Interview: MarkeyJester (2025-12-20)
MarkeyJester speaks with Alexander Rojas in this google meet interview for Sega Retro.
by Alexander Rojas with MarkeyJester
Sega Retro · December 20, 2025
This Sega Retro interview with MarkeyJester was conducted by Alexander Rojas via google meet.
AR:
[carrying off from pre-interview conversation]
AR:
Yeah, I'm really surprised at the amount of passion that we have for non-Sonic stuff there. I was a little worried. I still get a little worried. I guess this kind of ties into what we're going to be talking about today - one of many things, not focusing entirely on this - but about feeling that you're... Because sometimes I'll put so much work into one of my interviews. I don't know if I mentioned, but the David Galloway one that I did recently was a 4-hour interview that took me over 12 hours of working on it. That's just the minimum estimation. I'm sure I probably spent 12 hours and a lot of mental anxiety because it [the transcription project] just kept going and going.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah.
AR:
That was 12 hours straight of my life, and just three months of work in total. I'm just not sure how many people saw it or even cared. [hesitant] No, that's not true because I know- I'm sorry.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, the real world is quite harsh and you are going to enter into a field where there's high competition. There are people who are ultimately skilled and you don't find out how brilliant they are until 100 years later and people are teaching history about them. Think of half the scientists who ever lived. They've done these extraordinary things. Nobody ever knew about them until 100 years later. You're not the big thing until after you're long gone. It's sad, but that's just the way things are.
AR:
No, I feel you.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, especially creative people - only a small percentage of very creative people make it big. That's because the competition is so high. The real life mechanisms don't really support creativity. It's just the way things are. As long as you keep going, you don't give up, right?
AR:
Right, right. Yeah, motivation is certainly a problem sometimes.
MARKEYJESTER:
It can be. I bet it can be. But you can't let a few flops get in the way. If you give up, that's when you fail. You got to keep going. I'll be honest with you. When you said you were going to interview me, I thought, "Ah, ain't that cute? Someone wants to interview me. Yeah, go on then. I'll do it for a laugh. It'll be a load of fun." And then I was looking at the list of stuff that you sent me and like, you interviewed Tom Kalinske and Brenda Cook and like, bloody hell, you want to interview me? I'm not even in that kind of area. I'm not even close. But it's pretty amazing. You should be very proud of yourself for getting those contacts and putting all that work, thinking very thoughtfully about the questions. It must have been nerve-wracking, right, to interview those guys?
AR:
You know what? Yeah, actually it was, and thank you by the way. When I first got started, yeah, I was super nervous. My first interview was a Google Meet interview like we're doing now with Michealene Cristini Risley who basically ran Sega of America's licensing department. The company was doing licensing before she arrived, but she was the one that actually said, "We are Sega of America. We're getting up to over 50% of market share. We need a gosh dang dedicated licensing department." She convinced Tom Kalinske and upper management to allow her to do that. She also gave me a chance. And I just - I message her every now and then and I'm like, "Dude, thank you so much." I was nobody. I just emailed - I don't remember how I did it because it wasn't on LinkedIn. I want to say I was doing her Sega Retro page. I was doing some research on her so I could find some stuff and I stumbled across an email address. And anytime you find an email address on a developer- that's not as common as it used to be. So I was just kind of like, "Oh, this is a valuable opportunity. I wonder if I could reach out and ask her questions." Then I sat there typing out some questions. I was like, "Oh, why don't I just try an interview?" I had never done an interview before. But I've seen them on TV.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah.
AR:
I know that you ask questions of someone. That was kind of about it. I also knew that - because I've seen a lot of interviews in the past, especially Sonic interviews - a lot of the questions, not all of them are great. The ones that are pretty good, they'll ask very specific questions and questions that I felt like I wasn't smart enough, or I didn't have the extensive years of experience on the Sonic scene to ask those kind of smart questions. So I just started doing them open-ended, like "Can you tell me about what it was like back then?" I found that anyone can answer a yes or no question.
MARKEYJESTER:
Mhm.
AR:
I could send a developer a list of 50 questions that are just yes, no. But their input wouldn't be anything more than a checkbox. I want to hear people talk. I want them to guide the story. These interviews aren't for me to talk. It's for my interviewee to talk. But it was so nerve-wracking at first. I used to do my interviews - I would call the person, I would have a printed out list of questions, I would turn the call recording app on my phone on, and then I would stand in the parking lot outside of my work because that's the only place I got reception at work (and I usually had to do these at work). Then I would just pace, just standing there in the parking lot for 3 hours. Looking back at it now, it's funny how ramshackle I was in regard to my approach to some of this stuff, but that's how you learn.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, I don't know if you've ever heard of Nardwuar.
AR:
Yes, yeah, oh yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. He interviews rappers and he comes up with all sorts of old merch and asks them, "Do you remember this? How the hell do you know that?" There was - I don't want to say it's a TED talk because it might not be - but he was telling people about how he did all these interviews and how he found all this information out and the best way of doing the interview. This goes back to you going ahead and being brave and contacting them. He said, "You know how I found out? I asked. It's just simple. You just ask."
AR:
Yes, absolutely. People don't ask enough, and that was also another reason I started doing the interviews - I would go on the forums or something and I would see threads and threads of 80 pages, 100 pages, 150 pages speculating "was this this, was this that, was this this," and it's like just "Email the dude." There were some cases where I'd see people who have been debating something for years and then I just emailed the dude and two days later I get an answer back and it's like, "Well, that took me seven minutes." Not that there isn't room for that kind of debate, but I always feel like that kind of debate should be left for after you've already exhausted all your options and you can't reach out to the developers.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh yeah, no, I completely agree and this was the point I was bringing up - perhaps the reason why people were speculating would be because they don't want to contact the people because maybe it would seem rude or impolite, or maybe they feel that the people are busy working on important things. But on the contrary, it could be that maybe they're just desperate for an interview.
AR:
Some people are very eager.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, they're like, "Oh, finally, somebody's acknowledging the work that I did." Because a lot of these people, they're paid to do the job and then that's it. Their name is in the credits. Nobody knows who they are. I didn't know who Tom Kalinske was until 20 years after they were gone.
AR:
Yeah, that's definitely the case for - that's the case for so many people. A lot of these people are just happy to talk. Most of the time, if someone actually agrees to an interview and they take the time to sit down, they're going to tell you a story. They've already signed up to tell you their story. There's very few people I've actually come across that - I've actually been very lucky because no one's really rejected me. I've definitely had some people say "No, I'm not interested." But it's always been polite. It's also something that people don't quite keep in or don't quite remember because it's not quite as topical in their minds.
AR:
I think the game industry burned a lot of people. Not only did the game industry burn a lot of people, but Sega burned a lot of people. A lot of people were not happy with STI in its later years. A lot of people were not happy with their projects being cancelled all the time.
AR:
God bless Brenda. Almost everything that she ever did throughout her career at Sega got cancelled in some form or another, really for none of her fault. It was usually that things were given to her that weren't always quite well planned out, or they would be - and actually this is unfortunate, but there's kind of a common trend among female game developers, of them being given projects that don't go anywhere or projects that they'll work on and work on and then they'll be canceled and cut from the game. Especially with Brenda - Brenda frickin' came up with the name Miles Prower. She's where we get Miles "Tails" Prower. It's just so funny that no one wrote that down. Then for years on Sonic Retro, we had it listed that someone else, like "Yamaguchi had come up with the name." Yamaguchi came up with the character. He didn't come up with the name, but this is still on Wikipedia. I'm kind of getting off topic here, but yeah-
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no, no, believe you me, I'm interested in this. I didn't actually know this either. I have to confess I've not actually seen any of - I've not actually read them all. I haven't had much time because I had to head to Manchester yesterday and I had to head out for my brother the day before, so I have to apologize in advance. I've only found out that you've done all these interviews a few days ago. But no, I had no idea Brenda came up with the name for Miles "Tails" Prower. That's quite the legacy, but nobody knows about it. That's insane.
AR:
Right. I was telling her, it's like this is a - if you take Sonic out of the equation, the money is not going to be as much, but this is a character alone that probably makes millions of dollars for this company. It would almost be like - and actually this is kind of true - Mario is more recognizable than Jesus Christ on planet Earth.
MARKEYJESTER:
I believe that.
AR:
Yet we don't - I'm not making that up. They've done tests for that. Yet we really don't know about a lot of the history in the game. We didn't even know when Mario 1 was released in the United States, when it was first released. The only way that we know now is... I want to say one of the developers [on the American publishing team] was like, "We released Mario and then we got Bloody Marys at X Bar." Some person [game historian] went to X Bar and was like, "In 1985 or whatever, what day did you have Bloody Mary days?" And they said, "Oh, Friday." Then they were able to look at some calendars and tie some stuff together. But it's just so funny how such large formative elements of culture, especially game culture, can exist without any documentation - or just garbage documentation - on the history of it. I think it's important to understand where this stuff comes from. When you go and look up the history of it and it's either non-existent or just completely incorrect, it just does a disservice for everyone. We can do a lot better than that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well yeah, to play devil's advocate, they probably didn't realize how big Mario would have been. So why would you document something if you don't - there's half the stuff I didn't bother documenting and I've forgotten I even done any of that stuff. Imagine what these guys are like. They didn't know they necessarily had a hit in their hands. It was just a job for them.
AR:
Right. It's always funny what people do and don't remember. That's partly why I do my interviews with an oral history lean. Because if I sit here with a list of questions that are just yes or no questions - did you remember this or what's this on this - a lot of them are just going to be no. But if I ask someone what it was like, they're going to remember something. It might not be the thing that I want them to remember, but they're not going to remember that anyway. So if I asked about that specifically, they're not going to remember. But asking an open-ended question not only gives us some insight into what we're talking about, but more importantly, it allows a platform for the individual to speak.
AR:
Also I'm a very firm believer in: I want to do my interviews about the person. I know I'm on Sega Retro and I know I have Sega focused interviews, but in a perfect world, I think the interviews would be mostly Sega and then we'd spend the rest of it covering that person's life and career. Because we wouldn't have that Sega involvement if not for that life and career, so that is tied to Sega in a way. Also it's respectful. People aren't just - I think that's kind of a trap that a lot of older interviews can fall into - people are so much more than their work with Sonic or Sega. To just focus on that one part kind of does a disservice to that person and their background, because asking about the background before they got to Sega and after they got to Sega are almost just as important sometimes.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I agree. One thing you mentioned about asking open-ended questions - I'm not saying this is necessarily 100% related, but investigators who are interviewing potential criminals, they usually ask open-ended questions rather than closed-ended questions to understand their thought process.
AR:
And I do work with a bunch of criminals. [laughs]
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] Really?
AR:
No. I'll tell you a funny story when we're off this call.
MARKEYJESTER:
You mean to tell me Brenda did what?
AR:
Brenda no! Stop!
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs]
AR:
No, y'know I was - because I've done more interviews than are listed there. So I was trying to think back because... Who knows, maybe one of my interviewees did do - honestly if I think about it, I'm sure if you went through all of my interviews you could find a part where... probably when they were kids. When they were like, "Oh, I did this dumb thing as a kid," or something like that. But everyone I speak to is pretty on the level. What's interesting most is how they feel about their time at Sega, because I mentioned Sega burned a lot of people. But that's not true for everyone - depending on your role, depending on when you were there... Especially with Sega Technical Institute. Were you there in the early days or the later days?
AR:
If you were there in the early days, you probably enjoyed quite a lot of your time there. It was in the later days - and I'm sorry, Roger Hector - if you were there after Roger Hector took Mark Cerny's spot, then you probably didn't have a good time. Again, I'm sorry Mr. Hector; if you're reading this. I apologize. Maybe I'll interview you one day and we'll get another perspective on that. But yeah, a lot of people weren't happy with his management style. I think that the most eloquent way of putting it was that- he was STI's studio director from '93 to '96. So he was basically the head of Sega Technical Institute and he just - again most eloquently here - he didn't engage as well as he could with his staff. A lot of staff felt that he was just kind of barking orders at them, or- he also just had an aversion to taking responsibility- y'know I'm getting a little off topic here.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no. Look, at the end of the day, if he is listening, he might have a logical explanation for it that maybe we don't know about. It'd be one hell of a good interview, wouldn't it?
AR:
Right, right. Just because - the internet will do that... Let me take a step back. The internet has gotten me very used to the fact that you could be presented a story on someone or an angle on someone and then have all of this logical, believable story that it's like, "Yeah, man, that person sucked." Then you speak with them and you find out that's not the case at all, or that is kind of the case but there was some confusion going on. So I said all that cautiously because I- it's tricky because I do have it written onto the STI article on Sega Retro that part of the reason why the studio did go into decline was his very poorly received management style. I wrote it very objectively, factually, but- because it's something that I have to document, but I don't [always] super feel comfortable doing it. So I'd love to go to Roger Hector and be like, "Hey-" I don't know how I'd phrase it. [laughs] "A lot of people bumped heads with you."
AR:
I'll tell you a story from an interview that I haven't published yet. One of the Sega VR developers was Futurescape Productions. Small game studio in California. Futurescape had a finance guy named Bill. I do not remember his last... Bill...
MARKEYJESTER:
Lumbergh? [laughs]
AR:
I don't remember. [laughs] No.
MARKEYJESTER:
"Uhmm, so... I'm gonna have to ask you to..." No no no.
AR:
Ken's OK with me telling this story because it was part of our interview. They were at like a Christmas party or something, and Bill had gotten super super drunk. Ken was in the bathroom taking a piss or something. Maybe he was just washing his hands but I think he was taking a piss. Bill drunkenly kicks open the door or something and he's like "Aughbaughhbahg", screaming at Ken while he's taking a piss. Ken finishing taking a piss, turns around, and just clocks Bill in the face. He falls back to the ground, and Ken was like [recalling], "I didn't wanna do that. Because he's Bill, he's my finance guy, he's someone I know. I don't think I particularly care for him but I didn't wanna do that. But I had knocked him out because he was drunk and belligerent and I just wanted him asleep."
AR:
To his surprise: Bill hits the ground, sits there for like two seconds, and then bounces back up and starts screaming at him again in like an alcoholic-energy-fueled rage. So frickin' funny.
MARKEYJESTER:
What? Are you sure this is real? Are you sure you've interviewed the right guy?
AR:
I know, right? I've actually interviewed both- the Futurescape boys have been very nice to me. Everyone at Futurescape has been very nice. Just for a little context, that was a studio... Electronic Arts had a lot of babies. They were a huge company. They're still a huge company. Very prolific. They had a lot of people - and I think they almost encouraged this to a little degree - where they just had so much staff, so much smart staff, that had their own ideas. Every now and then a small group of the Electronic Arts staff would get together and found their own company. Futurescape was one of those.
AR:
They were going to be kind of a tools and technology-focused [peripherals] third-party R&D studio for Sega. So Sega came to them with the planned launch title for the Sega VR and the planned launch title for the Menacer. The Menacer was going to have Monster Hunter; no relation to the Capcom game. Sega VR was going to have Nuclear Rush, which is the Video Game History Foundation release that came out a little while ago. That company was founded by Ken Hurley, the guy who I was talking to, and Kevin McGrath, who I also did an interview with.
AR:
It's always funny. You'll go to the wiki sometimes and there'll be this huge, influential company that did all these super huge, influential games: we'll have like two to three sentences of writing on them. You go to Futurescape, who- I love Futurescape but they unfortunately weren't really allowed to do quite a whole lot during their existence, so they're [reticently] like a relatively small blip: we'll have just a mountain of incredibly detailed primary sources on them; primary information on them. [laughs] It's just the disconnect between what we care about and what we don't care about on Sega Retro that's super funny. Because partly [sometimes] it's half me and I'm a weirdo, so it'll reflect me after a while.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I mean... Going back to what I said before, very creative and very open people don't really survive in the real world. It's one of limitations. Going back to what you said about [Ken] hitting the finance guy. They're only human at the end of the day, y'know? Gotta let your energy out somewhere.
AR:
Right. That was kind of a funny one because Ken is a very sweet, gentle guy and you could tell that when he was saying that and when he was taking himself back to when that happened, he was like, "I didn't want to do this." Man, I wouldn't want to punch my finance guy either, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because he's handling my money and I'd be worried he'd be doing something.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, no, props to him for being honest about it, being completely honest, self-reflecting. That sounds like my kind of guy.
AR:
He's a cool guy. Most everyone I run into has been cool. I was talking about this earlier. Actually speaking of Sega VR, because I was reaching out to everyone who had worked on Sega VR just because I thought it was cool and weird. I got in touch with almost everyone. I haven't gotten in touch with the Iron Hammer guys because I know I can because it was NovaLogic or something and that's fine. I'll reach out to them.
AR:
But the one I was worried about was Matrix Runner, which was done by a company that we'd never heard of before called... ZCT Systems? Zumalt... Computer Technology? It was basically a small weird demo for 3D code on the 68000 using the Sega VR to just do some very basic POV head tracking stuff. But it was only developed by like two people. One of the first people I ever reached out to was one of those two people, and he said no. I was like, "All right, thank you very much. I appreciate the kindness." Then I went to the other guy who developed it, and he also said no. So that's two out of two people. That's 100% of all the people on the development team who do not want to talk about the game. Maybe I'll swing back around to that, but yeah, it's very easy to find dead ends in this kind of work.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, you did what you could, right? What else can you do?
AR:
Anyway, so I will get started here. Sorry for - thanks for entertaining my yapping for the first half an hour here.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh no, absolutely. This has been quite entertaining for me. It's nice. Despite the fact that I'm calm, I don't really like talking about myself very much. So it's quite a nice breather.
AR:
For these questions, you can tell me as much as you feel comfortable. Tell me as much as you care to tell me. If you'd like to talk for 5, 10 minutes on each one of these questions, that'd be great. If not, that'd be great as well. Just whatever you feel like giving. I think that's important.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. As I mentioned to you prior, it's really just about speaking the truth. Just be honest. There's going to be some things I'm going to say that maybe one or two people might be uncomfortable with, but it's going to be the truth, and that's just the way it should be.
AR:
Right. I don't imagine that you'll suddenly be saying it with malice either.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] What do you mean by malice?
AR:
Like you're not saying it with bad intent. You're just getting out the truth. So if anyone's reading this and they're like, "Oh, I didn't like this thing that he said or I didn't like this interpretation," you're obviously not saying it with any bad intent.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh no, of course not. But at the end of the day, if they want to get angry and bitter about it, then they're a free human being living in the free world. What am I going to do about it? Furthermore, I'm leaving to start a fresh life next year, so I won't be around to hear the response. So it just is what it is.
AR:
Right, yeah. You have a good outlook about it though. I appreciate that.
MARKEYJESTER:
You have to. You're only on the planet for a limited number of time.
AR:
Yeah. All right, so just to get started here, you were actually kind enough to - you'd written that big biography on your page and that helped out quite a lot. Just to get started- because you had mentioned when you were 15, this is when you first got into it, but before then, you did mention that you had a nostalgia for Sonic and I assume the Mega Drive, but could you elaborate on how your passion for video games first began as a very young kid?
MARKEYJESTER:
My father would buy me these consoles and games. I didn't actually have an interest in them directly. I didn't really make any requests. My mom said I was a pretty good kid, usually because I think she was quite the violent type. So I very rarely made demands of things. Usually kept to myself. It was usually my father who would - we'd go down to London and he'd buy - I found a receipt for my original Mega Drive that I had as a kid about the age of five, 1995, and it was £50. He got a Mega Drive 2 with a second controller. The second controller had a gray start button. So I later found out that that's for the Model 1. Obviously the Mega Drive 2 came with its own controller which had the red start button which is for the Model 2. He also bought the first Sonic the Hedgehog game, which interestingly - and I have no idea to this day how this happened - but it was a European box with a US cartridge. It had the US sticker design. I have no idea how that happened, but he just bought that because he was quite the haggler.
MARKEYJESTER:
I didn't know what it was. I never really asked for it or anything. I had no idea about any of this world. So that was my introduction. That was the first console I ever owned, and the first proper game that was mine that I ever actually played was Sonic the Hedgehog. I played a few things in the past before then. A few years before, my father had a CD-i.
