Devices onto AWS back in 2013, I got up to speed on how to work with cloud infrastructure. We had this project called Fatty Apple, which was an online gaming thing where you could go into web browsers and play games and you could connect with people and all that - so online gaming before anybody knew what online gaming was.

KH:

We had our own servers at Futurescape in a warehouse in Hurricane Electric over in East Bay - our own rack, and I had set up the whole rack and stuff like that. Then when AWS came out, I was like, "Oh, this is great. We should just move over there." I tore down the rack and moved everything onto AWS, but that gave me experience on cloud infrastructure back in 2013. After Signature Devices went dormant because of the Wii crash... We did a bunch of games for the Wii, like Reader Rabbit and all that. That's also when Graffiti Entertainment was spun up. I left, again out of necessity, and it's like, "Okay, I need to start earning some cash here." Then people started asking me, "Hey, you're really good at AWS. Can you help us?" Eddie Bauer wanted me to help them scale their systems off of their Cobalt because they were having problems with that. I just kept getting asked to go into these different places because I knew AWS really well and how to scale systems.

KH:

I was kind of bouncing around between different contracts. That's also where that Athos Wear thing come up too. "Oh, hey, we'll hire you, come work on this stuff." Same thing with another company called Telly. I wasn't originally going to work for them. It was really under Stellar Giant. It was my contracting firm, but it originally started out as we were going to do games, but there was just no funding for us to start to build a studio in Stellar Giant. Out of necessity, I just started doing contract work to pay my bills type of thing to do that.

AR:

Right. I wish you would've gotten to flex your design muscle a little bit more. It seems like you got very close and many different opportunities and never quite got to do it.

KH:

Well, that's not true now. That's the only thing about AI.

AR:

Right. Actually, before I move on to Genius Ventures, can you quickly touch on Graffiti Entertainment?

KH:

Sure. Yeah. So again, Roger Arias, who I had worked with again on contract for a company called - what was the name of the company in Minnesota? Roger Arias worked for Destineer. So I was helping Destineer, again, on contract. Roger Arias and I met about 25 years ago, and there was a project that was screwed up and they brought me in to analyze it. I was going to take it over, and then they killed it. I'm like, [sarcastically] "Okay, great, thanks." He hired me to analyze it and everything, and then I was expecting this contract, but then he killed the project because it was so messed up and he ran out of funds. Anyway, he had his brother and I had connected as well, and I had started Signature Devices. He's like - somebody named... God, what was his name?

KH:

So we were doing games at Signature Devices. We were doing games for Global VR, and I had worked on CryTek and a bunch of other ones, just doing dev work. We worked on Medal of Honor and a bunch of other things. Then we had started to develop our own games again to build the studio at Signature Devices. Originally, Signature Devices was started because I came out of NVIDIA and we were going to build these devices for the military. There were 5,000 by 5,000 displays with interconnected NVIDIA GPUs, but couldn't get a military contract because you have to know somebody; you have to be in there. So we started doing hired hitman stuff, working on other projects. Then this guy named Doug, who was a marketing guy, said, "Hey, you're doing all these PC games. Why don't you just become a publisher?" And I'm like, "Well, Signature doesn't really denote a name for a game company." And Roger Arias, a friend, he's like, "Hey, I have this name that I had for a long time and you're welcome to it called Graffiti Entertainment." I'm like, "Oh, I love that. We'll take that and we'll start doing games and become a publisher and a studio."

KH:

So we took in a bunch of games and I kind of project-managed them and shipped a bunch of games under Signature Devices/Graffiti Entertainment. We finally got a publishing license with Nintendo and almost with Microsoft, but not quite. I think we had a Sony license (for the Sony PSP) and a Nintendo license, but Microsoft wouldn't give us one, even though we were doing Xbox Live games and we had started writing our own game engine. The reason we wrote our own game engine was because Global VR, we did Far Cry Instincts and then we were writing [for another project with] Marvel Comics. It was Marvel, then it was the other brand. It switched. Whatever Superman and Wonder Woman are in, that's the one it ended with.

AR:

That's not Marvel, that's DC Comics, right?

KH:

Yeah. So Global VR didn't want to pay the $350,000 licensing fee for CryTek engine. I worked on the CryTek engine and I'm like, "Hey, we already started writing our own back before Unity did. Why don't we just enhance this and we can use it for the arcade games because it's 90% written." They're like, "Oh, that's great." So we used our own engine called the Elemental Engine. Then Graffiti, who was the publishing arm - Signature Devices became the development arm of everything. That lasted for a while until we had Navarre Distribution who didn't pay a million dollars of an invoice that we had sent them. We put together and mortgaged everything to the hilt to basically build the projects, got it out to GameStop. GameStop had sold most of it, but they wanted to return some of one product.

KH:

Then Navarre decided they were going to go bankrupt because they didn't have any money, so they didn't pay us about a million dollar invoice. I was like, "Okay, well, I'm out again." So that's where Stellar Giant came in. So that's kind of how Graffiti Entertainment was born. It's still around, has a bunch of games, and we're going to reintegrate that with Genius Ventures.

AR:

That actually leads us to a perfect transition. Could you tell us about Genius Ventures?

KH:

Yeah, so in 2016 I was doing the Stellar Giant stuff and I got interested in blockchain because they were using graphics processing units and I didn't know why. I couldn't buy a graphics card except for at double what it normally costs. I got mad and I'm like, "What the hell are they using graphics cards for in the blockchain? This doesn't make any sense." So I tore apart proof of work and realized very quickly that proof of work was exactly the same thing as AI processing. I'm like, "Oh, okay, but they're wasting all these cycles. They could just be doing AI. Instead of wasting and doing random data, why don't we just do that? What is happening with the GPUs? Are other people using them? It's killing games, the price of the GPUs for games, so it's taking away from games, but are there other industries that can use the AI?"

KH:

I found this thing called Folding at Home and they were doing protein folding analysis to cure cancer. That's great. That's a better use of proof of work than just random data. Let's just do protein folding. I'm looking around and all the GPUs are going into people's houses and they're just doing proof of work to do mining to make money. I'm like, "Well, that's not very good for society." We could cure cancer instead of you earning a couple more bucks on mining, let's cure cancer or help cure cancer. "I don't think people understand that there's tons of GPUs (that aren't those high-end GPUs) that you use for graphics that can be used for AI and we can help cure cancer. So I'm going to architect this mesh network for my career, knowing games, working at NVIDIA, working at Google for four years in the cloud business, working on AWS.

KH:

So Genius Ventures was actually formed as a culmination of my entire career into one product (out of necessity again) and me wanting to learn why they were using GPUs. So we started on that and I patented it and I wrote the architecture and hired a couple engineers out of Russia. We worked for a couple years together on it and designed most of it. Then the Russian-Ukrainian war broke out and I couldn't pay them anymore. So that kind of stalled things. Then in 2019, just after I had filed the patent, Google came to me and said, "Hey, you have all this cloud experience. We need your help as a project manager." I said, "No, I don't really want to do that. I want to work on this stuff." Then they're like, "Well, just come interview with us." I said, "Okay, I'll come interview with you and see what's going on there." I kind of liked what I was going to be doing because it was easy work and I could do my own stuff while I was interviewing and all that.

KH:

Then they made me an offer, an offer I couldn't refuse. I'm like, "Holy mackerel, that's a lot of money and that's a lot of stock, are you sure?" I mean, this stuff is pretty easy to do. They're like, "That's what we pay everybody else." I'm like, "All right, here's my patent. Are you guys interested in building this product or can I continue to work on this? Here's the patent, here's everything that it does and it's in crypto." They're like, "No, no, we don't want to have anything to do with crypto." I said, "Well, it's AI and crypto." "No, no, no, we don't care. Nothing to do with crypto. No, you can work on it [in your own time], you can keep the patent." I filed a form with them, the attorneys all signed off on it that I could work on it, but I had to work on it on my own computers on my own time.