AR:
Oh my gosh.
MARKEYJESTER:
I know, I know. Oh, I know. We played The Seventh Guest, The Apprentice, Chaos Control. Oh, there was one quite popular famous one. What was it called? It escapes me. The plot is a guy who is set in the future. I hesitate to say- it's the '90s version of the future, where-
AR:
Burn Cycle?
MARKEYJESTER:
Burn Cycle! That's it, yeah. Excuse me. Yeah, Burn Cycle. That's the one. I'm glad you picked up on that.
AR:
Very purples and pinks and blues, that kind of thing. FMV too.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh man, when you're a kid, it looks amazing. When you're three or four years old, it looks really cool. [laughs]
AR:
Yeah. [dumb kid voice] "Whoa, there's video on my TV screen!"
MARKEYJESTER:
Well no, it wasn't even like that. I'm too young to really understand. I've got no context, but yeah, so it wasn't the first thing I played, but it's the first thing that was actually given to me that was mine. But I never asked for it. I never asked for any of these things. That was just the way my father was. He got me a Nintendo 64 when I was about 6 years old, '96, with Mario 64. He got it secondhand and all that. He was a haggler. £50 for a Mega Drive 2.
AR:
£50. Wow.
MARKEYJESTER:
For a Mega Drive 2, I mean? 1995 I suppose, but-
AR:
It was a little later. Yeah, but that's still pretty dang impressive.
MARKEYJESTER:
'94 was when the new model came out, right? When the new box art - '93, '94, Model 2? So it's not too bad. I wasn't really a gamer and to this day I'm still not a gamer. Not really. I honestly - yeah, I get it. I understand that word, but I rarely play any games.
AR:
Right, right. Yeah, you're not the only one. I'm kind of in the same boat. I don't play games. I like to write and read about them and research them and expand the culture on them, but I just don't have the patience for sitting down and playing games like that anymore. Rarely.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I chalk it up to being too old, but what do I know?
AR:
No, me too. Me too. I just got too much other shit going on right now. Worried about bills.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] Kudos to that.
AR:
So you're 15, you're sitting in the chair at the school computer lab looking at the monitor and you saw the Sonic 2 beta pics. I just think that's such a cool experience, because a lot of us in the community did have that initial discovery where we're looking at the Sonic 2 beta page or something and they first get introduced to the mystery of Hidden Palace and all of this stuff, Dust Hill Zone, all that stuff. I just don't think that's romanticized enough. Could you possibly take us back to what you remember about making that discovery for the first time?
MARKEYJESTER:
We moved houses from one end of the city to the other end of the city and I'd pretty much lost everything. By lost I mean I lost all my friends - I hesitate to say friends. A friend I suppose. I think most of the kids in school probably tolerated me more than actually liked me. For whatever reason, maybe pitied me. I don't know. I seem to remember silly little things like my mom buying me some Sonic branded slippers - not stickers, sorry - they had little icons sewn on the front and I'd cut them off and take them to school. Silly stupid stuff like that. So they probably thought I was a bit autistic or insane or something like that.
AR:
[laughs] I feel like that's just what kids do.
MARKEYJESTER:
When I moved houses I never saw any of them - most of them never ever again. I moved into a new school, but I was also moving from - I'm trying to think of the Americanism - original school to high school. We call it secondary school here, but I was moving into high school. So not only did I have new people I've never met, but I had no friends I knew about coming into high school. So I was kind of a loner. Didn't really have many friends or anything.
MARKEYJESTER:
My old Mega Drive console - I can only assume my mom probably threw it in the skip or something like that. She just used to do these things which back then I probably would have thought it was out of hate or spite, but I don't know, as an adult, it's not like I'm sympathizing with her or anything like that. But we used to have a comic series here called Sonic the Comic. It was the Fleetway side. I know the Americas, they had the Archies. We had the Fleetway. And despite all the years, I must have only had about maybe eight issues in all that time because getting a comic was actually quite rare for me. I never had any pocket money as a kid. We were quite a poor family to be honest. Not that I resent any of that, but yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
We moved over to this new house. My console's gone. It'd been quite a few years and I'd never played my old Sonic games like I'd love to play back then. I was a bit of a Sonic nut as a kid. So having no friends and no real social life as it were - being trapped - I was keen to look at nostalgia. So I would go on to the library computers, which is probably the only time we ever actually even used a damn computer, and I would search up just old screenshots and maybe even some other Sonic games I'd never even played, other 2D stuff. I don't think I ever played Sonic CD or 32X. Of course, Chaotix never. I was looking and then I came across old screenshots of the beta levels from Sonic 2 because I guess they were somewhat popular by that time, 2005. When was Sonic 2 beta? 2002, was it? Probably.
AR:
That's an excellent question. I did not have that written down, but yeah, you're probably right.
MARKEYJESTER:
I think 2002. I'm sure someone could probably correct me on that. Maybe Cinossu. He'd probably know. But yeah, I would look at all these old things, get a bit of nostalgia for it, and some of the Sonic CD levels... I'd never ever played Sonic CD, so I'd never seen any of these levels. I think I came across one site. I couldn't tell you the site. I couldn't because I couldn't possibly remember, but I remembered seeing on the page talks of the Game Genie and then there was a screenshot of a hex editor. I'd never owned a Game Genie. Most people never did, but I made that mental association that the Game Genie was this hex editor. So I always thought, these levels you could access with the Game Genie, which was true, but I had this mental idea of making your own game by modifying the Sonic 2 cartridge using the Game Genie. Obviously there's only a limited number of codes you could put in there. So I was wrong, but that's not the point.
MARKEYJESTER:
I did eventually - I pieced it together eventually and realized that there was an emulator. I think I downloaded Gens. I didn't have Kega. This is 2005, 2006. I got ahold of a few ROMs off of - I couldn't tell you the site. I'm terribly sorry. My mind is long gone.
AR:
Was it CoolROMs? Sorry. [laughs]
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I don't think it was CoolROMs. I couldn't tell you.
AR:
That was just my website.
MARKEYJESTER:
YOUR website?
AR:
No, no, sorry, that was my preference [in where to get ROMs], not my website.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.
AR:
Yeah. [sarcastically] I'm a lot cooler than I come off.
MARKEYJESTER:
Like "Cool"ROMs?
AR:
[laughs] Stop.
MARKEYJESTER:
They alphabetized the list of ROMs and they had a few beta prototypes in there, and of course I downloaded Sonic 2 Beta. I think even Sonic 2 Delta was in there which again I thought was a prototype. I never really made the connection that there were modifications going on by the scene. We never had internet connection. We had a computer in 2002, but we didn't have internet connection until 2008. I had to rely on the library internet.
AR:
Oh my gosh.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, oh yeah. That's just the way things are. Like I said, we were quite a poor family. So I downloaded that. I also downloaded- No. I also printed, at one of the libraries, the entirety of Nemesis's hacking document, all of the ROM offsets for Sonic 1, all of the offsets for every single data. The page might even still be on Sonic Retro. If you dig far enough, you might find it. I printed every single page of that and took it home. I also printed off Sonic 2 Beta, some of the offsets for that as well. That was one of the first ones I modified when I got back home. I think I put it on an MP3 player, a cheap MP3 player that my father got me because you could use it as a memory storage device. So I put them on there and brought it home.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I was working on this hack at home, modifying with a hex editor I picked up from - I got the hex editor from a - you get those PC magazines, they come with a disc of software.
AR:
Yeah, yeah. PC Gamer and stuff.
MARKEYJESTER:
I never had any money to buy that stuff, but we had a lodger and he would buy it and he'd give me the disc. So I got the hex editor from that. Ironically, before any of this hacking nonsense, I kept it. Didn't realize what I could do with it, but it was nice seeing files with the hex editor. Yeah, that's basically it.
AR:
Then from there - do you recall that - because that would almost kind of end up being your first work when you took that home and then you were editing, I want to say you said tiles and palettes for some of the Sonic 2 Beta art. Do you recall anything from that initial learning process?
MARKEYJESTER:
I don't recall-
AR:
It's a long time ago.
MARKEYJESTER:
I remember quite vividly. I remembered that I didn't have a concept of sprites necessarily, like sprite shapes, individual pieces, but I do recall editing the tiles with a hex editor, punching those individual numbers in and seeing them change on the screen. I'd have to reboot the ROM every single time. I might have the modified ROM stored somewhere on a disc. I will dig for it after this interview and if I can find it, I'll give you a copy.
AR:
Please do.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I swapped Sonic for this other character, just some - it's difficult to describe. When I find the disc and find the ROM, if it still exists somewhere, if the discs haven't resorted to disc rot, then you'll be able to see what exactly it looked like. But I replaced it all. The great thing about Sonic 2 Beta, when he's lying down in the waiting phase, he eventually goes into a lying down phase. There are sprite pieces that went below the floor. So I modified that art to have it look like he had little legs just hanging off the side of the level. So he's just sitting on the flat floor and his legs were hanging off and he'd be kicking his leg on the floor waiting. It's difficult to describe unless I find it and show you, but yeah, I remember that was the first thing I did and it was mostly just art modifications. I never edited the palette, interestingly, but I understood the concept of there being a palette of colors. I never released the ROMs obviously because, yeah.
AR:
Do you remember what character you swapped Sonic out with?
MARKEYJESTER:
I didn't have a name for it.
AR:
Oh, it's just original.
MARKEYJESTER:
I've got some files somewhere of what it looked like. I'll show you after the interview.
AR:
That'd be super cool. I think that's an important part of your - and maybe we can even, I don't know how you feel about it, but we could even release [preserve] them, because that's historically notable.
MARKEYJESTER:
If I can find it. It's absolute rubbish by any standards. This is 15-year-old me.
AR:
You might not be where you are today without that. That makes it less rubbish. So what got you from doing this basic graphic replacement? What got you from doing that to actually learning assembly and starting to get into this for real?
MARKEYJESTER:
I'd done a few binary hacks again and again and again, each time starting from the beginning, just trying new things. When searching up Sonic Hacks on YouTube, one of the first things you would have seen would have been the classic Sonic Extended Edition by Cinossu and Sonic 2 Delta by Esrael. But Sonic Megamix would often come up and Sonic Megamix at that time - I think by about 2006, 2007 maybe they released 3.0. I think 2007. I might have my years mixed up but I distinctly remember obtaining a download of that ROM and playing it and being really amazed at all these extra moves they managed to add in. I was just really really curious about how they did it.
MARKEYJESTER:
I did eventually discover that there were disassemblies on Sonic Retro and where somebody had already reversed-engineered - I think it might be Hivebrain, drx, and Stealth. There might be a few other names, but I think they were the original. The credits are actually in the source code at the top. So there might be a name I've missed.
AR:
What did the disassemblies look like back then?
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh god, there were no equates, there were no macros. Other than - I think no, there wasn't even an align. They had included a binary file of the padding just to make it one with the original ROM. I think with exception there was one instruction which was an exchange instruction. The assembler wouldn't pay attention to the order of the registers. So if you're exchanging D3 with D2, it would do the exchange with D2 and D3, which does the same thing, but it provides the wrong op code. I don't think it was 2 and 3. I think it was 1 and 2, but the point still stands.
MARKEYJESTER:
The assembler they used was SNASM68K. It was the previous one. It had no include support. What would happen is there would be another program that would be running in the batch script which would run through the source code, find the include directives and find the file and automatically include that into one file called S1 Comb. It's a combined version which combines all of the includes into one big massive file. Then the assembler would be given that massive file.
MARKEYJESTER:
I remember very distinctly, I'll never forget this - the program that includes all the files together to create the S1 Comb, it can't actually create that file. You have to create that file and it just writes into there. So I had to search for this because it was bizarre to me. I think when they wrote the program they probably used fopen which is a standard function for opening files, but they used the R+B which is read and write but read has priority. So if there's no file there it won't read anything and thus it can't write anything. If they did W+B, maybe it would have been fine. But yeah, I had to search quite deep to find that information out, which is probably the reason why a lot of people failed on the disassemblies originally. If you didn't know to create that S1 Comb file, you wouldn't be able to assemble this damn thing.
AR:
Yeah, that's pretty roundabout. I think we've quite a long way since then.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. We've got assemblers that can do the include for us, which is nice. We don't have to worry about that silly S1 Comb thing. But one of the first things I looked at, I was looking at the disassemblies and there were guides for doing different things. I think one of the first things I did was modify the Monitor contents, which is a great first thing to do if you're starting out and you don't understand assembly. It's really great. You go in there and you look for the object which is I think 2E. 26 is the Monitor itself and 2E are the contents, and when it gets destroyed it creates the object 2E and the subtype decides what contents you're being given to the player, whether it's rings or shield or whatever. So putting in the Robotnik Monitor, which the graphics are already done for you - it's just unused - all you really had to do was put in a call to the death sequence. It's really easy, really simple. The one with the ring, you can change the number. It's just an immediate value. It's nice to change it from 10 to 50 or whatever you wanted. You can edit the graphics. It's very simple stuff but really exciting when you first do it. Now it's nothing, but back then, yeah.
AR:
I can imagine a lot of people getting their start with stuff like that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, you got to start simple. You got to just change things before you start writing your code. But I did eventually follow the Spin Dash guide and the Spin Dash guide is really absolutely awesome. It teaches you so many things. There's a lot of copy and pasting, but it teaches you about putting the Spin Dash art in the mappings, the pattern load cues, the animation sequence is written in there, and there's a section about putting in the Spin Dash sound. There's so many things in that one guide. If you follow it to the letter, it's amazing when it works and then you start thinking, well, maybe I can modify it. I really like the Super Peel Out. Maybe I can modify it and use that instead. Change it to be Super Peel Out. So instead of looking down, change the button presses to be up instead. You start doing these little changes and yeah, you start to learn from that. Start baby steps, one step at a time.
AR:
Right. Speaking of baby steps, your first proper hack was Sonic Regen. If your biography's to be believed. Could you tell us a little bit about Sonic Regen?
MARKEYJESTER:
Sonic Regen was built on top of the - as I just mentioned - the Spin Dash that I changed into a Peel Out and I spent probably weeks and weeks carefully modifying it to behave like a Peel Out. After I'd built that, I archived the copy. I've still got the archives on a disc, every single step of doing that Peel Out thing.
AR:
That's cool.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I built the hack based on that disassembly that had the Peel Out in. If I find it, I'll hand you a copy so you can play around with it. All the different revisions- if the discs haven't rotted. I don't think they have. They've actually held up really well. They're 20 years old and I think I put them in my computer maybe about a year ago and they were still reading data. So that's impressive. 20 years for a rewritable disc. Not even a professional disc, just a rewritable.
AR:
A rewritable. Oof.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, yeah. I built it on top of that. One thing I do remember is while I was modifying the first level, I came across some music. I don't know if you remember Sonic the Remix. It's a-
AR:
I don't unfortunately. I'm sorry.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's a CD that was probably released like '93 or something, probably.
AR:
Oh, yes I do. I'm sorry, I do.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's got Sonic standing there with headphones looking very kind of - well stupid I suppose - but very circle, like colors, two colors like a stripey circle kind of thing if I remember rightly, and they had Sonic CD influences there but they had people singing to lyrics of various level songs and all that crap. I was listening to that at the time. I turned Green Hill Zone into - I forget the name of it. I think Lakeside Hill. I'll find out when I dig up the disc. I put a recording of that on YouTube of me doing that. It was nothing. It wasn't anything special. It just had a little bit of artwork, but most hacks didn't really have any unique artwork back then. So I guess it was more important to people than maybe we'd even consider now, but it was a really rubbish hack. I just made a video of that and then I distinctly remember making like a bronze statue of the Sonic Peel Out on it and yeah, it looked kind of cool, but it was just rubbish.
MARKEYJESTER:
There's loads of rubbish in it. It wasn't anything special, but I put a YouTube video of me playing that first level. Then I modified the labyrinth level, made it with a full moon, and it was all blue and I didn't even - I think I made a loop, but it wasn't a proper loop. It was just remove collision on the ground. So when you run across it, you'd skip the hole and you go around and go down the hole. And it impressed people in the comments and on Sonic Retro, but there was nothing really special about it. I feel like kind of a fraudster in a way, but-
AR:
No, that's just - oh gosh, what's it called - imposter syndrome.
MARKEYJESTER:
Imposter syndrome.
AR:
Yeah, that's right, 100%.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, because it's kind of true. When I finally got - and this is 2007, right - when I put these videos up on YouTube, I had to ride a bike all the way to the city and use their internet cafe to upload the video. Silly stuff like that. I didn't have internet connection till 2008.
AR:
Oh my gosh.
MARKEYJESTER:
When I did get internet connection in 2008, everybody was treating me like I'm some sort of celebrity. I kind of let it go to my head. When you're exposed to - you're made out to be a celebrity - it does go to your head. A lot of people fall into that. It's probably a reason why you shouldn't give everyone a huge load of money, for example. Like lottery winners, they get a load of money and then they just absolutely waste it all without thinking. It's that kind of thing.
AR:
You had actually mentioned that in your biography which I'm going to be referencing a lot here. You had mentioned that in your words you had called it a "slight egocentrism." Then you were acting out as a result. There was actually a lot that happened in that whole process. Was that a particularly difficult time for you? Were you just not used to the internet fame, or - I guess if you're comfortable sharing - what was the reason for all that happening?
MARKEYJESTER:
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head there really. I thought I was more special than I was, basically. I mean at the end of the day I'm just a nobody like most people. I'm nothing too particularly special. Yeah, I've done some really cool things since but even now it's not that special at all. Which is why it was quite humorous when you asked for this interview. I thought, "Aw, ain't that cute? Yeah c'mon then, it'll be a good laugh." But yeah I let it go to my head and thought I was more important than I was. And thought that what I said was more important than it was.
MARKEYJESTER:
You soon find out quick enough that what you say doesn't really matter. Nobody really cares. Especially if you're a very agreeable type and you're very feminine in your behavior, you stop really understanding that, "Hey, this is the real world." Nobody owes you any attention. Nobody owes you any sort of welcome or celebrity status or whatever you want to call it. I'm older now so I'm wiser now and I try not to let anything I do go to my head. I try not to draw into it too much. I failed sometimes, but...
AR:
Yeah, making that type of personality work - work out in a way that's healthy for you - isn't always the easiest.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no. You see it now and again. New people come in and they get all excited. They're doing something that, maybe 20 years ago- I'd say maybe 30 years ago, people would never have a chance to do anything like this. It still is pretty cool.
AR:
Yeah. Before we continue on that note, because I want to- you did eventually work on Megamix. How did that connection first happen?
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh, hm. That is quite a jump forward, actually.
AR:
[apologetically] Oh is that a jump forward? I'm sorry-
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no. It's fine.
AR:
It was a little bit of trouble putting this [your career] in chronological order here.
MARKEYJESTER:
After I'd cancelled Regen due to my own pathetic negligence - which I'm happy to come back to, if you want to talk about later - after that I'd gone away and I'd made Brother Trouble. Again, we can come back to that if you wanna talk about that?
AR:
Was that- Redemption?
MARKEYJESTER:
It was FOR Redemption?
AR:
[pauses] If you don't mind, I'm gonna swap out two of my questions here. We had just finished speaking about you and the slight egocentrism and your first issues with the community. Then we'll lead into Megamix. With you kind of acting out and doing that, you were actually going to leave the scene, I believe, and then you were contacted about joining Sonic Redemption, correct?
MARKEYJESTER:
That's correct. Yeah, basically - due to my negligence, I was by hand creating a splash screen with a character I designed, but I was doing it all by hand. One tile at a time. I put the graphics in and I was mapping it out very carefully. I was doing this in the internet cafe interestingly enough, because by this point our internet connection was kind of rocky. Sometimes it was okay, sometimes it wasn't. So I was doing this and I think what had happened was I must have forgot to save or I must have saved another copy and overwritten all of my hard work. Of course, I was very distraught and very upset because back then I was very emotional, very neurotic. I hadn't grown up yet. So I got upset. Because of all the people giving praise for my work, praising it way better than it actually was because - like I said, maybe they'd never seen level artwork being modified very much - so it made me look better than I actually was. I sort of didn't have the heart to admit that's what I had done.