KH:

Then the pandemic hits in 2020 and guess what happened? "Everybody go home, work on your own computers and your own stuff, and then check in every once in a while for a couple hours to do product project management." So from 2000 to about 2023, I was working at home on Genius Ventures the whole time because project management is so simple. You have a meeting for an hour, you solve a few problems that take people hours and solve a few problems. Half the people aren't even working because of the pandemic anyway. It's almost like we're laid off, but we're still getting paid.

KH:

So four years go by and I'm going to quit on March 25th (my four-year anniversary) because I've fully vested all my stock in everything. In January of 2023, they say, "We're going to lay off 10,000 people and Ken, you're one of those people. So, we're going to lay everybody off as of March 31st, and if you stay till March 31st without quitting, we'll give you six months severance." I'm like, "I was going to quit on March 25th, so I'll stay here." I'll tough it out. [laughs] Between January, they cut off your email too. When they said they were laying you off, it's like, "No, you're just going to have to do nothing for six months and you have no access to your email. You have no access to anything. You just have to sit around and wait." Well, that's weird. Okay, sure. So I had no [Google email] access from January 2023 through to the end of March 2023. I was free to work on my stuff and I'm still getting paid and I got six months severance on top of it. So it was beautiful. Then I restarted Genius Ventures.

KH:

Around that time in about 2021, I'm sitting in bed with my wife and she's playing this video game called Gardenscapes. I remember this distinctly, it was probably October 30th of 2020 probably, somewhere in there. Let's see, about four or five years, 2021 probably. I got a ding on my phone, $30 on Apple Pay on the Apple store. I'm like, "What are you doing? 30 bucks. What are you playing? Let me see that game." Oh my God, I could rewrite this thing in three weeks. "Why are you doing that?" "Well, they put ads in there and I don't like the ads. I want to get past it so I can play in my garden." So she became my muse. I'm like, "I've got to kill the ads industry. This is so ridiculous." I go back and look, and she had spent $600 in 2020 on this game and another $600 in 2022. I'm like, "Oh my God, you're a whale. You're one of the whales, because you're so impatient." [laughs] She's like, "Yeah, but it's entertainment. It's cheap entertainment. It's 600 bucks a year. It's cheap entertainment." Okay, sure. [laughs]

KH:

Then my daughter was playing Roblox and she's making these beautiful houses in there in Bloxburg. We go and look at these things - these mansions and the architecture. We we're blown away. She's like 10 or 11 years old (she's 14 now). We're looking and I'm going, "Wow, those are beautiful. You should make those in NFT and sell those," because NFTs were coming out on the blockchain. She's like, "You can't. You can't do that kind of stuff in Roblox." I'm like, "What are you talking about?" I go and I look and sure enough, you can't trade Bloxburg money. You can't have somebody else buy your houses. You actually have to be a developer and make your own cities and stuff like that in order to collect money. I'm like, "Well, that's stupid. You're a creator and you're paying $20 a week to build these houses for your friends and you can't make money. Okay, I've got to kill Bloxburg too and Roblox because this is crazy." It's so much money out the door and I was in the gaming district.

KH:

Around that time, I was talking with Apple about a GPU manager position. Me and the other GPU manager guy got to talking about how optimized the iPhones were because I was talking OpenGL the whole time and he's like, "Do you realize that we've switched from OpenGL to something called Metal and Android switched to something called Vulkan? The reason we did that is we've optimized for battery life on your phone and even the AAA games are now using only 50% of your maximum GPU. All of a sudden, light bulbs start turning on. I'm like, "Wait a minute, that means I can do AI in the background on these 2D games because I know how much GPU the [more intensive] 3D games use. I know those other ones were only using about 5% or 10% of the GPU then.

KH:

There's like 40% of the GPU sitting there idle that we could use for AI. Okay, this is interesting. I'm going to build a smart contract that allows you to basically create a game token. While you're playing a game, you can basically get paid in in-game tokens for your device doing AI processing that can help cure cancer. I'm like, "This is brilliant." So that's what I did. I did that about four years ago. I read all the smart contracts and I started to realize that this can go onto any plain old application. It could be on a streaming application because they're not using the GPU at all. It could be on a music application, a video streaming application... My buddy, Roger, who gave me the Graffiti Entertainment name, says, "Hey, I sleep with my iPad because it generates noise for me so that I can sleep." I'm like, "It's not using the GPU at all. We can use it while you're sleeping. You can make money while you're sleeping." It's a great system.