MARKEYJESTER:
So I made up a story. I lied. I said my cousin did it; that he corrupted my computer. It's just a load of stupid stuff. [laughs]
AR:
Not that anyone would have even cared if you were like, "Oh, it was me that-" [laughs]
MARKEYJESTER:
I accused my cousin of corrupting my computer and GerbilSoft called me out on it. I think it was GerbilSoft anyway, saying "That's not how operating systems work. You should read this document on how they work before spreading bullshit," which is fair enough. It is harsh-
AR:
Oh, that's a little harsh though. Yeah, but that's how it was back in the day too.
MARKEYJESTER:
But hey, you have to grow up. You need to be harshly hit with reality, otherwise you'll be forever thinking the world - that's what a lot of people today are suffering from. They don't know the real world. They think the world behaves a certain way and it doesn't. Look, this is the internet. It's the Wild West. You can't yell at it. You can't tell it what to do. It's a mirror. It tells you who you really are. You have to pay attention. Otherwise you'll be forever suffering. A lot of people do. You see it all the time online. They suffer because they don't have the balls to admit that they were wrong. They don't have the balls to reflect on themselves. Self-reflection is really important. Most people, if you're irritated by someone, it's because you want them to self-reflect. You want them to realize what they did wrong and to not do that wrong thing again. That's all you really want. That's what revenge is. You want people to learn they screwed up so they never do that again.
AR:
Yeah. And then you realize that you don't have any control over any of those people.
MARKEYJESTER:
Of course.
AR:
And the only person that you have control over is yourself. That's something that personally I struggled with for a long time. I used to - not hold grudges, but I would get very sore about things, take things very personally, very sensitive, just because I was like, "Well, why didn't that person think this through and understand that this would hurt me," or "Why didn't they think this through and they didn't realize that this was just a terrible thing to do in the first place?" And I was putting those questions onto myself. Like, "That's the reason why I'm unhappy. That's the reason why things aren't changing for me." And then as I got older, I started realizing that "No, the only one I can change here is myself." And not only that, but I can change my reaction to their reaction. It's not a pleasant thing, and it's still never pleasant to hear those things, but you can make all of those changes on your side. Doesn't make the world a better place, but it makes it easier for you to live in, I think.
MARKEYJESTER:
100% agree. It's a mirror. It's a reflection of yourself. You pay attention to that. If somebody's treating you like crap, maybe it's because of the way you're acting. Not always the case. There are some narcissists out there. There are sociopaths out there. One out of 100 people are a psychopath who are using you. You have to be aware of these things. But still, if more than one out of 100 people are telling you something or treating you a certain way, you have to start thinking that maybe it's something that you're doing wrong. And it sometimes takes a long time to admit that and to understand it as well. I'm still learning now, but-
AR:
Yeah, you're not the only one.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] Of course, we're all learning. We're all children in a way. But yeah, he called me out on it and fair enough. I was angry and bitter at the time, but no, he's completely right. 100% correct. I was lying. What do you expect was going to happen? You let all that fame and stuff go to your head. It is what it is. So one person after I'd canceled the hack for that lame excuse and got called out on it - a few days later, a member, some new member, I think they might have been pending or whatever - they made something on the lines of a comment of, "Hey, you should add this feature." You can go and find out what that post is. It's still on Sonic Retro. It's still there. You can go and find it. It's not like it's hidden or anything. I can't even remember what was said on it. It was that long ago. I've never looked back. I try and avoid looking back because it's awful to read.
MARKEYJESTER:
I kind of snapped at them and said, "Well, if you've been paying attention-" I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember exactly what I said, but I said, "If you've been paying attention, the hack is canceled." I was essentially backseat modding, acting as if I was staff or something - this is canceled. Why are you being stupid or something like that? Again, paraphrasing. Tweaker called me out on that one. I don't know if you remember Tweaker. He was admin at the time. He said - I can remember the phrase, maybe not. It's been a long time, but: "You're not staff, we are. You don't make decisions, we do." Yeah, I can't remember. I know I said I could remember, but now that I'm thinking back, yeah, I can't remember. He locked the thread, basically, and that was just the end of it. I remember being angry about that, even though he was completely right. I was angry about it and I felt like, you know what, screw this, I'm going to leave.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's when I was contacted by Lips2K - might be 2KY, I can never remember. He wanted to make a hack and he noticed I'd canceled my hack. So he wanted to know if I'd be interested in joining his team and working on his project. This is 2008, you have to remember. So I said, "Yeah, sure, I'll be interested in doing that." I don't even know if I still have the email. Let me have - not email, the PM. I might actually still have the PM. Let me have a look. I'll tell you exactly what I said. If I can find it, if I haven't deleted it, if it's kept from- [looks for PM]
MARKEYJESTER:
No, the earliest one I've got is from 2013. So yeah, the earliest PM - I don't have anything earlier than that. So I can't even tell you what I said. Sorry. It's lost to time now.
AR:
Oh, that's fine.
MARKEYJESTER:
Maybe I'll say, you don't want to go hanging around here. It's a bit of a jerk place, which was a lie. Like I said, I was angry and I was bitter. I agreed to work on his project. He wanted to make a hack called Sonic Redemption. I thought, "Yeah, all right then. I'll incorporate some of the stuff that I've done in Sonic Regen onto your project and we'll work together. We'll make something really cool, we'll show them," that kind of arrogant thing. So I worked on putting splash screens in, importing music from other games, and making new music.
MARKEYJESTER:
I was doing it with a hex editor, making SMPS music tracks.
AR:
Yeah. Oh my gosh.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's not so bad. It's not as difficult as you think it would be. I can remember most of the coordination flags. It's just the wrong way to do it, by the way. If you can do it in the tracker, that's the right way to do it, but back then - even now - I can still remember.
MARKEYJESTER:
It was around about that time there was a guy called UtopiaUK. I think his real name was Chris. He came onto the scene and he was doing a few things, different layouts, and so I thought wouldn't it be really cool if we could all work together, like me, this Lips guy and this new UtopiaUK. He seems quite enthusiastic, he seems like he's interested. So I asked Lips, I said, "This guy, what do you think, should we invite him to work on our team?" He seemed pretty cool with it, pretty down with it. I invited him and we got talking. I think we were on Live Messenger at the time. I don't know if you remember using that back in the day.
AR:
A little bit, yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
Windows Live Messenger. I can still remember the tone in my head. It's like three xylophone tones and a timpani drum going off. So after I invited him, we started doing some stuff. Unfortunately, right about that same time, my mom couldn't afford the broadband. She wasn't really interested. So we lost internet connection for a long time, several months without internet connection. I decided, right, I'm going to be clever about this. I'm going to grab a brand new split disassembly [of Redemption] because I had copies before I lost connection, and I'm going to work on some stuff that I would add to Sonic Redemption later on. So I'd practice and I'd learn how to modify levels and create new art and put in new moves that were a bit more satisfactory than I'd previously had done, some new music. It's where I learned a lot of stuff to be honest with you, was offline when I guess I didn't have many distractions. And I had built up - I'd like to call it a portfolio. It's not really a portfolio but that's the best way I can describe it. I made essentially a ROM hack that could kind of stand on its own, but all of the contents were designed to be put into Redemption when I would get connection again.
MARKEYJESTER:
When I did eventually go to the internet cafe just to log in and check how things were - this was several months later. This was after Christmas 2008. It was early 2009. I had found out that Utopia, this guy who we had invited in, he kind of took over the project and he kind of turned Redemption into a Megamix clone, if you will. I don't know if you've ever played it. There's a lot of stuff in there that looks like it's basically a copy-paste of some of the Sonic Megamix stuff that had been being done, which I kind of wanted to avoid. They'd released video clips of it and obviously they didn't converse with me. I was kind of out of the picture. So yeah, I guess I felt kind of betrayed in a way, and it wasn't just that. They also removed a lot of stuff that I had put in initially as well. They just removed the splash screens, got rid of them. And yeah, I felt kind of rough about that.
AR:
Do you think that was purposeful on UtopiaUK's part-
MARKEYJESTER:
Nope.
AR:
-or was that maybe more just a consequence of-
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no, no, I don't think so. I think he was a really excited kid. He wanted - I say kid, he's obviously not a child, but a younger - he was a real sort of young, enthusiastic guy, very excited to get this out. So in hindsight, looking back, yeah, I don't think it was anything intentional. It still hurt, having some of the stuff put in removed and some of the stuff kept of their own volition, but it was also that kind of flip coin of, well, I wasn't around. They couldn't contact me, so it's not entirely their fault.
AR:
Right, yeah, they might have thought you had left.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. I was kind of in a juxtaposition where on one hand they've released contents of this hack that now looks like a copy-paste of Megamix which is kind of awkward. Even back then I remembered feeling very awkward about that. But also some of the work that I had put in had been removed and I've got a whole portfolio of the stuff to be added to this Redemption hack. They just removed a load of my stuff. Are they going to really look at the stuff I've made and actually add it? I didn't think so. Yeah, I just honestly I didn't think so.
MARKEYJESTER:
After I'd left the internet cafe and I was on my way home by bike, I remembered thinking, well, maybe I should just make it into something else; make something different. I kept all of the revisions, by the way. I've got a whole disc full of them. So I can go back and show you every single ROM revision I made where something different was changed leading up to just before I even put the character Manic in it. Yeah, I think by the time I put Manic in, it was right about the time just after I found out that they'd sort of went on without me and this was going to be its own thing. And that's when I ended up changing it to Sonic Brother Trouble.
MARKEYJESTER:
I realized, well, I couldn't just go in and release this thing because I'd look like a right jerk. Despite the fact that they made this Redemption and made it without me, removed half my stuff, which is pretty jerky in its own right, but it would be just as jerky for me to release this hack and they knew I had made all this stuff and didn't put it into Redemption. I don't know. It's probably silly. They probably didn't see it that way, but that's just the way I felt about it. And that's how Brother Trouble ended up becoming a thing. If you've ever played - on the [Sonic Retro] page, somebody uploaded the version 0.5, that ROM that holds all of the levels in there and all that stuff - that was meant for Redemption.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's all the stuff I worked on before I changed it to Brother Trouble.
AR:
Oh, interesting. Was Redemption the first time you were working on a proper team?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I think you're right. That's actually a good question. I'm thinking - yeah. No. No, actually, no, that's a lie. No, that's not true. I was actually working on S Factor.
AR:
Oh, I didn't know that came first.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, yeah. I didn't do a very good job on the wiki despite the fact that I was supposed to clean up loose ends-
AR:
[sarcastically] Thanks.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no, it's entirely my fault. I'm getting old now. I'm 35. I'm forgetting details.
AR:
No, I'm teasing.
MARKEYJESTER:
I know you are. After I'd released the footage of the Sonic Regen levels before I was invited in and let the "celebrity" thing go to my head, I was invited to make some levels for S Factor, Sonia and Silver, because they saw the levels being made. Nobody was making levels back then, apart from StephenUK. He'd made the water level Misty Maze for 3.0, but he wasn't exactly making them at super speed pace or anything. So I got invited into that.
MARKEYJESTER:
S Factor has a history of its own. It was originally called Sonic One by Jayextee, Malevolence, and D.A. Garden, which is how they all knew each other. It was Malevolence who invited me in. He invited me to sign up for AIM Messenger. It's the first messenger service I signed up for before Live Messenger. He invited me in and he showed me how to join the IRC server and yeah, that's how I got involved. So yeah, I made that god awful Sky Highway level before we changed it to Chaotic Street or whatever it was called. Absolutely horrible looking level. Really bad. There's no flow to it. It's just absolutely rubbish. I felt really bad about that. I still do now to this day.
AR:
It's a learning experience, right?
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh yeah, I mean absolutely. You can make new art, but making a game level correctly is more complicated than you think. It's not just about making beautiful graphics - it's about making these pieces fit together and making sure the gameplay works. I've learned a hell of a lot from D.A. Garden, especially. He's fantastic with layout structure and design. You learn these things, but it's far more complicated, like I said. That's how S Factor ties into it. Obviously when I got bitter about being told off by GerbilSoft and Tweaker and left, that's when I kind of left S Factor for a bit, didn't come back onto it until I came back.
AR:
What project did you - or not project that you moved to, but I guess what was the next big project that you worked on after S Factor just so I have everything in order here?
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, after S Factor was after I canceled Sonic Regen. So I did S Factor on the side of doing my own project. After I canceled and left, I stopped working on both those to work on Sonic Regen [Redemption]. I put that in quotes because most of my stuff that I actually put in never made it into their final release. So technically I should really have a credit on it, but whatever. The stuff I had to put onto it became Brother Trouble. So it became its own thing. It gained its own life.
MARKEYJESTER:
I was working - after I released the demo and came back into the scene, Tweaker immediately sent me a message saying that he believed I was MarkeyJester, which is true. I admitted it there and then. I didn't find out until later on by D.A. Garden - he said apparently he was the one who noticed. I don't know, maybe there was something about the way I typed on the forums or something about the artwork, probably something like that. I knew D.A. Garden quite well. Him, Malevolence, and Jayextee were the three people I first kind of met online, and so I got identified pretty quickly. Then I eventually admitted it and then got my name changed back to MarkeyJester. I carried on working on Brother Trouble and I worked on that for about another year, got fed up with it, canceled it, and then Tweaker contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in doing level artwork for his hack Megamix, which was in 2010.
AR:
That was one of the larger projects that you worked on, huh?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, pretty much. Ironically, none of the stuff I ever worked on ever got released.
AR:
Oh no.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] Yeah I did all this artwork and all these badniks, but it never got released. It just happened that I joined right after 4.0 was released and it never got released properly. Stealth has done some YouTube videos and you can see some of the new artwork I did for the first level. There's brand new beautiful palm trees and stones and stuff, but no, never properly released. It's never been out yet. It's still a work in progress or I assume it is anyway.
AR:
Yeah I hope so. I wasn't sure if that was kind of dead in the water or if that was going to be one of those things where in five or 10 years they're like, "Oh my god, here it is, finally!"
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, it's always continuously canceled and then uncanceled. It is what it is. Nobody's making money out of it. We've all got our own lives, so...
AR:
Yeah, passion can only take you so far. Ah- I don't know. That's a tricky question. Everyone has a different answer to that question.
AR:
I always try to find a personal connection between me and the person I'm interviewing, and for me that personal connection is Jester's Challenge. It seems like the first time that you had taken your work or any project of yours to the next level in terms of creativity. Could you tell us a bit about Jester's Challenge.
MARKEYJESTER:
Jester Challenge? Oh, that was so fun to work on. There's so many of these other silly little projects that were just fun, just fun to work on. There was nothing special about them in the sense that there's nothing technically advanced about them. It really is just Sonic 1 and I'd made it into a maze with these chunk pieces. Nothing really so effortful. It took a while to make the layout, but it was more fun than it was tedious, so...
AR:
I can imagine. Just the - I guess where did the idea for smaller segmented gameplay challenges come from, because that's partly what drew me into the hack - just how segmented, how compartmentalized what you were being requested to do was. It was very straightforward and I guess that just kind of clicked with my brain. Where'd that idea come from?
MARKEYJESTER:
It came from Gex for the 3DO. If you play all of the - if you manage to find all of the bonus levels in each of these different worlds and you complete that bonus challenge, destroy the most zombies or whatever, it gives you a small piece of a remote. If you complete all of them, you complete the remote and this remote takes you to an extra secret world called Planet X. There's a whole load of levels in there. Very spacey, very 1990s, very X-Filesy kind of thing, but they had one level called The Project, which is just this massive maze, right? You're like a little hamster in this maze. Obviously, because you're the Gex lizard, you can climb on all the walls.
AR:
I haven't. I'm familiar with Gex, but I'm kind of familiar with the development of the first Gex and I looked up - I'm looking up The Project now. Is that a digitized developer walking along?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yes, they included - because these levels, they were all secret apparently.
AR:
Like challenge, bonus levels, right? Yeah, oh my gosh.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, apparently the company didn't know all the stuff was in there. If you complete all of that sci-fi world, the Planet X world, and then you complete the last boss, you get a second secret credits where they show you all these old drawings of their designs and how they did it. Apparently they kept that secret from the CEOs and didn't tell them about it. Then they found out about it that they were doing all this extra stuff and thank goodness they agreed to keep it in. There's a huge interview about it. It's worth looking up. It's absolutely fantastic. The designer who designed all of the levels, he got really irritated by the corporate atmosphere and then quit. It's just absolutely- it's really insane. It's worth a read. I won't go too deep into it. It's worth reading though if you've got time.
AR:
I think I've seen that. Yeah, and then you can go into the prototype and there's a message from that developer or to the developer and they're angry or something?
MARKEYJESTER:
yeah, yes, that's right. It's like what the hell? This is insane because you don't think about these things when you're a kid. I was only 3 years old when this game was released. I'm just a kid. But yeah, The Project was the massive maze and I think there's a few exits and one of the exits led you to this little room where the developer's walking around and I think he pukes on you and just those edgy dicey stupid things. But yeah, that's what I took a liking to and that's the reason why Jester Challenge exists. It's basically a maze and you got this dance music or in my case jungle music, space synth jungle. That's what it is basically.
AR:
I was going to ask because I - sorry, I have it written down here as club music but I was going to say, "Man, I hope he's more specific because-" you really know music actually [and I'm not sure "club" is the right descriptor]. I was going to wrap this into my question here. So Jester's Challenge does have very striking music. At least personally, it was one of the first times I had heard that kind of PCM-heavy, sample-heavy... I think it was just the first time that music in a Sonic hack surprised me. In a good way. What was - I guess in your own words - the inception for making that, for having that as a feature of the hack?
MARKEYJESTER:
raveakidd. When I was young, a kid growing up in the '90s, I remembered jungle music was quite a thing. My stepfather was into the rave scene, so I got to hear a lot of rave music, but there's also some side things like The Prodigy and the usual stuff you get. We had this one tape which was a Helter Skelter tape and I don't know if you're familiar with Helter Skelter. I'm not talking about the song. I'm not talking about that little fairground ride. I'm talking about there's a rave group called Helter Skelter.
AR:
[looks up Helter Skelter] Okay. I'm not really- but I have topically - I've seen the artwork, the poster artwork. But I don't know much past that, but I know they're a big influential rave group.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, yes, absolutely. We had a tape from one of their events. Happy Hardcore. Happy Hardcore is not really my kind of thing, but I was listening to that at the age of six or seven, and so I was exposed not just to rave - I was exposed to a lot of music. My real father was a bit... I suppose, campy. He liked all the kind of music that most people didn't really like. My mom - like my father, he fancied the ass off of Mariah Carey. So instinct in my head I know all of the Mariah Carey songs. Not that I hate her or anything, but it's just not my kind of music, but I know quite a lot of the lyrics in my head because I was just exposed to that as a kid. So I was exposed to rave music, exposed to jungle music, breakbeat music, pop music obviously because it's popular. It's always on the radio. Campy stuff that my father and my mom used to listen to. So I was exposed to a lot of music.
MARKEYJESTER:
In terms of jungle, I didn't realize how much I really like jungle until someone on YouTube called raveakidd, who was a Sonic fan and liked jungle music - he would make all sorts of different videos about Sonic the Hedgehog. He'd have a few about different rave songs. He was on YouTube. He would make all sorts of videos about Sonic the Hedgehog. He was a fan of Sonic the Hedgehog and he loved jungle music. Specifically, Intelligent Space Synth. That's specifically the name, Intelligent Space Synth jungle music. That's how I kind of - he's still got some videos on YouTube. In fact, if you type in Intelligent Space Synth, I'm guaranteeing you it'll come up probably as the first.
AR:
Is raveakidd one word?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Intelligent Space Synth Jungle Selection. He had two videos on it. In fact, if you listen through one of them, you'll hear the main theme to Jester's Challenge in there somewhere.
AR:
If you're able to find that, can you link that to me later? I'd be curious to check it out.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. You have to remind me though otherwise I forget.
MARKEYJESTER:
I listened to a few of them and that kind of got me back into jungle properly and now I have a bit of a stronger appreciation of it. Because if I'm ever going to make a game in the future - just hypothetically, probably never - but if I were, I would make the game have jungle music and I'd have the different subcategories: drum and bass, liquid drum and bass, space music... Because you got different styles in there that can reflect different-
AR:
Compositional styles.
MARKEYJESTER:
Exactly. They can give you different themes for different levels. I thought that would be a really great way to go. Maybe one day, maybe not.
AR:
Heck yeah. You could design the levels with a top-down theme built around- like if the music's a little more hectic, you could make the design a little more hectic, stuff like that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. Very heavy, very dark drum and bass. Whereas if you're somewhere pleasant and nice, you can have something a bit more space synthy, it's a bit more pleasant. Yeah, there's loads of different styles involving jungle - that's the main core, but there's loads of subgenres that are connected to that. But yeah, that raveakidd, I spoke with him not too long ago, a few months ago, just said, "Hi, how you doing?" We don't keep in touch much. I don't really speak too much with the guy, but yeah, he got me back into jungle and yeah, I like the idea of that particular thing.
MARKEYJESTER:
I think it's DJ Ron. It's either Dangerous or it's Cannon Land. The vinyl has two sides. I always forget which one's which, but it's one of them. That's the main theme. The ice theme is from a Neo Geo CD game, believe it or not.
AR:
Right, yeah, I saw it. I think it's listed on the wiki somewhere.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh, it probably is. I haven't looked at that Wikipedia in forever. I think Tweaker made the boss theme, ironically enough.
AR:
Yes, yeah. Exclusively for the hack. Oh, that was Fantasia too. Sorry, sorry. I just - I'm looking through the music list here. Fantasia is the - that's how I know Helter Skelter, because I have a couple CDs from Fantasia '90-something or other.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, Fantasia '92, '93, even later part of '91 are really awesome. They're worth listening to. Hot Buzz. If that's your thing, if you like that kind of music. Yeah, I have to give you a few links maybe after the interview. They're great to have in the background while you're working on something. It's this continuous droning going on in the background. It's quite the bloody experience.
MARKEYJESTER:
I was speaking to my dear friend Selbi. He mentioned how he kind of got into jungle music. He's more of a metalhead, you see. So he's gotten into jungle. I remember saying to him, I was listening to Jungle Fatigue Volume 1 while I had - I think The Matrix Revolutions, the last one where all the sentinels are flying about - just on mute while this music- It's quite the bloody experience. It really is. It was a hack idea.
AR:
That's so 2000s.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] Yeah, well, it was a hack idea. I was going to have the Sentinel in Sonic 1 using clever tile animation with sprite pieces. I think I could have fit all the arms and legs in there so you could fly around and destroy the level with your laser beam and crawl around and fly around everywhere. I thought it'd be just hilarious, but I'm never going to finish that now.
AR:
You have a lot of ideas for this kind of stuff.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, not to sound arrogant, but I'm a very creative person-
AR:
Absolutely.
MARKEYJESTER:
-which is probably why I'm not a very happy person. [laughs]
AR:
[laughs] I'll get to that question here because I wanted to - so speaking of kind of interesting hacks and again going back to my personal connection with you - Jester's Challenge was the first hack that I actually enjoyed. I'd mentioned that I don't like - I'm not a huge fan of Sonic and I'm not a huge fan of the gameplay. I can get into some aspects of it, but I think Jester's Challenge was the first time that I enjoyed the Sonic the Hedgehog physics engine. That and the little character of yours that you have in the game - I just remember that image sticking with me and then to come back 20 years later or something and be like, "Oh, that's MarkeyJester" is so cool. It comes full circle.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. Jester's Challenge doesn't really have the hallmarks of Sonic gameplay. There's no curves, there's no loops, there's no hills. It's literally jumping precision similar to Mario. You've got some acceleration and deceleration. That character, by the way, his name is Markey the Jester. That's where I get my name from.
AR:
Oh, okay. Interesting. Where did that character come from? What was the inception or the background behind that?
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh god. When you're a kid - I must have drew that when I was about 13, 14, that character, kind of based on a mixture of those platform mascot characters you get like Rayman. I think it was drawing those generic alien cutesy kind of characters back then because like I said, I was very feminine and childish in my demeanor when I was younger. So I was a bit softer, not very manly. I'm still not now to some degree, but I'm a bit more-
AR:
Nothing wrong with that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Not necessarily. You're right. There's nothing necessarily wrong, but there's nothing uglier than an adult infant, right? If you're supposed to be a man, you got to be responsible. You got to be prepared for danger. By the way, that's what women are interested in as well, right? Not that that's any strong relation, but you get my point.
MARKEYJESTER:
So I would draw these cutesy alien characters. Oh, Okie Polie Rolie. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Okie Dokie- I think it's Okie Polie Rolie...
AR:
Rolie Polie Olie?
MARKEYJESTER:
Rolie Polie Olie, that's it.
AR:
Yes, yeah, totally. The 3D - with the yellow people in the teapot. Yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's right, yeah. But can you see there's a slight resemblance? He's got an antenna and he's got these colors about him. Subconsciously, of course, I didn't plagiarize intentionally, but yeah, subconsciously, this is part of where these characters were created. My character is kind of a rubbish character. It's not great or anything, but hey, it was fun. I thought, yeah, I'll shove him in, make that me. I'm giving you instructions. I'm telling you what to do. I'm going to tease you. I'm going to tell you to go this way. I'm just going to screw with you. I thought it'd be fun.
AR:
Very meta.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, it was. Like I said, a really fun project to work on. There's not many projects that are fun to work on, but that was one of them. I did enjoy working on it.
AR:
How about Pana Der Hejhog? Could you tell us a little bit about that because that also stands out as one of your more creative - everything you do is creative, but that one was especially standout to me.
MARKEYJESTER:
That was so much fun as well. That character is actually a real OC from when I was 11, 12.
AR:
No way.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, seriously. It's just because when you're young and you're a child, you do these silly things. You make your own character. I remember drawing this Sonic ripoff. He had extra spines. He had chains on his arms like prison chains because that's what those are. They're supposed to be chains. He was supposed to be locked up because he was the edgy and evil, that kind of thing. I wish I kept the original drawing I did. It didn't last very long to be fair.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, it was a real OC that I'd forgotten about and then remembered. I think about the time there was a lot of people making their own original characters and it was becoming a whole thing and it was very much frowned upon. If somebody's going to put their original character in a project, you can guarantee that the project is going to be rubbish because it's got their original character in it and they're not very creative. They're not very clever. So I wanted to see what it would be like if I could make a really awesome hack that had an original character in it to kind of - I guess arrogantly - prove that just because there's an original character in it doesn't necessarily mean that the hack's going to be rubbish. That's what that was all about. Just the most beautiful art I could make at the time when I was about, oh god, 2011. I must have been about 21 years old.
AR:
2011, I think so.
MARKEYJESTER:
I think about 21, yeah. I could do so much better now, but back then that was probably the most beautiful I could make it. I did really put a lot of details in there, extra frames of animation just to make this thing look really awesome with extra gameplay elements in there. It was really just an arrogant way of saying, "Hey, just because you got an original character in there doesn't necessarily mean that the hack or game is going to be bad," which looking back is kind of wrong of me because you use these assumption cues to make judgments. And 99% of the time that's true. I was just the 1% that was the exception. Back then, like I said, I was a bit more feminine in my demeanor, a bit more arrogant. So I tried to push this idea of, "No, not necessarily."
MARKEYJESTER:
Basically that's just what it was. It was just to prove a point. A point that didn't really need proving. I still think I'm wrong about the point, but we got a good hack out of it. It was fun. I had - his name was, I always pronounce it wrong - like CarrascoZX0. I'm butchering his name.
AR:
I think that's right, yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, he made a Mega Man Ice Man theme because I thought, oh, I'll have the boss come in and it'd be like a fake out and it'd go all icy. I need an ice theme. I thought, I can't be bothered making music. I'll find somebody who can make something decent. Carrasco at the time was doing a lot of music ports, remakes using SMPS, XM to SMPS or MIDI to SMPS. So I said to him, make me something, a port, and he chose Ice Man theme from Mega Man...
AR:
I think Ice Man is 1.
MARKEYJESTER:
I think it's Mega Man 9 or Mega Man 10. I can't remember which one it is. It's the PlayStation version. I think it might be the only PlayStation Mega Man. Could it be 8 maybe?
AR:
Oh, yeah, 8 was like [erroneously sings first few bars of Mega Man & Bass' "Coldman"]
MARKEYJESTER:
No no no. [sings first few bars of Mega Man 8's "Underwater Stage"]
AR:
[starts singing along in confirmation] Oh! Ok yeah, THAT'S Mega Man 8.
MARKEYJESTER:
Okay, so it's Mega Man 8, but it was the PlayStation version. I know there's different versions where there's an instrument change at the chorus. But yeah, he sent me that over and it sounded pretty good. I made a few instrument changes. I created some new instruments that sounded like the PlayStation as much as possible and put that in. I'm very grateful that he did that. He's a very kind guy. He's Canadian. Canadians are pretty kind to be fair. That was a really fun hack to work on. It was just a short silly thing to prove a point that didn't need proving, was the wrong point to prove, but it was fun. It was so fun to work on.
AR:
Speaking of, what is the most enjoyable project that you've worked on?
MARKEYJESTER:
The most enjoyable project I've work on is a project that's not been released yet. I could probably tell you a little bit about it without spoiling anything. My long-term friend D.A. Garden has been working on a brand new hack and has been working on it for about, oh god, six, seven years now. I remembered playing an early version of his hack live on stream, a demo version that he kind of released. I think it was a demo version. I said to him that this would be really great if you had some awesome music in it. Would you be interested in me making some music? We'll put in a decent sound driver. We'll have my dual PCM so I can use both PCM channels and I'll make some awesome music for you. You can decide what kind of music you want and if you can't decide, I'll make something up. He agreed and I've made a whole soundtrack in the past 5 years since about 2020, 2019, 2020, slowly. And that's why it was so enjoyable because you could work on it very slowly, take your time with it.
MARKEYJESTER:
The great thing about D.A. Garden is he tells you the truth. He's honest with you. He'll tell you if he doesn't like something. He says, "Yeah, I'm not too keen on this. I think we should do it this way." The reason why that's important is because when he turns to me and says, "Yeah, I love this. This is great. Really digging this," you know he's telling the truth. You know he's honest. You know he's not deceiving you or telling you what you want to hear. He will tell me flat out if there's something he doesn't like. I really appreciate that.
AR:
That's incredibly valuable. Not a lot of people have that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh absolutely. Honesty, it really is the best policy. I've learned that. Like I said in this interview, I've lied about a few things [in the past] and I feel awful about that, but I always tell the truth now. I tell people what I really think and I upset people, sure, but it's the truth. I think that's all that matters. That project, it's been really fun to work on.
MARKEYJESTER:
I've had to contact him recently just to tie up the last few ends. I've done most of the soundtrack, but maybe one or two songs I'm going to clean them up before I leave for 2026. So he'll have them all done. When he releases that, well, I can't say. That's up to him. It's his project, and I'm not going to tell you anything about that project, unfortunately. You'll just have to wait and find out.
AR:
Would you be able to tell me where it's going to be released so we can keep an eye out for it?
MARKEYJESTER:
Most likely Sonic Retro, but he'll probably release some YouTube clips of it maybe. But like I said, it's all quite hush hush. I'm not going to spoil anything. I've just made some music for it, but it's been an awesome project to work on. I've really enjoyed myself taking my time. It's been nice because I can shelve my work and come back to it and work on it again. I've done some awesome things with my sound driver Dual PCM on that project and he's let me have quite a few liberties, but he's also been honest about them. So I've been able to put real proper use to it.
AR:
Do you enjoy making music for the Mega Drive and how do you like that whole process? Obviously you have a penchant for it [audio work] with Dual PCM.
MARKEYJESTER:
The thing is, going back to Jester's Challenge, if I can just recurse a bit. I know you mentioned it was PCM audio. It was fun to put them in but it was a crappy sound driver. There's nothing special about that sound driver. It literally is just a DAC driver. You just give it sample bites and it plays them like a series of drums but the drums are just recordings or a section of a bit of music that I chopped in.
MARKEYJESTER:
Dual PCM is different because it's essentially like having a chip in the Mega Drive that can play the equivalent of two of the Super NES' channels or two of the Mega-CD's PCM channels. You can play the samples at any pitch you want, any volume you want. You can do pitch bends, you can play them backwards, in reverse. You can record an instrument, like a synth instrument or a saxophone or whatever, and play them at any note you want. I can't demonstrate to you what that would sound like. You're going to have to wait until D.A. Garden releases it. I think most people underestimate the power of Dual PCM, and they're going to find out exactly what it's capable of when D.A. Garden releases his hack. Whenever that is. Whether they're interested in playing it- I mean, who knows? Maybe they won't pay attention. You can't predict the market.
MARKEYJESTER:
Making music for the Mega Drive - it can be fun. Lots of fun. But it can also be quite tedious. If you're trying to remake some real-life music on the Mega Drive, it can be quite frustrating, because you will have huge difficulty recreating some sounds. For example, pad instruments are very difficult to make on the Yamaha chip, very difficult to make. You don't have echo, you don't have reverb, you don't have all these intertwining intricacies-
AR:
To like smooth out the- because when I think of the Super Nintendo I think of it doing held notes and synth and strings and stuff like that by taking a very small sample of that [original sample] and playing it repeatedly in succession so fast that you don't quite notice that it's firing off a bunch of individual samples and not playing a long one. Is that kind of what you're talking about?
MARKEYJESTER:
Kind of. That's certainly where Dual PCM certainly helps. I've got an orchestra, I've got an attack, and then I've got a section that loops, like a sustain, then a release section - and I can make those requests. If you were to do it on just the Yamaha, just the chip on the 2612, it doesn't sound as heavenly. It's missing something. It's missing that richness to it. Incredibly difficult. The Yamaha chip is very good at guitar sounds. I don't mean the distorted kind, I mean the heavy bass sounds. It's very good at complex sound; very good at that, excellent at that. But anything involving some soft harmonics like pads or orchestral- violin. It's actually quite difficult to make those sounds. It's not impossible, but sometimes you have to use more than one channel, and you start to run out of channels, so it becomes very very difficult.
AR:
Dual PCM was kind of created to give yourself a little more breathing room?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. To give me the ability to play any instrument I want at any note I want. As if I had some- imagine I wanted to play one of those jungle Intelligent Space Synth songs and you've got that wonderful harmonic pad sound in the background. What if I wanted to play that? It'd be incredibly difficult with the 2612. Very difficult. But I could have a sample recording of that: an attack, then loop the middle section, and then decay, just like the Super NES. It's been an incredible asset, Dual PCM, very incredible asset. But most people have never used it the way I would expect them to have used it. Not that they have to. Who am I to tell the internet what to do, right? But it would be nice if- it almost seems like they don't understand the power that they've got in their hands. They have no idea and they're not gonna find out until probably after I'm long gone, but that's just the way things are, you know?
AR:
You also made a lot of development tools in general. I mean you made a whole compression format. You've built up this suite of development tools, development programs. Was there a specific reason that you had made that? Was it to try and encourage the community to make more ROM hacks? What was the reason behind that?
MARKEYJESTER:
Different tools for different reasons. I made a very terrible, crappy command line tool called GetArt which basically takes a bitmap image of graphics, with a bitmap image of a palette of colors, and converts them into tiles mappings and stuff. If you remember, going back to Sonic Regen and Redemption, when I was making those splash screens. I was putting those map tiles in by hand with a hex editor one map at a time. I made that quick command line too just to make the job quicker, and it works. I think MainMemory made a .NET version that was slightly more stable but it's pretty much the same thing.
MARKEYJESTER:
I've got some other private tools that I've never released though, more complex ones. For example, I've got one program that will take an entire folder of individual sprite frames, PNG files of individual sprite pieces, and convert them into the art mappings and pattern load cues, which would be ideal for a split disassembly of a Sonic game. People could just go and edit the PNG file, draw the pixels with whatever paint tool they want, and just run the program.
AR:
That's versatile.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. There's nothing complicated about it. But I don't think the scene is ready for tools like that. I don't think they're ready for something like that. It's a big ask because these tools, they don't recreate the data 1:1 with the original ROM data. They're going to generate data that's probably slightly larger than the original in some instances. And it's not quite perfect, but it will never be perfect.
AR:
So this is more like an independent games thing.
MARKEYJESTER:
They're independent tools that I've used for my own personal usage. I thought about releasing it multiple times but never got around to it, but there are a few tools I have released, Interprite being one of them.
AR:
A MarkeySuite.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] A MarkeySuite. You know, I've seen loads of people back in the day, back in the mid-2000s, they made their own "hacking studio." It opens up the binary ROM and you can edit the title cards. Esrael had his own editor. Who else was it? Hivebrain, he made his own hacking studio. These are just like command line tools. They're not anything special. There's some graphical user interface with them, but nothing too outrageous. They're just there to make me do my job quicker, but they're very powerful if you know how to use them.
MARKEYJESTER:
In terms of compression, Twizzler was the main compression that I released. I've done a few others for private use, for homebrews and stuff, but Twizzler was the one I made publicly, but that was more an arrogance, I suppose, more just to assert some sort of ridiculous dominance that, "Hey, I can make the best compression algorithm that beats all of the Kens and all the other-," and I succeeded, but nobody ever uses it. And kind of for good reason. The decompression algorithm itself - the code is large and so even if you save a bit of memory compressing these files small, if you don't compress a lot of files with them, well the algorithm, the code for decompressing it is so large, it takes up the memory that you would have saved if you compressed it with any other format. It's very slow as well so it's not really useful. It's more of a proof of concept and a bit of a showoff really. I feel kind of bad for it even now, but it is what it is, you know.
AR:
You know, I hope and I'd like to believe that most people looking back on that stuff from today are going to understand the context of... You know, you were younger, we were all younger. I really think that no one would be that sore about it. I've seen one or two people still be a little sore about that stuff, but I think everyone looks back on that with a laugh more than anything.
MARKEYJESTER:
Different people take a different amount of time to learn, don't they? They take a while to grow up. As you get older, you almost become like you're a parent and all the other people, they're not children, they're just younger, but you kind of look at them as if they are children. Not in a condescending kind of way, but more of an accepting kind of way. You go, "Ah, yeah, you know, this guy's acting really noobish and they got this terrible hack, they think it's awesome, but you know. I used to be like that in some ways. I can let it go. They're young." You know, it's kind of like a parent talking, that kind of way. I don't know if you understand what I'm saying.
AR:
No, I think I do.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. But sometimes it gets weird. This was about two months ago. I was contacted by someone who wanted to ask for a copy of a ROM of Sonic Brother Trouble. A specific version I had released as a link in the forum thread, an alternate version that had something that was missing, and the link is now dead. And they wanted to play that particular ROM. As luck would have it, SonicVaan, who now goes by the name neonsynth, happened to have kept all of the versions that I'd ever sent him. One of the versions in that dead link just happened to be in amongst that data. I sent it to him because I'm a bit more of a relaxed bloke these days. I don't really care too much about my reputation in that way, you know? Look, here's all the ROMs. If you want to play them or leak them out or whatever, it's no big deal. It's not necessarily that I don't care. It's just like this is the internet. What are you going to do, right?
MARKEYJESTER:
So we had one or two backwards and forwards in this email chain. I'm kind of disinterested in some way. It's Brother Trouble, that's a long time ago. That's 16 years ago. I'm not that interested in it, but it's nice to know some people are interested still. And he showed me some music remixes he had made and they sounded pretty good. I thought, "Well, well done, you know, congratulations. They sound pretty good." And then he did a playthrough of the ROM, the dead ROM link that I gave him a copy of, and he was doing narration over it. That's when I realized, "Holy shit, he sounds like a young kid." Like 10 years old, 11 years old. Just this young kid, like bloody hell, this is really awkward, you know. So I responded, "I'm glad that you're happy, but you know, I'm in my mid-30s and you sound like you're about 10 years old. Maybe we shouldn't be talking with one another. You know what I mean?" You have to have that talk of, "Look, you know, the internet's a very dangerous place. You got to be careful. There are some very sick people on the internet. Just be careful, you know." It's just the strange idea that he's playing a hack that's older than he is based off of a game that's older than he is.