KH:

What we built was a monetization channel for developers. I already have a game in development that I've been designing for a few years. So when Genius AI launches, I can just sit back, make games and design games, and I don't have to worry about how to monetize them anymore. Now as a developer, I can sit there and put my game out for free, take 30% of the cut for doing AI processing, give 70% to the person that's playing my game. They'll sit there and use the tokens to buy the in-game garden - like my wife would do - and turn around and the developer gets 100%. She doesn't have to pay anything. The developer (or other enterprise companies) automatically earns money by doing AI processing to help cure cancer.

KH:

They pull their game down, link with our software development kit, relaunch your game and start making money from every player. So this whole thing turned into my dream of being able to just sit back after it's launched here in January and just make games that feed this system - to do AI to cure cancer. I don't have to worry about monetization. I don't need to worry about finding paid players anymore. I don't need to market anything. I just need to make great games that have no ads in them and no annoying things like that. I could just get back to making great games and designing great games. If you go to docs.gnus.ai/neospace, you'll see the game I've been working on that I've architected and designed entirely myself.

KH:

Actually, there's another thing that I worked on with Roger called Runelords. This guy named David Farland wrote this set of books called Runelords, which I read (it's a good science fiction kind of thing). There's these things called Reavers in there. It took me a while to get this right, but see, [shows animations from an in-development game) there's the animated Reaver. See, the animation, his arms aren't animated because it's a quadruped and quadrupeds usually don't have arms like this, but I can take this into Blender and get the arms rigged as well, but this was actually just rigged in here. So there's a couple attempts at it, but you can see this is without rigging. I mean, look at how kind of gruesome that looks. This was from a description of the reavers inside that book. Roger and I always wanted to do the game for this called Runelords.

KH:

We had attempted that. We actually did a demo with a CryTek engine back when we had Signature Devices on this game. Then Roger's going to join me because he's a good designer of games too. He has a bunch of designs. My wife wants to do a dog show [game] and a bunch of other things. Genius is kind of my mechanism for me to be able to just sit back and rake in money for AI happening across the world - to focus on making games that people enjoy. It's been a journey, but now I've figured out a way where I'll never have to go back to work for anybody else. I can just design games and make games, which has been kind of my goal since the 90s.

KH:

AI turned into my passion as well - helping the world cure cancer and other medical issues and all that kind of stuff. So I have two passions now, doing games and using my background to help the world with AI and technology.

AR:

Where'd your interest in the latter - the giving back and the curing cancer with crowdsourced or distributed computing - where'd that come from? Other than just, we're humans and goodwill?

KH:

After 45 years of doing things in technology, you get older and you get more wisdom and you're like, "What am I doing?" I mean, this is fun and stuff, and people are entertained by it, but it's not having am impact. What's my legacy going to be for my children? You get some wisdom in you growing older. I was given a lot of brainpower and a lot of technology and things like that for a reason. For a lot of years, I asked God, "What the hell am I doing on earth? This is fun and all, and I like doing this, but there's got to be more than me just having fun and getting through life. You need me to do something while we're here. I know that earth is a lesson. What is my lesson? What am I supposed to be doing here?" In 2016, he finally answered, and it's been answer after answer after answer since 2016: how I am going to have the greatest impact I can have on the world and leave a legacy for people to say, "Hey, Ken Hurley was a good human being and he did this and he did that and he contributed. Everything he was given, he gave back more than he was given."

KH:

I don't know, just getting old I guess. All of a sudden you're like, "What am I doing with my life?" I mean, it's fun and I like doing it and it's a passion, but you have to give back more than you were given. Tt triggered when I was 55 years old somehow. I'm about to turn 62 and I still love doing all this stuff. Now it also gives me the ability to keep my brain going and keep my drive going because now I have a set of problems or a set of things that I can help solve with the 45 years of technology experience that I was given.