AR:
[laughs] Yeah, that's older than he is. I hadn't thought of that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Based off of a console, a games console that's a year older than I am. It's insane. That's crazy.
AR:
Right. It really puts things into perspective, huh?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, you get a bit weirded out by that. I don't think I could really be talking with people like this. I get a bit uncomfortable. You're way too young to- I'm not your parent and I'm getting concerned about you. What the hell?
AR:
I think it goes to show how widespread your influence and your work actually is.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's scary though. I'm not going to lie. It's scary.
AR:
Yeah. Do you ever get a little wigged out by how visible you are sometimes?
MARKEYJESTER:
I get weirded out because there are people who kind of know me who probably shouldn't know me. I feel like a celebrity, but this time because I'm older, I'm like, "No, no, no, no. I'm not falling for that again. I'm not getting boasted out again like that. I'm not. No, I'm going to be an adult about this." I'm well aware that a lot of my work is pretty darn good. I know that. But I'm not going to let that go to my head because it's not that great. There are far better things I've seen outside of the hacking scene as well. There's loads of other great people, but yeah, it does weird you out. It freaks you out. You get a bit concerned. You're too young to be playing these hacks. What are you doing?
AR:
Right. I'd be more curious how they even found it in the first place. How is that on a 10-year-old's radar?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. It's a mystery. They clearly like Sonic the Hedgehog. I don't know.
AR:
Just a shout out. I'm sure that all worked out and I'm sure whoever that was was really appreciative for you talking to them and helping them out like that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, they went quiet, which I mean- I'm not going to chase.
AR:
Eh. Okay that's a little less appreciative.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, they're young. Like I said, I've got to be the responsible adult here. I got to be very careful and make sure I don't say things I'm not supposed to say. If I go effing and blinding in the email, it doesn't look right. Not that they're my responsibility. I would have questions about their parents. Do you know who your kid is speaking to on the internet? You can't rely on your government to protect your children. It's up to you. But that's a whole other issue. There's political stuff involved. I don't want to get into it. I just thought it was really weird. That's all.
AR:
Yeah. Speaking of influence, your 68000 assembly tutorial has become foundational, I think is probably the best word, both in the community and outside of it. Just in researching you I was finding it being translated into other languages and I can just imagine - I was trying to put a number to how many people have probably done their work and, further, how many people's careers wouldn't exist without that tutorial. I know at least five of them. I guess what made you initially decide to make a 68000 tutorial?
MARKEYJESTER:
I've always been irritated. When you learn how to program, there's a steep learning curve. I start to think that maybe that learning curve is higher than it should be. I'm starting to think that maybe all of the teachings that have been provided have not been sufficient. I think they've been dreadful. I don't think they've been clear enough. It took me way longer to learn how to program in C code than it should have done because looking back now, "Well, actually this is really quite simple. But this manual, this book I've been reading makes it really, really complicated. Way more complicated. You could have said it like this. You could have kept it really, really simple."
MARKEYJESTER:
It was redhotsonic. He made an assembly tutorial on the Sonic Retro Wiki. It was kind of a rubbish tutorial in the sense that half the stuff was kind of wrong about it, but it really laid out the foundations, the very simple things. If you moved a byte from one register to another, this is what data in that register is actually modified. These are the kind of things that nowhere else do you ever find that information. They don't explain that in any of the manuals. You never hear about any of that stuff.
MARKEYJESTER:
So we always had people on the forums asking for help and understanding. I figured it would be nice if we had a proper website, a proper tutorial, quote unquote, just to sort of point these people to this website. "This will explain everything. If you read it through properly, step by step, you'll understand pretty much everything." Admittedly, it doesn't teach you how you would use those instructions to do a job, but it at least explains to you how those instructions work properly at a much more precise level that the manuals won't explain. I think the manuals assume you already have a baseline knowledge, and it's the baseline knowledge that's non-existent.
MARKEYJESTER:
So that's why the site exists. But as for its influence, yeah, I know what you're talking about. I had a publisher contact me. They wanted to publish the website as a book.
AR:
No way.
MARKEYJESTER:
They did, yeah. I bailed out of it because when they gave me a little document advertising their company and all that, there were loads of spelling errors in there and grammatical issues. I thought, well, you're supposed to be really hot on this. You're supposed to be really focused on that. If you can't get that right, I don't want any business with you. So I bailed out and it never happened. I have had emails - people congratulate me and saying, "Thank you for making it." A few people have asked, "Can I make a translation?" I always say yes, because what am I going to do? What am I going to say, no? You're going to do what you want anyway. I can't control you. It's the internet. It's the Wild West. You can't yell at it. You can't make demands of it. You want to make a translation, you go right ahead.
AR:
Yeah. That won't get you much. It'll make you a lot more upset. Won't do much else.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, of course you won't. You get angry over something that probably doesn't really matter. People contact me saying that they're learning it for a college course. I'm thinking, there's a college course where you learn this assembly language? This is surely obsolete tech, right? Where are you located? I need to get a job as a professor or something like that to teach this. It would be nice if I could teach Motorola assembly to a class of people in a college. That would be so awesome, wouldn't it? But I think most of them are from various Middle Eastern places, like second, third world places. So they're all on old tech and I think that's probably where a lot-
AR:
Right. Where it's a little more relevant.
MARKEYJESTER:
I think so. I think that's what it is. I couldn't tell you for certain. I'm probably wrong, but that's where it seems to be coming from. If they're grateful and they get some value out of it, yeah, great. I ain't got a problem with that. Provide value if you can.
AR:
I'm glad you're getting feedback on it too, because I think with just the - I'll call it a career - with the career and history that you've had in ROM hacking and just with all the work that you've put in, it's nice to hear you get some feedback, positive feedback like that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I've also had corrections as well. People say, "Well, actually, I think this is a mistake." Like, you're absolutely right. I'll go and fix it. Then put the name in the credits somewhere. Can't say fairer than that, right? It ain't perfect. Like I said, I never finished it and it doesn't teach you how you would use those instructions. There's lots missing there. But I just leave it up there. It's helping people. I don't see a problem with it. I'd like to think that after the original website is taken down, which it will be in the future at some point, there's plenty of copies out there in multiple languages still available for anybody. That's quite legacy if you think about it. I never really thought about this too carefully until you brought it up.
AR:
Do you ever think about finishing it?
MARKEYJESTER:
No. Definitely not. I'm moving on, like I said. [laughs]
AR:
Right, that's part of the reset. I wanted to hop forward to The Next Level, which won frickin' 14 trophies at SHC 2015 I believe. That's insane. Could you tell us a little bit more about the project in your own words?
MARKEYJESTER:
To be fair, part of the reason why it won most of the trophies is because a lot of the other projects were kind of naff. They weren't exactly great. So I kind of had an advantage. Not that I took advantage; it just happened to be there were a lot of less superior projects on there. Although I would like to shout out to Cybernetic Outbreak, which I thought got harshly criticized. Don't get me wrong - I suppose the creator was maybe unintentionally arrogantly pushing it as more than it was, but I still think the backlash - his hack won nothing. Absolutely nothing. I think there's bias in that for sure. So that's part of the reason why I got probably most of the trophies - there was a little bit of bias in there, which I feel bad about.
MARKEYJESTER:
Going back to the project itself, I couldn't quite 100% tell you why I started working on it. I suppose for fun. You get bored. The level for that hack was originally made for MainMemory's hack as she was working - I think it might have been Knuckles' Emerald Hunt - and I thought, "Well, maybe you could do with a brand new level. You've got all these other levels in it. Wouldn't it be great if you had a brand new level, something unique and different and way out there?" So I started making some foreground elements, but she decided she didn't want it. Fair enough. I can't force people at gunpoint to take my work, can I? So it just stayed on the shelf for a while.
MARKEYJESTER:
Then I think I was working on a Chu Chu Rocket! homebrew kind of demo thingy and I was hoping to have it released for - because at the time we had two different categories for the "hacking contest." I think there was the hacking contest and then the other one I think was called the expo. I can't remember.
AR:
I think I've seen that name, yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. So you had one for homebrew stuff and you had one for hacks. I was aiming for the homebrew stuff. I wanted to do the Chu Chu Rocket!- It was supposed to be an accurate representation of the Dreamcast version, which I'd played a many years ago and really absolutely loved. So I wanted to make a Mega Drive extremely accurate version of that as a sort of "wow, this should be impossible" kind of thing. I even had an idea for making the table rotate around. You know when you complete the level and the rocket flies off and they show you the maze floor, kind of like Mode 7 kind of thing. I had lots of ideas, but it was just a lot of work and I knew I wasn't going to get it ready in time, like 2, 3 months left. So I thought, well, I want to submit something.
MARKEYJESTER:
So I started - I saw the level I'd made for MainMemory, just the foreground piece. I thought, well, maybe if I finish that, maybe I could make a hack out of it, like a space level. There's not many space levels in Sonic games, are there? So maybe I could make a whole space themed kind of level. The reason why the background is all purple and you got the planet Saturn, by the way - which I don't think is mentioned in the wiki - is because of Theme Park World. They've got a little space level and if you go in with the camera and you look up in the sky, the whole sky is purple and there's a Saturn in the sky, which I thought was a really nice detail. Yeah, that's where that comes from.
MARKEYJESTER:
I put some other things in there. I made a demo, a private demo of a brand new sound driver that I'd been working on which streamed some sample audio, like I buffered it into the Z80 RAM so it wouldn't get cut off by DMA transfers and other stops so it sounded really crystal clear. I thought, "Yeah, I'll add that in there." So I added all these things, various things I've done in the past, but never all came to fruition. Put them all in and added a lot of extra work to it. Added in extra chunk pieces, extra details, and put all my knowledge, everything that I knew into making something that would be as realistic of a Sonic game as you could possibly get.
MARKEYJESTER:
Imagine something that Sega probably would have released back in the '90s, something really high quality for the Mega Drive. You have to remember this was made before Mania. Mania hadn't even released yet. Mania was a year after. We hadn't had a decent 2D platformer from Sega for a very long time. So I wanted to make something that would be - if they were to make a game today, maybe this is what it would look like. Of course, a year later, we had Mania. Then I did notice there were a few elements in Mania that were suspiciously look like they came from The Next Level. Not that I'm bitter. Like I said, I'm too old to be bitter these days, but yeah, just thought that was really interesting.
AR:
Do you think there was any direct inspiration there for Mania?
MARKEYJESTER:
I don't know about direct, but yeah, I think - and it's not just my hack, there's other hacks too, like Megamix. There's definitely loads of Megamix influence in there, which makes a lot of sense because Stealth worked on Megamix and worked on Mania. I also think Flamewing got a little bit upset because there were some things in one of his hacks that were made [re-made] in Mania. I can't remember exactly what and I might be remembering the wrong person in fairness. My memory is hazy these days. I think it was Flamewing. Might have been Sonic Classic Heroes. Maybe, maybe not. Specifically the end level where you get sucked into a void and fight the final boss. I think that probably came from The Next Level. The extra frames making it look smooth? I don't know. I don't think so. I think if you were to make a modern Sonic game, that's probably what you would do. So I don't think that was necessarily ripped. The final boss with you're in that weird void and you're super? Maybe that, maybe. To be honest most of it I think came from Megamix.
AR:
I'm assuming when that Next Level footage was used in that Netflix documentary High Score, I'm assuming you weren't contacted for that. I'm assuming they grabbed that online, didn't know what they were looking at?
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh yeah, no, they contacted me and they said, "Look-"
AR:
No way!!
MARKEYJESTER:
No, of course they didn't. I'm joking. [laughs] Of course they didn't.
AR:
Oh jeez gosh dangit Markey. I'm too gullible for this.
MARKEYJESTER:
Sorry. No, no, no, they never. I still don't know to this day whether it was just an accident or just a nod. No idea. Probably never will know. Maybe that's your job as an interviewer?
AR:
Yeah, I was gonna say, now that's on my radar.
MARKEYJESTER:
Contact them, ask them, find out. "Was that intentional? Was that accidental?"
AR:
Right, yeah. If it's the latter, they probably won't admit it.
MARKEYJESTER:
To be fair, when they did add it - because that was 5 years after the fact, right? The Next Level was 2015 and the Netflix thing was 2020. When it was posted, I was kind of surprised by it, but there was a little bit of me that, "Yeeheehee, so exciting. My work's made it into something professional and real, you mugs." After they put that there, I thought, well, nobody's made a wiki page for The Next Level. I'll make the wiki page and it gives me an excuse to make it. I can add that, document it, and yeah, I'm kind of glad that I did. I don't like documenting my own stuff. I prefer if it was someone else who was doing it on my behalf. Like I said, I still look back on when I was younger and more arrogant and more egocentric and self-absorbed. I don't want to go back there again. It's ugly. It's not nice. So I don't like arrogantly making my own wiki page.
MARKEYJESTER:
I would suspect maybe a lot of creators have the same problem. I've spoken to Selbi and he's sort of mentioned something along those lines. So I wouldn't be surprised if the reason why we don't have wiki pages for these hacks is because the creators don't want to do it because it's kind of arrogant, but nobody else wants to do it because I don't know, maybe they just don't.
AR:
Right. This is not going to happen overnight but I have been looking to change that. Not just myself but other people have mentioned it too and other people have also expressed interest in assisting with that. So would you have any issue if I - or I guess, do I have your - I guess I don't need permission, but I would like to ask permission - to add or clean up some of these ROM hack pages for some of your more notable stuff and work with others to do so?
MARKEYJESTER:
You're absolutely more than welcome to.
AR:
Thank you.
MARKEYJESTER:
Like I said, you didn't really need to ask. It's very polite that you did, but yeah, like I mentioned before, you really don't need to. What am I going to do? Am I going to dox you? Hunt you down and force you to take it down? Like I said, the internet is the Wild West. You got to grow up. This is the real world. You can't argue with the world to bow to you, can you? You're more than welcome to, mate.
AR:
Oh, thank you.
MARKEYJESTER:
No worries, buddy. [laughs]
AR:
Awesome. I wanted to ask, and I'm going to hop forward here a little bit, could you tell us about your experience on Hellfire Saga? I think on that one you didn't play as much of a leading role, correct?
MARKEYJESTER:
No, I did not. I was late to it. They had contacted me for years. Egor, also known as FoxConEd, also known as - he's gone by a few names over the years. I think they were originally called Hardline Team. Before that, I might be getting this wrong - I think they were called Ladego Team. I'm not sure if that's a separate team or if that was the original name and they went to Hardline. Maybe pixelcat, maybe they might know better, or even if you contacted Egor, he might better know the history of that.
MARKEYJESTER:
They had contacted me multiple times asking me if I could work on their hack. There was a small part of me like, "Well, your hack is kind of crappy." Which it was a long time ago, but that wasn't the main reason. The main reason was just I'm working on other projects. So I've got other things to do. I don't have the time to work on these. I politely kept turning them down. Through the years, they built up a wonderful team and had loads of people on who had been working and adding their own little niches and their own little touches to this project. They made something really fantastic.
MARKEYJESTER:
I was then contacted by pixelcat and they asked me if I would be interested in programming the final boss. Now, I've been casually keeping an eye on their project, just having a look occasionally, seeing their progress. Their programmer - I forget the programmer's name. Let me find the name for you. I want to get this right because I think they're a wonderful programmer and I think they're really going places. Certainly you'd want to keep an eye on them. Apologies for making you wait as I search for this.
MARKEYJESTER:
Certainly, you'd want to keep an eye on them. Apologies for making you wait as I search for this.
AR:
No, no, go ahead. You've already given me hours of your time. I can be as patient as you need.
MARKEYJESTER:
I've got all the time in the world at the minute, so it's no problem on my end.
AR:
Awesome.
MARKEYJESTER:
I will find it. TheBlad, that's his name. TheBlad.
AR:
Oh yeah. Yeah. TheBlad768.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's the one. Yeah. I said to pixelcat, I said, "Well, he seems quite competent." They also had Natsumi in the project, and they've had Devon, who used to go by the name Ralakimus. He used to, and they're very competent programmers. I said, "Well, why didn't, why isn't he working on this? He's certainly clever." Because they showed me, they really thought this one out. I was absolutely blown away and surprised. They showed me these details of how they wanted this final boss to be, really very detailed, right?
MARKEYJESTER:
I will ask pixelcat if they're happy for me to share these documents with you. As you know, I'm going to put this recording up on YouTube, so I'll probably put it on the screen as well if that's okay with you.
AR:
Yeah, totally.
MARKEYJESTER:
I'll show you the full details if they let me. I have to ask, but they were very detailed. Really. They had 4 phases. They very clearly marked out all the moves that would occur, what they were doing. They had like a beginning part where you find this snake thing and then you destroy the center part and it cracks open and this goo comes out and it's like a slimy kind of slug thing, a caterpillar that you'd have to destroy. Then it would eventually evolve into a moth and it'd be like floating around, this massive moth thing, and then you'd fight that. Then you'd go into like this three-dimensional vortex fighting a head. Really well detailed. So they knew exactly what they wanted and I said, "Well, this is quite ambitious, but I think TheBlad probably could do this. He seems very competent. I'm looking at all the other stuff that they've done." pixelcat said, "Well, they didn't feel like they were quite ready for that kind of ambitious work yet."
MARKEYJESTER:
By coincidence, I didn't have any other work that I was doing. I didn't have any projects at the time, so I caved and I said, "All right, tell you what, I'll do it on the condition that I don't have to do any of the artwork. You have to have the artwork ready. I don't want to do the artwork. I'm tired of doing artwork. Just offering to do the programming." I did end up doing a little bit of artwork, just tiny little nit things here and there, but I didn't have to do the bulk of it. They showed me this really wonderful high-detailed pixeled moth Eggman which was similar to what's in the final ROM and yeah, absolutely amazed. We traded some ideas. I looked at the main document and that's how I got involved.
MARKEYJESTER:
When I first joined in I wasn't doing anything because they hadn't had any of the artwork fully made yet. So for months and months and months I was just sitting there waiting. I think I might have just done one or two bits like fixed their H-blank routine for the lava rising, fixed a graphical issue with that, but that was about it. Eventually I think they had a problem with a lack of artists. I think the artists had sort of moved on. Again I'm probably butchering the history here. I'm getting old, you see, and my memory isn't quite- I feel like I'm going to grow up with Alzheimer's eventually, which would be horrible.
AR:
No, don't scare me. I'm right there with you.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, this is why we're doing this interview to document everything now, right? [laughs]
AR:
[laughs]
MARKEYJESTER:
Anyway, pixelcat ended up on their own and they basically carried the project pretty much. They were making all of the proper decisions and they did all the cleanup and the pixel work, the backgrounds and stuff. I would suggest ideas and they'd implement them and then they would suggest ideas to me and I'd program it exactly the way they wanted it.
MARKEYJESTER:
I got the first phase in, which was with the little snake thing with the little laser beams and the missiles, everything that was on the paper. I was going to move on to the second one with all the slime. I was discussing ideas about how we could achieve that, maybe something akin to The Ooze for the Mega Drive. That kind of where all the tiles-
AR:
Procedurally generated.
MARKEYJESTER:
Kind of like that where the body pieces move around, the liquid, something akin to that. Not quite that, but something like that for this slime caterpillar thing. I say caterpillar, I mean caterpillar, but you understand what I mean. Like a maggot kind of slug maggot thing. Yeah. Supposed to be really disgusting.
MARKEYJESTER:
I think they planned to release it on Halloween and we were running out of time and so pixelcat said, "Well, okay, what we'll do is we'll ditch phase two. We'll move straight to phase three with the moth, but we'll merge it with phase four, which is the head in the 3D field." So it would be the moth devil Eggman, but in the three-dimensional thing. We had some discussions back and forth about how we were going to do that. We looked at a few other Mega Drive ROM hacks where they did some sort of three-dimensional tube thing which was supposed to bend around. We looked at Earthworm Jim. I think there's one where he's on like a space, through like a space tunnel. I don't know if you're familiar with Earthworm Jim.
AR:
Yeah. Andy Asteroids.
MARKEYJESTER:
Something like that. I think that's about right. I've never played the game.
AR:
You're flying a rocket.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, that's right. It looks really cool. I wanted something where the tube could bend and something like that. So we discussed this and we talked about it and because we only had a limited amount of ROM space (because the ROM was getting quite big by then), I played around with a few different ideas and created an OpenGL program that would create like a vortex with solid colors and we could transpose them into the Mega Drive as a combination of horizontal scrolling and palette icons to create the effect. They liked it and it was pretty cool and they suggested more ideas and there's a lot of back and forth.
MARKEYJESTER:
When I completed the final level and they were happy with it, pixelcat then put in the move structures. I set up a special kind of table so they could change it how easily they wanted and I was just sitting there waiting. There was discussion about the fact that they didn't have a credit screen. I suggested, "Oh, maybe you could have an interactive credit screen where you could go and search for these Monitors and if you destroy the Monitors, the contents will unlock that part of the level." So you destroy the first one with the music, music starts playing and it shows you the credits of who worked on the music. You destroy the Monitor with the little layout icon, it unlocks the layout. You destroy the one with the paintbrush, it changes the graphics so you can see all the artwork. I thought that'd be really cool.
MARKEYJESTER:
Then I did the ending sequence. pixelcat did a wonderful job with all these artworks. They were very good with the artwork. Yeah, I think I ended up implementing a few other tiny tidbits like when you die and they had the little thing come down and saying you died. I put that in. Nobody asked me to. I just stuck it in and nobody complained about it. But I actually enjoyed working on that project. It was really enjoyable.
AR:
It seems like the scope of that one... I always see ROM hacks and teams and all that stuff as equivalent to actual development. I don't really draw the line there too strongly. But Hellfire Saga in particular seems to very closely mirror the scope of like a real game project in terms of, like you had mentioned, the planning and the design document, but just from like the breakdown of roles and all that stuff. What was it like working on a project on that scale, on that scope?
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, just to put it into perspective, I've only ever talked about the stuff that I've done, which is very limited compared to the rest of the project. They've had so many really good programmers in there, different programmers who have done different bosses throughout and they're really top-notch. They really care about working on this project. They took it really seriously. I've been in their Discord channel and it's very almost professional but laid-back at the same time. It's really difficult to describe. I mean, these Russian hackers, man, they're the coolest cats in the world. They're really chill, despite what you might hear in the news.
AR:
No, of course. That's cool, though.
MARKEYJESTER:
They are very awesome guys. Very laid-back. I think they've just had so many different talented people over the years working on the project. They've implemented their own little bit. That little HUD system. I was looking through the comments to fix a few things and like I see like Devon's name in there where he programmed the menu. "Oh, okay. So you did that thing there." The HUD with the rings and the death splatter and stuff like that. You start to get to, and I think they're very happy to hear when they've been praised for it. I'll go in there and say, "Well, who programmed this boss?" And they say, "Oh, that was me." I say, "Oh, good job. Well done. That's really fantastic. It's really, really cool. You should be really proud of yourself. This is really top-notch, really solid." Oh, they're so happy to hear it.
MARKEYJESTER:
I like to imagine this is what like a real game is like when you get all those credits. Most people don't pay attention to the credits and most of them don't get the praise that they perhaps deserve, which is really sad. But it was very professional but laid-back at the same time. I can't describe it.
AR:
It sounds like a great environment. And I agree. I think recognition is important. Even if it's minimal. I think the worst thing that someone can experience is to put in a lot of work and then just receive zero recognition. It doesn't matter if you receive a little recognition or a lot, but I think to receive nothing is just a terrible feeling. So thank you for doing that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh, Brenda Cook.
AR:
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. She has a wonderful- thankfully she had a whole team of people supporting her. So she got that feedback immediately. But that's also another thing that's different when you're working in a studio, [you have] a desk and you can turn to the person next to you and they can immediately see what you're doing, versus working at home where all of that isn't visible or immediately visible. So yeah, recognition's just so important.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, recognition is important. A bit of a sensitive topic. We had Natsumi work on the project, also known as AURORA☆FIELDS, who got into trouble. I won't say what for, that's not really any of my business, but they got into trouble for something very inappropriate and essentially got exiled from the scene. They were debating on whether or not they should keep their credit in.
MARKEYJESTER:
I put it to them and suggested them that maybe they should keep the name in. Not because they agree with the person. They probably hate this person for what they allegedly done. She got into trouble for some inappropriate things which I'm not really going to describe here. They're all alleged. Keep in mind, they're all alleged. I'm not going to get into that, but I will get into the fact that they were hesitant whether or not they should keep her name in the credits.
MARKEYJESTER:
I put it to them that maybe they should keep the credit in because if you're using their work, and don't get me wrong, she was very clever. She was very talented. If you're going to use their work and you're going to keep it in, you should keep the credit in. It's just the right thing to do. So that's how I feel about it anyway. To their credit, to Red Miso's credit, the team Red Miso, they yeah, they kept her credit in. I'm very proud of them because you have to give credit where it's due. Even if you don't like the person for what they may have allegedly had done.
AR:
Right. That's also a really tough situation too because it's hard to act on a maybe. A lot of times you're presented with a maybe that you SHOULD act on. But it's tricky. I won't say anything because that's a very specific situation.
MARKEYJESTER:
It is very specific. Yeah. No, I understand. Look, there are some people who have, again, allegedly been hurt by this person, and so we're getting into territories that I shouldn't be getting into.
AR:
Understandable. I'll actually move on to- I wanted to talk about M-DOS really quick. Or, excuse me, MD-OS.
MARKEYJESTER:
Microsoft Direct Operation System? [laughs]
AR:
M- M- [stuttering] This is tripping up my brain. MD-OS is a spectacular piece of homebrew. Where did the inspiration from that- I know where the inspiration [is from] because it's Windows and all that stuff, but how were you inspired to create an operating system-like thing on the Mega Drive?
MARKEYJESTER:
Frustration. I don't use a mobile phone. I don't use a cell phone.
AR:
What? [accusatory] Alien. Space alien.
MARKEYJESTER:
[laughs] It's not because I'm old or anything. I'm of the generation that should be into that. But I am very demanding of technology to work. I expect it to work. I expect machines to work the way they're supposed to work. I don't like tapping an icon on my mobile phone and it not doing anything. I don't like hitting that icon four times before it actually does it. That's bad design.
AR:
Yeah, same. It's so frustrating.
MARKEYJESTER:
I was sitting with my ex and she had her phone and she was trying to book a holiday on this site on her phone and it just wasn't working. Like she would tap this thing several times and I could hear her tutting and huffing because it just wasn't working right. When she managed to somehow spam it and it just coincidentally worked, she got all excited because she managed to book this holiday and it was almost like she'd forgotten that she was struggling.
MARKEYJESTER:
I pay attention to people like that. Like they forget that they were struggling, almost like the reward they got for succeeding completely wipes out all of that struggle. I can't be doing with that. I'm absolutely stressed out. I had a mobile phone in 2017 and the alarm didn't go off like it was supposed to. Apparently, it was a bug, I later found out, with the alarm clock. How do you screw up an alarm clock? How do you do that?
AR:
Right? That's mission critical.
MARKEYJESTER:
I smashed that mobile phone. I destroyed it. I've got a picture online somewhere. I will find it and I will post it to you right now on Discord. Give me two seconds, please. I should be able to find it quite quickly. [looks for image] Where are we?
MARKEYJESTER:
I'm actually having trouble finding it, but yeah, it's basically an old Samsung phone that's been absolutely smashed to pieces. If I find it, I'll give you the picture of it. Not that it's relevant. I smashed that thing because it angers me. Like when you got a washing machine and it's doing its last minute spin and it takes 10 minutes despite the fact that the clock says 1 minute. Can't tolerate that.
AR:
Yeah, I have no patience for exactly what you're describing. I can almost understand it intimately.
MARKEYJESTER:
Can't tolerate that. I hate the Windows operating system. I don't like Windows 10. I don't like Windows 8. I don't like Windows 11. I don't like it.
AR:
What do you use?
MARKEYJESTER:
I think I like Seven. After Seven, I'll be moving to Linux. Probably Zorin or something like that, which I've used before. It looks quite nice. But the purpose was to prove a few things. One, to prove that you can make decent software even on an old console, an old machine. There's no excuse for you not to make decent software. But it's also to prove that I could make an operating system. It's a proper operating system. It's not like pretend or anything. There's not much that's hardcoded. It's all proper, very similar to an operating system. There are function calls to create objects and buttons and it renders correctly. You can make your own programs with it if you could get the program into the ROM, of course, but it works.
AR:
Does that have keyboard support? I hadn't checked.
MARKEYJESTER:
It does. I've never tested it on hardware because the keyboard for the Mega Drive, it exists, but it's extremely rare. I don't think it was ever released.
AR:
Oh gosh. I had no idea.
MARKEYJESTER:
There might be some, only BlastEm has support for the keyboard. It's called the XBAND Keyboard. Yeah, it's for multiplayer, technically for the internet access, but the Mega Drive did have one, but it was never released. But we did, I think I say we, not me personally, but as a scene, we came across software for the keyboard or partial software, half of the software for utilizing the keyboard. So Mask of Destiny has implemented it into their emulator BlastEm, or at least implemented what we BELIEVE the keyboard should function as. I've written some software to utilize that and it works. Not many software on the operating system uses it. Yeah, it would have been really cool to use for the operating system because it works. It genuinely does work.
MARKEYJESTER:
There is another keyboard that's supported, the Sega Saturn. A lot of people take the Sega Saturn XBAND Keyboard, cut off the end plug and attach the Mega Drive plug in the right way. Apparently it still functions on the Mega Drive if you wire it up correctly. I don't know the details about it. I'm the wrong person to ask and I never wrote software for the Saturn one. Yeah, it works.
MARKEYJESTER:
The purpose of the operating system was just to prove a few things. One, to prove that I could make an operating system. I know how to do it and to prove that it could be done on an old console. To prove that you can write good software. Look, it's not perfect. The Mega Drive is quite a slow machine, but it mostly works.
AR:
I'll tell you a quick little story. David Galloway is an EA Canada programmer, one of the guys I recently interviewed. He was discussing his experience. He had made a Mega Man homebrew on the Atari 2600, Atari VCS, which is how we get the Sonic the Hedgehog- I think it's Zippy the Porcupine or something. There's a Sonic on 2600 hack and that's all derived from Galloway's work. He recalls releasing this Mega Man on 2600 ROM and just hearing all these people saying "This is fake. The 2600 can't do this." I just remember saying back like, "It's still a computer. I don't understand that these people don't..." It almost seems like, in a way, MD-OS was showing that, "Hey we understand that the Genesis is this many years old but it's still a computer and you can still write modern looking things and modern performing things on a computer from a long time ago because it's still a computer."
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, absolutely. The fact that people call his work fake is quite laughable. I understand why. A lot of people don't understand how these things work. With the Mega Drive Operating System, MD-OS, the Mega Drive is not designed for an operating system. You don't have control over the memory map. You don't have much control over the CPU. For example, I can't stop people when they write their own little program to create a window and all that. I can't stop them from accessing the VDP chip. I can't stop them from accessing the Z80 sound chip. I can't stop them from accessing all these regions of memory they're not supposed to access. It's really just done on good faith. They just have to behave themselves.
MARKEYJESTER:
On a real operating system, the CPU has various different memory map regions. You can specify that things are locked out before you let the program, let the CPU run as a program as a user program rather than supervisor. You can't do that very much on the Mega Drive. There's some things you can restrict. For example, if I set the user bit on the status register, I can stop them from using illegal- stop accessing the status register, stuff like that. I got some control, but not enough to stop them from doing damage. It's all done on faith. It's pretty marvelous that you can make a multi-threaded system by abusing the H-blank portion of the VDP chip in some way. It works.
AR:
Is that how the core of MD-OS came together, technically?
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, that's how it works. During the main loop it does the drawing of the graphics and then during V-blank it does some basic stuff, transferring palettes, reading from the controls, processing the keyboard and stuff, and then it runs. During display it sets up an interrupt system so it will return out of V-blank into the program, run the program, and then when H-blank triggers it interrupts into H-blank. So that program stops for a bit and then it finds the next program, jumps into that routine, runs it, and then when the next interrupt occurs, the H interrupt, it jumps back out. So each program gets its own portion during the screen. Obviously the more programs you got the less time it's got. But that's the only way I could do the multi-threading thing. Every program gets their own thread time. It gets interrupted.
AR:
That's a super cool implementation.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. It's a way of abusing H-blank to do a thread job because you don't have any thread controller, doesn't exist on a Mega Drive. Modern PCs will have a proper interrupt system. I had to use the VDP chip to do that. It works. It's limited, but it works. The whole point of the operating system was just, it was just my frustration of programs and machines not working even though there's no excuse for it. Not that I'm proving it to anyone. It's kind of daft really. Who's going to listen, right?
AR:
Yeah. No, I get it. Honestly, I think it does kind of accomplish what you were looking to set out to show, right? Look, I could do this on a piece of hardware from 30 plus years ago, and here's my phone from two years ago still struggling to do any of this.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. I get told all the time, "Well, maybe it's a user issue." I'm like, "Well, in fairness, I'll put my hand up and admit, look, yeah, I'm not super tech-savvy like I used to be." We were a poor family. We didn't have mobile phones. Everybody else ended up with a smartphone and we kind of fell behind. Just the way it is. It's kind of a good thing it happened to me because it's almost like everyone's caught in a spell. They're glued to their phones and it's almost like being behind financially and not being able to afford stuff has sort of helped me to break free of something - where if we had the money like anyone else and we had mobile phones like everyone else, maybe, who knows, maybe I wouldn't be so cautious. Maybe I'd be glued to it right now. We probably wouldn't be having this conversation, who knows.
AR:
Right, right. One thing I wanted to ask in regard to your hacks, actually, this is probably the last hack I wanted to touch on, because I could sit here all day. PTMZD is just a frickin' incredible hack. That was super recently. You've got first person ray casting, you got a mature horror theme, and just the fact that it's basically an entirely new game inside Sonic 1. Being impressive isn't really out of character for you, but I'm just super interested in PTMZD and I guess how you first came up with the idea for a first-person horror hack.
MARKEYJESTER:
I've always wanted to make a horror hack in some capacity. It never ended up being planned to be 3D. I did make back in 2014, there was a plan to make something really scary, properly scary, called Carnival. I was thinking about all different cool effects that I could have. It would start off; you'd have your intro and I was going to do it all cryptically. I think I was probably inspired by- I don't know if you remember PT. It was going to be cryptic.
AR:
Yes. Oh, I just made a connection here. Sorry, go ahead.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no, it's nothing to do with the name PTMZD.
AR:
Oh, gotcha. Okay. Yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's unrelated. No, that's the name- I'll explain why that's called that later on. This Carnival thing was supposed to be like, "Well, maybe if I can make a horror hack, but maybe if I don't share it, if I just create a new user and share that..." Kind of similar to what PT did. Nobody knew it was Silent Hill until they completed it, right? I figured maybe I could do something like that. Make something really quite scary.
MARKEYJESTER:
So it'll be: you'd go in and you'd be like a normal carnival. There'd be rides you can, 2D. You can go on the roller coaster, just have fun, just load little gimmicks. Then there'd be the spooky tent that you could go in and that's where the real game will be secretly. You go in and it's all dark and dreary. I had plans for Tails to be - because you'd be Sonic and Tails and Tails would follow you and at some point Tails would get kind of lost off screen like he usually does. Because you're used to that happening, you might not notice that he never actually returns.
MARKEYJESTER:
Then I was going to have it where you'd get to some place where you couldn't go past, this door, and you went back. You found a checkpoint post that was all bent going through Tails, through his heart, and all sorts of really dark stuff like that. Then if you keep going to left suddenly you hear a noise, you come back and Tails is gone and it's just kind of...
AR:
Oh, I like that.
MARKEYJESTER:
I didn't want it to be cheap Sonic.exe kind of thing. I wanted this to be properly scary, properly eerie. Then it was going to be this whole thing of - I was really planning out how to do this. You would have a spotlight on Sonic as if he's carrying a candle. There's only a light around him and the whole rest of the screen is black. I was going to animate some tiles as you were moving along the level to make it look like this ball of light was going where you were going. Very complicated stuff like that. Have it where, as you're moving along this level with this light, you'd see a massive evil Tails head just as you were approaching and then suddenly the candle gets blown out and goes dark and eerie kind of stuff like that. The end was going to be just this massive Tails without eyes that you were going to have to fight against.
MARKEYJESTER:
I had loads of different ideas like that, but I ended up just shelving it because it was a lot of work and I had other stresses at the time. So that was shelved. It was forgotten about and I'd occasionally look at it now and again and I'd just ignore it.
MARKEYJESTER:
Then this year it was coming up to Halloween. I wasn't doing anything in particular. Didn't have any serious projects going on, or I had but I wanted to just put them to one side. I was relaxing for a bit and I was watching some - this was two weeks before Halloween - I was watching some playthroughs of Mental Torment which was a VR game. There was this one guy, Storpey, was playing it and he was really shitting bricks. It's really eerie, very well designed. I thought, "I would so love to make something like that on the Mega Drive, just something that good in a Sonic hack." I thought, "Maybe I could do that." So I really started thinking. I thought, "Yeah, maybe I could do that in two weeks. I could probably do that in two weeks."
MARKEYJESTER:
I remembered, well, maybe I could do that ray casting thing that everybody's usually raving about, but maybe I could do it maybe a bit better, maybe higher resolution. Yeah, it took slightly longer than two weeks. Obviously I didn't have it ready for Halloween, unfortunately, because two weeks just really wasn't enough. I got stuck on something and so because I missed the deadline, I thought, well, I'll keep working on it anyway. Then I ended up adding more things to it than I wanted to. It ended up becoming a whole thing. I think I got GalliumGrant involved in the beginning because I thought, look, I'm going to be able to program this ray casting thing, but I'm not going to have time for the levels. He could do the levels. I could do this ray casting thing and it'd be great.
MARKEYJESTER:
Again, missed a deadline, but it was all just inspired by that VR game. I thought that'd be so awesome to make something like that. I don't think I did a terrific job by any means. As I mentioned, I think I mentioned in the post, it's not the technical stuff that's impressive. Some people might find that impressive, but there's nothing special about that. There's nothing really impressive in the grand scheme if you really think about it. It's not the point of that. The point is whether or not I could make something properly scary. Not like Sonic.exe or others that maybe try to be scary but fail. I wanted something that really genuinely worked. I think I partially succeeded. I think there were some people who genuinely got scared. Not everyone. Some people are just tougher than others.
AR:
In what ways did you think that you did succeed in making it scary and what ways could you have improved on, looking back?
MARKEYJESTER:
The Motobug I thought was brilliant because it caught me out a few times. I'd be making this thing and while testing it, it cracked me up, but once you're familiar with it quite quickly, you get used to it. But the Caterkiller and the Basaran weren't nearly as scary, but I was kind of rushing it at that point, which I'm kind of disappointed in. I think mainly the music [was what was scary]. Mainly the audio because I think that's what sells it. The same as in films. If you've ever watched something without the music, it's not really as scary or as enjoyable. The music really sells a film, it really sells a game. I've noticed whenever I've gone to play back some old game, I've learned that I don't really go to play it because I want to play it. I want to play it because there's some good music.
AR:
Mhm. Oh, absolutely.
MARKEYJESTER:
I don't if you've ever noticed that. I've certainly noticed it with me. So the music really makes a difference. There's some studies on this where they show footage of a shark swimming and they play some very Jaws-like orchestra music and it's scary. But then they play one with pleasant music and it's not scary. Even though it's the exact same footage, the music really matters. It really matters.