AR:

Right, right. It gives you a goal to shoot towards too. I appreciate hearing your outlook.

AR:

We're just about wrapped up here, but I had a little question. I don't know if she would be comfortable with it, but I've always wanted to interview Lisa Ching or at least speak to her. If you're still in contact, would you maybe be able to ask her if I could reach out?

KH:

Sure. Yeah.

AR:

She'd be comfortable with that?

KH:

Oh, I'm sure she would be comfortable. She's such a nice person. I believe she wouldn't have any problem. I might have her email here somewhere too. She's in San Ramon still, so let's see if I can message her. Let's see if I have her actual email though.

AR:

Something about Lisa Ching that always cracked me up is she wrote a sound driver for the Genesis and she called it Lisa's Sound Driver, LSD.

KH:

[Back when I knew Lisa] I was working out tremendously at the time, and she would come to me and ask me to berate her so that she would go work out at the gym too. I said, "Lisa, you've got to..." So she come to see me. "Give it to me." I'm like, "What? Okay. Lisa, if you don't go work out, you're going to turn into a pear shape and your butt's going to get really big and you're going to..." And she's like, "Okay, okay, okay!" Then she'd go work out. It was hilarious. She would come up to me when she wasn't feeling motivated and ask me to basically berate her until she went worked out. It was the most funniest thing. [laughs]

AR:

[laughs] Hey, whatever works.

KH:

Oh yeah, I have her email, so let's see if I can... I'll just tell her I had a great interview with you and that she should talk to you about the Sega Genesis days and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, she was great to work with. I loved her. She was so fantastic to work with and super nice.

AR:

By the way, this has been a super pleasant interview on my end as well. Normally, I don't quite get this comfortable, and I really appreciate just the back and forth. It's been very nice speaking with you.

KH:

Yeah. I didn't mind it at all. I always like this kind of stuff.

AR:

Yeah, it's always very cool hearing - I always appreciate oral histories because I think hearing that perspective on... I think I'd mentioned this in the email, but just that perspective on that era and that time period is so valuable. Those are such formative years, formative decades for the current game industry - which is massive, but it's also not a very well-understood industry. It's looked at through either the lens of "it's extremely nostalgic" or "it's super crappy." It's just great hearing a very real perspective on it, I suppose.

KH:

Well, you should definitely get ahold of Dan Geisler. He wrote the Road Rash series back in the day, and he's a great guy too. Carl Mey would be a little hard to get ahold of... I actually think he might have passed away. I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure he passed away. There's been a lot of people that I know that passed away too. Daniel Button, who was Daniella Button in the end. It's kind of weird to me because I've had people much younger than me pass away and I'm just like, "What's going on?" It's sad.

KH:

I appreciate everything you're doing here. I love that you're documenting these things. Like I said, I'm going to probably try to write a book because I have some other things in my childhood that are outside of the Sega Genesis stuff that I think are kind of interesting. And I'm happy. I'm really happy right now with what I'm doing. That's the whole thing. It's like you realize money's not going to... Being a billionaire is not going to make you happy. What's going to make you happy is impact, your legacy, doing what you love. I used to be driven by money because we were so poor when I first started, but I'm not anymore. Money is secondary now. It's more of, "Hey, look, I can change the world and cure cancer with my technology background and help facilitate other people [doing the same] so they can do it faster." That makes me happy more than, "Oh, I have another million dollars in the bank. Who cares?" I'm not going to take it with me. It's inconsequential for me to be a billionaire

AR:

There's a legacy to live.

KH:

Yeah. I feel it's going to happen just because I know how this monetization thing's going to roll, but it's like maybe I take that money and do some other impact to change the world. Who knows?

AR:

Yeah. Again, I'm super appreciative for everything that you shared with me. This was an incredible interview. Really, thank you so much Ken.

KH:

All right. Thanks, Alex. Bye.

AR:

Bye-bye.

Transcript sourced from https://segaretro.org/Interview:_Kenneth_Hurley_(2025-12-04)_by_Alexander_Rojas and migrated into devquoted with linked people, tags, source metadata, and media where available.

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