MARKEYJESTER:
So GalliumGrant has had a lot of experience making Mega Drive audio, Mega Drive music as well, and I've had my fair share as well, so we both put together a few different things. I think that's where its strength is, is the music. It helps sell the atmosphere. Graphically, despite using shadow and highlighting to get that extra color precision, it still does look silly sometimes. You look at it: "Ah, it's just a load of pixels. There's nothing really scary about it." It's music that sells it.
AR:
Mhm. I think that's a good observation. I personally think the graphics look pretty good too. But I think I can understand where you're coming from there.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, we tried.
AR:
Where did the idea for a level editor come from?
MARKEYJESTER:
Oh, that was towards the end. GalliumGrant, bless him, he made all those levels with a hex editor. I showed him how to do it and he made all of them with a hex editor. I didn't even think about making a level editor for him. It's just when I got towards the end and I had a bit of time, I thought, maybe it would be pretty fun. I've got plenty of RAM space. I could do that. The levels that GalliumGrant made, the levels themselves in the main game, they're 8,000 bytes of memory. That's half of your Mega Drive RAM, right? Is dedicated to just the layout. He had all that space and barely used it. In the level editor, you've only got a quarter of that space to use. I don't know if you've seen clips of it, that's still a huge amount of space in the editor.
AR:
Right. Yeah. You estimated, even at the largest level, it was only using 25% of what it could or something to that effect.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, the level editor, that's only a quarter of what is capable in the main levels. It's four times bigger. Imagine that size if you were to multiply it by four. Like, make it twice as wide and twice as tall as what you see in the editor - [that's] what the real levels actually have the space for. The editor only has a quarter of the space for you to play in. So I could make a copy and you play in the copy, collecting the rings. So I could keep a copy of your ring placement because when you collect rings, you delete the ring data. So that's why it's got a copy. That's why it's a quarter of the size. But it's still quite massive for a quarter.
AR:
Yeah, you could do a heck of a lot with that engine.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I mean the idea for the level was just a fun little neat little gimmick. I thought probably people are going to get bored and tired of playing the hack because the first boss is quite scary, but the other two, they're not that scary really once you get used to them, even with all the music and atmosphere. So I thought, well, I thought I could quickly cobble up a level editor and all that and that'd be a reward to encourage them to want to play through even if they get bored of it. It's just a little bit of incentive, I suppose. But yeah, GalliumGrant, he never actually used the editor. He did it all in hex editor before I even made that.
AR:
Wow. Good for him. That's putting in some work there. So I'd asked which of your hacks and which of your projects that you've worked on that you enjoyed the most, but out of everything that you've worked on personally, which are you the most proud of? I know that can kind of be a big question.
MARKEYJESTER:
I'm really thinking about this because I think it's important. Proud of, proud of...
AR:
It doesn't have to be explicitly "proud of." I guess which one do you look back on the most fondly or I guess what sticks out in your memory the most in terms of like pleasant experiences?
MARKEYJESTER:
Probably... I know the most fun hack I've ever worked on is this private hack that I can't talk much about with D.A. Garden, but most fondly looking back - probably Hellfire Saga. I barely had any involvement. I was more towards the tail end, but that was a pretty good project to work on. It was nice to work with other people and they were ever so nice and polite. It was just a shame because there's a lot of people who had come and gone and who had worked on the project who I never really got to talk with. I think, like for example, Devon. He came on, did a few bits and he was gone. Natsumi came on, did a few bits and was gone. There's just a few people who have done some bits over the years, no longer working it. They've moved on. I come in and I'm looking at the legacy of their work. [I] don't really have an opportunity to sort of work with them directly. They've done their own little bit and I've done my own little bit separate, which is a bit of a shame. Despite being on the tail end I did actually enjoy working on that. It was a challenge and it was a fun challenge.
AR:
It seems like it'd be good experience too.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. Yeah. It's quite a difficult question.
AR:
Yeah. Not anything you have to answer now either, but I appreciate the recollections. Another thing I wanted to ask about is, we've kind of been touching on this as we've been going through here, but you also have an interest in just game design and making your own games in general. Could you tell us about your experience in game design outside of ROM hacking and where you possibly want to take that?
MARKEYJESTER:
As I mentioned before, I really want to make a PC game. I would love to make a PC game - again, with the jungle music that I spoke of previously. I'd like to make it with jungle music of various different kinds. I've got an idea for a game. My problem is I don't really- I've got good creative ideas with a baseline. You take the Sonic series - I don't like using the word franchise. I think that's an overused word. I think it's also incorrectly used. I don't like to use the term franchise. I like series. Let's call it series because it seems a bit more fitting to me.
MARKEYJESTER:
The Sonic series, if you're playing, you can come up with a cool idea to go along with that. When you're creating your own game, it's surprising how difficult that is to come up with various different... Like I have no idea how I would make a level for my own game without making it-
AR:
In terms of design?
MARKEYJESTER:
I mean, I can't exactly put like ramps and loops in it and springs and spikes. It's not its own thing. That's basically just Sonic 2.0. It's not good.
AR:
Oh, you mean making your own creation unique?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. Yeah, I can come up with character designs and they're not always perfect, but I think that's where I get stuck. I can make an engine. I can program an engine and I can design, but ideas are really difficult if you're making something 100% original. When you're basing it off of something else, you can twist it a little bit and have fun. But making your own game is really quite difficult just in terms of ideas, which is probably why it's better to work in a team than it is to work in a solo project. You can correct each other.
AR:
Yeah. Do you like working - and we kind of touched on this with Hellfire Saga, but do you like working in like a larger team?
MARKEYJESTER:
Depends on the team.
AR:
Right. Yeah. True, true.
MARKEYJESTER:
I mean, yeah. I think the reason why it's nice to work on - and this is going to sound rather ridiculous and arrogant and self-serving, but it's because you get to make things and then you get to show it to people and you get to get their feedback, but you also get praise when you've done those things. When I was working on Sonic 2 VS and I made the Special Stage thing and I showed it to them, they were really quite amazed and really shocked and it was really, really exciting before you've even released it. So you can keep a project private, but you can get a little bit of, at the risk of sounding camp or sly here, you get a bit of dopamine, I suppose, if that makes any sense.
AR:
No, right. It's encouragement.
MARKEYJESTER:
You get your fix, I guess, is the harsh way of putting it. But no, it's nice to get a little bit of praise and recognition for something you've done without actually releasing it and spoiling it when you're working on the solo project.
AR:
I think that goes far.
MARKEYJESTER:
When you are working on your solo project, you're tempted to share screenshots and spoil it for the sake of getting some feedback and attention and it can ruin the surprise of the project. So that's probably one reason why you'd want to have a team to work with. Red Miso, I think they were a special case, because they were very cool dudes. Very cool. Yeah, nice and laid-back. There were no arguments. Nobody was... It's hard to describe.
AR:
No drama.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no serious drama at all.
AR:
That's so refreshing to hear.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. [laughs]
AR:
Could you tell us a little bit about the Chaos Layer?
MARKEYJESTER:
The Chaos Layer. Yeah, I mean that was kind of a silly project really, in hindsight looking back. I wanted to make my own homebrew, but I didn't want to use my character, the MarkeyJester character. I wanted to do something a bit more genuine, a bit more realistic. The idea was if you've ever played a game where you're playing as a character and you eventually unlock some sort of really powerful state of that character where you're essentially playing as god by the end of it. You're flying over levels and destroying everything. You've got the complete power. Difficult to describe. I suppose it's a bit like, just to use a very narrow analogy, it's like Sonic the Hedgehog when you've got all the Chaos Emeralds and you're Super; you're practically invincible, but you're super fast and you dominate the level essentially. I'm trying to think of other examples, but my mind's amiss.
MARKEYJESTER:
I wanted to make something like that where you had a character that was quite powerful and in the beginning it started off like that. This thing could like jump really high in these test levels and they can walk on walls and flip upside down and on the side and stuff. It kind of fell apart after that. I had to limit that because it was just too easy to play a level and it kind of went, well, practically downhill. It wasn't really enjoyable. This is where when I said before about having ideas, I can create an engine. I can create a character, but coming up with a story that makes sense. Who's the enemy? I don't know how to make an enemy or an antagonist. I don't know really how to make a storyline out of this. It wasn't very fun to work on if I'm at all honest. A lot of hard work, not very fun.
AR:
Do you think you'll ever revisit it?
MARKEYJESTER:
No, definitely not. Definitely not. I'd have to make a brand new game. It'd have to be brand new.
AR:
I think that sounds more appropriate.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, and I suppose not take it so seriously. But as I said, I'm giving all this up by the new year and going to seek some other avenues, something a bit more practical and physical. I'm tired of software now. I'm tired of programming. I want to do something like engineering maybe, unless somebody comes along and says, "Hey, we need a programmer to work on this project. We'll give you a bit of a salary," maybe I'd be interested but this is not likely to happen. That's just reality.
AR:
It should. I was going to touch on this a little later, but if I was running a studio or if I was a producer, I would absolutely look at your experience and your resume and be, "Oh my gosh, I want this guy on my project." I would pay you. I mean, that doesn't mean a whole lot because I'm not running anything [a game studio], but I think that if you did ever want to give that a stab, I think you'd have a much better leg up than most people. And you have work to show for it.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's very kind of you to say. Don't get me wrong, I am flattered, but it's very difficult to put this stuff on your resume or your CV.
AR:
[in confirmation] To make people understand it.
MARKEYJESTER:
THAT is the most difficult thing then. How do you explain to people the significance of what you've done? You take all of the stuff that you know I've done. If you were to explain it to somebody who's never played a Mega Drive: You know that, one, they're not going to be very impressed because they don't understand. You could be explaining all sorts of technical detail. They're not going to get it. "Oh well, I've made this 3D Special Stage and it functions at a high frame rate, nearly 60 fps." Well, if they don't know the console and they're not familiar with the games and how games are usually portrayed, well, they're not going to be that impressed. They're not really going to understand what it is that you've done. So I have real difficulty.
AR:
I would say you could probably still do it, but it would just take more explanation. You'd also have to know your audience is. Because I've definitely been there where you're having to explain something very niche or that seems very niche or is very technical to someone that - especially people who don't care about video games and you're trying to like impart the importance of what you're talking about to them. It's difficult, but I think you could get there. You just need to swap out some words and be very careful about your phrasing. But I absolutely get what you're saying.
MARKEYJESTER:
100%, 100%, and I'm terrible at that. I'm terrible at selling myself in that way. I also got elements of imposter syndrome in there. I mean, it's not like I haven't done some incredible things, but I'm very terrible at wording it.
AR:
Especially if you're talking about yourself too.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, it's very nerve-wracking. It's very difficult to explain it. I've had it before. At my current job, there was a job position going for some other department in the warehouse, but slightly less pay than I'm getting, right? Only ever so slightly, but nevertheless... So I thought, well, I'll tell you what. I'll just show these guys what I can do.
MARKEYJESTER:
I showed them not any of my hack stuff or any of the ROMs. This is stuff that I've never shown anyone on the internet. I've written several programs for me to do my job really, really well at work. When I'm at workbench and I need to process some orders, I've got a few shortcuts here and there. They agree to have a little - not an interview, because I don't want the job. I just want to show them what I'm capable of doing. We sit in there and I show them, "Okay, well, this program is a manifest stripper. When I get manifests at the end of the day, rather than having to manually copy these order numbers and put them in, I just copy and paste into this program, hit this button, and it's done for me. That's just the end of it, right?"
MARKEYJESTER:
They seem really impressed with it. They genuinely are, but they always get to the same thing right at the end. They always said the same thing. "Have you considered insert website here where you can learn how to do things before." I'm thinking, "Well, I don't need to learn anything. I've already shown you what - this is why we're here."
AR:
That's a weird thing to say.
MARKEYJESTER:
"Well, I don't need to learn anything. I've already shown you what - this is why we're here."
AR:
That's a weird thing to say.
MARKEYJESTER:
"Look, I can do this thing. I can help you. I can help you achieve stuff. I can make your life easier. Why aren't you paying attention?"
AR:
Right? "Isn't it your guys's job to figure out how to use my abilities in the first place?"
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, like I'm here to help you. There's no good suggesting me to go to some thing online to learn something I already know. What's wrong with you?
AR:
That's kind of insulting.
MARKEYJESTER:
But it happens. It happens every single time. The only thing I can think of is that they genuinely don't care. They're not really that interested. They think they're trying to help me out, but they're not. They're just- it's just irritating me. So I have to get out of that. I have to get out of this place and find some other avenue. So that's why I'm giving up the software thing.
AR:
Just don't throw it all out. Just take all your work and throw it in a box and stick it in a garage somewhere. Just don't throw it out.
MARKEYJESTER:
Everything is being archived, don't worry. I wasn't supposed to be telling anyone that I was leaving. That wasn't the plan. I was supposed to be leaving quietly. I modified the wiki page about myself just to close up some loose ends, put some projects on there before I left. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, they've got a bot that's monitoring the wiki pages because they've had some issues with some individuals going on to wiki pages and making edits that they shouldn't. So they put a bot there to monitor changes so they can keep an eye on it. I didn't know this thing was running.
MARKEYJESTER:
So when I put in the wiki page saying that, "In 2026 he left and to do his own thing," I had no idea that that bot was plastering it out on Discord for everyone to see. That wasn't my intention. I was supposed to be going quietly because I'm going through a phase where I'm trying to let go. I need to let go of all this. I've been holding on to it for too long and not really making progress in life. I have to let go and it's very difficult to let go when everybody knows that you're leaving and it's trying to claw you back. So that's part of the huge issue.
MARKEYJESTER:
But a few people have contacted me. I did the edit, went to work, came back, and then had several people contact me on Discord, all panicking. I've had to sit them down and explain, "Look, I'm not making this as a rash decision. I'm not depressed. I'm just going a different route now. I've really thought about this for a very long time. For a few years now, I've really thought about this. I need to make changes in my life. I need to let go. This is a conscious decision, very well thought out. This isn't blind." Some of my work, I mean I said to him, "If there's something you want, some sort of project I worked on, some source code or tools that I've got and if you want a copy, I'll give you a copy, you can do what you want with it."
MARKEYJESTER:
I've had a few people say, "Yeah, I'd be interested in this thing you were working on X amount of years ago" and I'm interested in having a look at the source code. I'm like, "Yeah sure, I don't mind sharing that out." So none of it will get lost. It's all being archived and some people are getting what they've asked for. Just before I go, I'm still cleaning up a few loose ends.
MARKEYJESTER:
[connection issue]
AR:
Yeah, you're cutting out a little bit too. Maybe give it like five seconds. There we are.
MARKEYJESTER:
There we go.
AR:
Oh, my frickin' connection. I'm sorry. That might be on my end. I'm going to go yell at my router after this.
MARKEYJESTER:
But yeah, that's basically me. That's what I'm doing. My, I'm not completely throwing it away. I'm just detaching myself. Once I've sorted out my life, maybe I'll come back as a hobby and continue. But for now, I need to take a strong break. I need to let go.
MARKEYJESTER:
[connection issues]
MARKEYJESTER:
You still hear me?
AR:
I can still hear you too. Yeah, Google Meet is a pain in the ass sometimes.
MARKEYJESTER:
Maybe you should stick with Discord, but then again, I know a lot of people that you talk with probably don't use Discord. I mean, I wouldn't imagine Tom Kalinske uses Discord. [laughs]
AR:
Tom Kalinske was just a straight phone call, which is how I normally do it. I prefer phone calls because, just in my own experience in terms of not connectivity, but disconnectivity, which is what I care about more, the cellular service is just a little more reliable in that regard, surprisingly. I don't know why call recording services don't work when you're going from the US to the UK. I tried to make it work for a month and a half, blew like $80, didn't end up working. Lost an interview from that. It was, I was interviewing the guy who did Lemmings, made Lemmings, the art, excuse me. That interview is still going to happen, but it's going to be over text because I couldn't figure out voice and kind of kicks me, but he's being very patient with me. So I appreciate that.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, it sucks. I mean, lucky for me, when I did the three little silly mini interviews that I did with, on my short-lived podcast thing.
AR:
Behind the Code.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. Luckily it was always done through Discord, so I never had any problems. Or we had brief problems, but it was picked up quite early on. I mean, the biggest problem that we had was their voice threshold was by default too high, so they'd have to lower it. But other than that, we never really had any problems. So I can only offer you deepest sympathy for having to deal with a service that's rubbish.
AR:
I appreciate that. We're about nearing the end here and I wanted to ask, while we've been going through here, I've been marking a few things. Going to hop back in time to gosh, I want to say late 2000s, early 2010s. What was the Retro UK Barcade run like?
MARKEYJESTER:
It was fun. The people there were very cool, very- I hesitate to say nerdy because it's not quite right.
AR:
You're among friends.
MARKEYJESTER:
More kind of slightly gothy kind of nerdy, if that makes sense. Quite laid-back, very chill. Usually I felt kind of out of place because I'm not, contrary to perhaps popular belief, I'm not really a nerd. I'm not really too into games.
AR:
[confidently] I don't believe that.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, seriously. I mean, I'd go all the way down there and I'd bring my laptop and maybe show, Cinossu would be interested. He'd show me some of his work that he's been doing on his laptop. I'd show him some of the work I've been doing on mine. Usually it'd end up in the end of the day where they've all got the DSs up and they're all playing Mario and I'm kind of like the spare wheel just sitting there watching. But no, it wasn't bad or anything and I'm certainly not blaming them or accusing them of singling me out or anything like that. It wasn't that I didn't get along. It's just, I guess it just really wasn't my thing. I didn't really have much of a life and I wanted to get out more, so I'd go down there. I stopped going just before we had the lockdowns and I haven't been since. They did invite me a few times. I think they brought me into the Discord channel, but I just... Yeah, I'm getting too old for that now, I think.
AR:
Sure.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, it's really funny. If you do come to the UK, you should arrange it around about the time that they're doing a barcade and join them. It is a good load of fun.
AR:
Yeah. I've actually never been to the UK. I would like to go. If I did I would probably reach out to you to see, "Hey, do you want to get a drink?" I think that'd be pretty cool. I don't know if- that's just me putting that out there.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. I'm like an hour from London, so I could spare a day. I probably won't be what you think I am. [laughs]
AR:
That's all right. It's funny about interviews because you kind of get to know someone on a, not an intimate level but on a much closer level than - especially verbal interviews - if you had just spoken with them over text. I just appreciate everything that you're telling me today here and just sharing with me.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, as I mentioned before, this is just the truth and nothing but the truth. It's probably a lot of stuff I've said here that probably hasn't done my reputation very well, but that's not, it's not the point. I'll stick to the truth. That's what's important.
AR:
No, honestly, I think - also I'm very careful about that kind of stuff to where if my interviewee says something that could not look great when published, I usually like edit around it, but I don't know. I think everything's pretty straight here. You haven't said anything hurtful or harmful. Everything's been the truth. Anything that even approaches that is - this is 30 years ago. We were all kids. I'm sure we could laugh about it more than anything.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. Well, like I said, even if I did, you're free to publish it as is. You shouldn't be watching out for my reputation or anything. That's not the point of the interview. The point of the interview is for the honesty, for the truth, to find out what really happened. The only time you'd ever catch me in a lie is if I'd forgotten and I misremembered. That's really about it. Not with any intent.
AR:
You're allowed to do that too.
MARKEYJESTER:
I literally might just completely forget a little detail here or there, and that's just the way it is.
MARKEYJESTER:
Speaking of interviews, you did- going back to Hacker: Behind the Code here, why did you want to do a podcast interviewing other hackers?
MARKEYJESTER:
To be absolutely honest with you, two main reasons. One, I've listened to podcasts and interviews and I've always thought it would be really awesome to interview people. Two, there was a market for it. Nobody's really interviewed hackers before. ROM hackers. Not like real hackers. Our silly little hackers, if you can call us that, because we're not really hackers. We're more ROM modifiers now. We modify the games now more than we do the hacking. We don't do that ROM editing anymore, not really. Maybe rarely. But it was just I thought, "There's a market for that." There's a few people who've been here for a very long time. Maybe I could interview a few of them. That would be cool. Start off with a few people who I'd know would be willing to do it. People I know would have been around for a long time.
MARKEYJESTER:
Perhaps some close friends, people who trust me, who I trust them. Maybe over time maybe some people would be interested. I've always wanted to interview Ayla. I don't know if you're familiar with Ayla.
AR:
A-y-l-a?
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, she's been around for absolute years and there's a whole breadth of history with her. I remembered one time going through the - I don't even know if it's still on the wiki - but there was a whole big backstory, massive backstory. It was almost like reading a book. It was almost like a piece of fiction. Yeah, it's just really amazing talking about all these different people I'd never even heard of. It was written in a weird elegant way, like it was a story book. Like it wasn't real, but it was all the history of - not necessarily her personal history of how she came into the scene or anything, but just stuff that happened back in the day, like the late 1990s, early 2000s.
MARKEYJESTER:
I thought, yeah, maybe one day that would be really cool. I couldn't ask her in the beginning because this is new territory for me. I need to get used to interviewing people. So I picked some friends I knew I'd be comfortable with to begin with and people I knew had a rich history, if they wanted to. I didn't want to just do a generic interview. I wanted to make it kind of like a podcast, like a radio show or something really silly and ridiculous. So I had a whole system planned, a whole thing set up, where I'd explain to them some prerequisites.
MARKEYJESTER:
I would say, "Here are the rules. We don't talk about religion. We don't talk about politics and we don't talk about sex." Because those are quite divisive, right? If there's anything that if I'm asking a question and it's something really uncomfortable and you don't want to talk about it, just say no comment and I will cut out my question in the editing phase. Just sort of things to make them be a bit comfortable.
MARKEYJESTER:
I wanted to have a little chat beforehand just to sort of get in the groove and get comfortable because it can be quite nerve-wracking if you're being interviewed and you're getting your voice recorded and you know it's going to be published on YouTube. What I would do is I'd ask them if they would be interested in being interviewed. They'd say yes hopefully. Then I'd go and try and find as much history on them as I possibly could. Not to be nosy or anything like that.
AR:
No, that's research. That's what you should do.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, really try and dig in and go back as far as I can, find out anything that I could, anything, even stuff that I might have remembered because I remember being there at the time. We'd make it like a radio show, like I'm interviewing someone on the radio and just occasionally playing some music. The research part was amazing. That was quite fun because you find out about things that you didn't know. Then the interview part was nerve-wracking. I won't lie. I was a bit nervous about doing it. That was also quite fun. You'd have a good laugh with them and try not to interrupt them mid-sentence, and you try to restrain yourself and not try to cut in and try to make it about you. Try to focus on them. Then towards the end you got to do the editing which is in my honest opinion an absolute nightmare to do.
MARKEYJESTER:
Absolutely horrible. You get those YouTube videos where it's a modern YouTube channel. There's a person who's, I don't know, maybe they're playing a game and it's super edited. It's completely chopped up. Every single bit of breath space is cut out and all patched together. Really insane. Which I always looked at as, "Wow, that's just silly. That's just modern bullcrap." I never really cared for it. After editing my own ones, just casually, not even to the extreme that they did, I look at them and I think, "Wow, the editor, whoever edited this video, they must have put a lot of hard work into that. Even if I do think the result is stupid, that's a lot of hard work." I have so much appreciation for that now.
MARKEYJESTER:
I also have a lot of appreciation for the research that people do as well. Like I said before, when you asked me if you'd be interested in interviewing me, I thought it was just silly like, oh, somebody wants to interview me, isn't that cute, like, oh, go on then. It'll be a good laugh. Then I see you've interviewed all these other people and I'm like, Jesus Christ, this guy is serious. These are real top-notch people. Damn.
MARKEYJESTER:
I've come into this having interviewed other people and done all the research. I have a lot of respect for you because I know exactly what you've done. I know how much hard work you've put in, the time you put in. You've taken time out of your own life and it's not like you're making any money out of this. You're not gaining anything other than perhaps value in the sense of information that you might be interested in, but it's a lot of hard work.
MARKEYJESTER:
I did, on the first episode, I did toy with a few different ideas of what kind of intro and ending music I wanted. I did settle on a kind of jazzy - like you're in a cafe and you're having a relaxing talk with someone. Kind of jazzy bluesy kind of music.
AR:
Totally. That was such a great idea.
MARKEYJESTER:
So I thought it'd be kind of cool to have that kind of bluesy, because I've been listening to a lot of the Dana Gould Hour over the years, and he had a sort of similar kind of thing of, oh, maybe I could do something of some similar style, but just a bit more bluesy, but I could never find anybody who could make that kind of music. I gave up in the end and just made some music out of some different samples from a sample CD kit, which is what the intro is.
MARKEYJESTER:
Towards the end, I remembered jokingly saying to D.A. Garden after, he had a wonderful speech at the end which was almost tearjerking, about how he's very proud to have been part of the hacking community and met some wonderful people who he calls his friends. Really tearjerking stuff. I said jokingly towards the end, I said, "And that's it." Then I said to him, I said, "I'm just going to use the part about when you," I can't remember what it was. It was some joke. I'm just going to cut everything out and just use this small section here, jokingly. He went like, "Thanks."
MARKEYJESTER:
When I was editing it, I realized he's went through this emotional speech and I feel kind of bad. So I cut that out and put something a bit more emotional on the end and that's how you got that end orchestra thing. I think it was from Lloyd Cole and the Commandos [Commotions]? I forget what the song is called, but there's an orchestra section. It's really quite emotional.
MARKEYJESTER:
The whole thing, it was enjoyable, but really bloody hard work. I couldn't keep it up. After the third one, I felt I kind of let ProjectFM down. He's the third person I interviewed because I did do a lot of research, but there were lots of things I missed. It was almost like I was slipping. Like I missed several things and yeah, I just decided, yeah, maybe this isn't for me. I can't really do this continuously. It's a lot of hard work. I'll leave it to the professionals like CartridgeCulture. [laughs]
AR:
[laughs] Oh, shoot. Man, that's so sweet of you to say. But I'm going to say this to you. You have - and this isn't just me bullshitting like, "Oh, you have talent because I'm interviewing you." - you have actual talent for it. Something that impressed me was just you understanding that research is- it's so obvious, right? Just your breakdown of what you needed to do, how you needed to prepare and executing that and then the work afterwards. That's like 90% of the job. Obviously you're doing your own things and there are reasons why - the work is very hard, but man, just to let you know, put this in your head, you do have actual real talent for interviewing.
MARKEYJESTER:
That's very kind of you. Yeah, it's just not for me, unfortunately. It's just the way it is. I can't keep doing that. I don't have the stamina for that. I like doing creative things.
AR:
Totally. I'd mentioned I kind of wanted to document the history of the Sonic scene and just the Sonic ROM hacking community and just all the community stuff. Would you be all right if I reached out to say D.A. Garden and he said okay it's cool if you transcribe this interview, would you be okay if I get the permission of the interviewees to transcribe the interview to text and then we can use that for citations on the wiki?
MARKEYJESTER:
So I will say yes, you can transcribe, but I will say no, don't hassle them. D.A. Garden did mention to me he was contacted by you and he's kind of busy.
AR:
Yes, yeah.
MARKEYJESTER:
He's got his own stuff and as I mentioned to him, well, if you want a transcript, you should come to me. I don't have a transcript for any of these, by the way. You'll have to make the transcript. There's nothing I can do about that.
AR:
Oh yeah. That's what I was planning on.
MARKEYJESTER:
There's no point in asking them, they're unrelated. They just did the interview. I put together everything and handled all the logistics and the issues. I'd be the person to ask. If you want to do a transcript, you can. They knew full well that by being interviewed and it being made public that maybe this would happen. It's just the way it is.
AR:
Okay. I'm friends with Selbi and ProjectFM anyway.
MARKEYJESTER:
Okay, that's cool. Yeah, I'll just say look, you can do a transcript if you want, but maybe don't go hassling them because - maybe they'd be all right with it, but yeah.
AR:
For sure, for sure. All I would be doing in that case would be reaching out and being like, "Hey, I just wanted to touch base here." It wouldn't be asking them for involvement or work either. It'd just be getting permission.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
AR:
Also done tactfully and carefully. I understand that everyone's got their own schedules and we're all kind of busy with our lives at this point.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. No, by all means. Look, fill your boots.
AR:
Awesome.
MARKEYJESTER:
Now, what am I going to do? Say no.
AR:
Y'know, I try to be on the level with everyone.
MARKEYJESTER:
I know. People do try to be polite, but I'm going to say it - I've said it probably 4 or 5 times and I'll say it again. The internet is the Wild West. You got to learn to grow up and just accept the fact that you can't control what people say or do. Once you put something on the internet, you're out in the open. That's just the way it is.
AR:
Right. So to kind of get this wrapped up here, I wanted to ask if there was a big driving "why" reason behind your work. Why do you do what you do? Which is a very big question to ask and also it's a question that the answer to changes as you get older. Let's say I went back to 20-year-old Markey or 24-year-old Markey, when you were really doing a heck of a lot. What do you think the answer to why you do what you do would have been back then?
MARKEYJESTER:
20-year-old me, it would be for love and attention, to be noticed, to say, "Hey, look at me. I exist. Love me. Pay attention to me." It's horrible to say. Looking back now, it's very awkward and horrible, but it's the truth. It's doing it for attention.
MARKEYJESTER:
Nowadays, it's more - not really for the attention, but more because I'm a creative individual and I'm a very open personality. I have to be doing something creative. I stopped doing creative stuff recently this month just to get ready for 2026 and found myself just getting bored very quickly and thinking, "No, look, this is the reason I got to stop doing these creative things because they're distracting me from doing what I should be doing which is looking for a better job and better opportunities and setting my life up properly and getting too distracted by creative logistics.
MARKEYJESTER:
If it were today, as 35-year-old me today, it's really I just want people to notice what I can do so I can do them a favor in exchange for services, a mutual exchange. You help me out, I help you out, everybody goes home a winner. But 20-year-old me was arrogant, egocentric. It was all about the attention. "Look at me."
AR:
Right. Again, honestly, I think you're not the only one there.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, I know I'm not the only one, but this isn't about anyone else. This is about me.
AR:
I think it's a normal feeling, is what I'm saying.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I appreciate it. Self-reflection is something I think we all need. We all need self-reflection.
AR:
Yeah... [thinking] What was the thing I needed to wrap up... [flipping through pages] I've been saying that a few times. I appreciate the patience.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's okay. No worries. I got all the time, mate. I'm not doing anything too important.
AR:
I appreciate that. If you were talking to someone who was just starting out on the scene today, what would you tell them?
MARKEYJESTER:
Don't give up. Keep trying. When you start a new project, you will be excited and you'll go in there with a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, and you'll do a really good job to begin with. Then you'll reach the hump. The hump is the point where you're doing the difficult parts of the project that have very minimal impact, but they're necessary.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's at this point you kind of get bored of it and you want to bail out and start some different project. You get bored of it. Don't give up. You got to keep at it. You got to do the difficult stuff. You got to push on. Sometimes you have to tell yourself, "No, this has to be done. I have to do this. No excuses. Let's not get distracted. Let's turn off, stop watching that YouTube video. Put the phone down. Switch it off. Let's just do this. Let's do this difficult thing and do it carefully and slowly. It will be difficult, but after I got over this hump, after I've done all this difficult stuff, which will be really painful, it'll get easy and then I'll do all the fun stuff afterwards towards the end of the project."
MARKEYJESTER:
You have to go through that difficult phase. Nobody can avoid it. You can't get around it. Don't give up. Just keep pushing through. It's very important. You have to do the difficult work. You've really got to push yourself to do the thing you know you don't want to do. "I don't want to do this. It's tedious. It's boring." Do it. Just push on through. That's my advice to somebody who's new starting out.
AR:
That's really impactful. Thank you for sharing that. I'm sure that'll help a lot of readers.
MARKEYJESTER:
Well, it's not impactful, it's the truth.
AR:
[in confirmation] It's the truth.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, you need to do this otherwise you'll fail. It's not just for projects. It's for real life too. It's for anything you can think of. Maybe that girl you really fancy or that boy you really fancy or that job you want or if you're in a competition with someone, you got to do that.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's really important. It's part of what makes life worth living. Do the difficult work. Push yourself. Obviously I don't want people pushing themselves in terms of it damaging their health. Of course not. There's going to be tedious, difficult things you don't want to do, but you have to do. You have to wake up to go to work. You can't just keep putting it off.
AR:
Right. Wow. Thank you.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, thank you.
AR:
All right. So I think that was going to be everything and we can probably go ahead and - this is the cut mark. You can mark like 10 seconds ago is where you might want to cut it off. So man, thank you so much. This was so frickin' cool speaking to you. Just you giving me your patience. And I know you said - I'm going to thank you anyways. Just you giving me so much of your time and so much of your life really. I learned a whole lot. People are going to learn a heck of a lot from this. I just think we did something wonderful here.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, no worries. My pleasure. It's been great speaking with you and I do mean what I said about the hard work that you do and it, again, it really is only because I've sort of done what you've done.
AR:
You have.
MARKEYJESTER:
So I can relate and understand. So keep up with it. I did notice all of your interviews seem to be approximately from around 2025, so I'm assuming this is quite relatively new to you.
AR:
Yeah. [pauses] Maybe we'll keep this running for a little bit. Part of why I was so interested in reaching out - lots of reasons, because your work is historically notable. You're historically notable. It's important to document all that stuff. Blah blah blah, all that stuff. I really personally related to a lot of what you were saying in regard to doing work and just not having the impact that you had hoped for or even the audience that you had hoped for. In my case it was a feeling of, "Is anyone listening?" I'm dedicating sometimes a majority of my working day - of my life, really - to doing this work. It just feels like I'm releasing it into a void sometimes.
AR:
Personally, I keep that going because I'm a '90s baby. I don't know if I described this, but we're both '90s kids. There was a sense of optimism back then where the world was all going to hold hands and sing kumbaya and everything was going to be all right and we were told that that's the world that we have to build and that's the people that we have to make ourselves for. Now it's 2025 almost 2026. That's not the case. I never changed from that type of person. I'm always almost optimistic to a point that it seems like it's not real. It is very real.
AR:
Where was I going with this? I can relate to your feelings of wanting to start over. In my case, this last 2025 has been a year of trying out new Alexes. I wasn't happy with where I was. I'm okay financially. My job's okay, but just in my personality, I was way too anxious all the time. I was way too fearful. I suffer from [emphasis] "anxiety" anxiety. It was taking over my life and I was building my personality and my future - I was building future Alex around the shape of anxiety, like accommodating it inside of me, deep inside of me.
AR:
I just got sick of it. I needed to do something vastly different. Also, I was running into what you were kind of running into, where I was putting so much effort into game work in my case and just seeing it go nowhere and I was like, "Well, how can I take that to the next level?" Also, the researcher in me wanted to create new primary sources. I think that was a big deal too. So it just kind of all coalesced into - and I'm still not done changing either.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, nobody is.
AR:
But in terms of the reset that I mentioned, I feel like I'm very close. I needed a reset. I kind of kicked that off at the beginning of 2025. Because I didn't just want this shit sitting in my head. To make it real, I wanted to do a little more with my life. That meant putting in a little more effort at work to try to progress my career, but also to do the interviews. I don't know where I want to take that. I'm not going to share my plans with that now, but I would like to eventually try to find a way to make my passion with games into a commercial career, something that can support me. Everyone wants that. That's the holy grail, right? I'm trying to make it a history angle because there isn't a lot of history out there.
AR:
Your journey has personally informed mine. That's very recently. That's speaking within the last week or two weeks. Your question about the importance of your work when it seems like it doesn't have an audience or it doesn't have the audience that it should and how you value that and how you look at that and how you move forward with that... These are all questions that your exit is making me ask myself. And I'm not sure I have the answers yet, but I'm glad that my mind is asking this of myself. So I'm just very glad I got in touch with you and I'm very glad I got to hear your perspective. Everything that you were saying was hitting a very personal nerve in me. I really appreciate hearing your perspective on it.
MARKEYJESTER:
No, look, it sounds like a primal scream to me. A few people, when they contacted me because they found out I was leaving, they got it wrong. They thought that maybe there was something wrong with me, that I was depressed or I was super frustrated. It wasn't that I was frustrated. I've been-
AR:
Fed up. Would fed up be a better word? Or just knowing that you need a change?
MARKEYJESTER:
I've been fed up in the past and tried to do something different, but never letting go of my projects. I've gone through transformations over the years. I've been listening and reading up on different philosophical speakers just to get an idea, a sensation, of maybe what I really want in life. I'd imagine you've probably been going through this same similar thing.
MARKEYJESTER:
The original one for me was Earl Nightingale. He had a talk during the 1950s called The Strangest Secret where he discovers the idea that all the different prophets, teachers, philosophers and wise men all disagreed on many different things. But there's a few things that they all unanimously agreed on. One of them is that you become what you think about. I'll say that again. You become what you think about. If you really think about that, you realize how true that is. Whatever you focus on, because you can only focus on one thing at any given time, that becomes essentially your life goal. So you have to let go of one thing to trade it for another.
MARKEYJESTER:
It's not just him. There's been a few others. You get those occasional silly ones like the stoicism or Gandhi speeches which seem quite well-meaning and you listen to them and they seem all right but they just seem kind of generic in a way. Usually it's a video with an AI generated voice in the style of that particular person.
MARKEYJESTER:
But the one that got me, it wasn't just that one, but it was the final nail in the coffin, was Alan Watts. He was the last one. A bit more of a Buddhist background and - not everything I agree with him on in all these, they are AI generated videos after all, but nevertheless I don't agree with everything. But there are some things I do agree with, for example the importance of silence and just not speaking unnecessarily. I know we're not doing a very good example of that because this is an interview.
AR:
[laughs] Yeah. But I can hear it in you. I can hear it in you.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, it's just be quiet and let them speak and HEAR what they're saying. That's very important. The biggest one is learning to let go. When somebody irritates you, learning to let it go, to be an adult, to grow up. You've got things in your head, you got projects, you got to let them go.
MARKEYJESTER:
I split up with my partner about three years ago. I still had their contact on my phone until last month. We never spoke. We never contacted one another. We never blocked one another or anything. I realized really thinking about it, the only reason why I wanted her contact was one day she'll contact me out of the blue and then I can tell her-
AR:
"Just in case."
MARKEYJESTER:
No. It's not that I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself. As harsh as that sounds, fuck no. One, it's horrible. Two, I'm holding on to something here. I need to let it go, and I need to not be so cruel about it. I need to let it go. So I didn't block her to be cruel. I blocked her to be kind. I deleted the conversation history. Let her go. I haven't spoken to her in 2 years. There's no point in keeping her number for that. It'd just be horrible. It's not going to do me any favors. If that happened, maybe I'd feel a little bit happy about it for a bit, but it just, it wouldn't fill me with monumental joy in the long run.
MARKEYJESTER:
I have to let it go. I got to be an adult about this. I got to let go of all these projects. They're not helping me. I don't know if any of this- if you've got any similar feelings about this?
AR:
[in confirmation] No, I'm holding onto something too.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I have to let go. When I was around my ex, I was way too kind to her, way too polite, and that irritated her. She hurt me a few times and then I drew the line and then I just wanted to hurt her back and I realized I'd just been holding on to that and I got to let go. It's not just about relationships but there's other things too. I'm still living with my mother. I'm 35 years old. I shouldn't be living- when my father was my age, he already had me. He had already a house. He'd moved on.
MARKEYJESTER:
He had another daughter with someone else. Had his own house. He's moved on. At my age? He's had a third daughter with a third woman, a third house. But what am I doing?
AR:
It was also a lot cheaper back then, but I get what you're saying. It almost feels you're tardy on life.
MARKEYJESTER:
Absolutely. I won't take that out of it. Absolutely. Look, things are different and house prices are a lot way more expensive now. If you've got the assets, fine. But there's also this other thing of taking responsibility and accountability, not trying to pass the blame. While there's certain times you'd be right in passing the blame, like I would blame my mom. Maybe the reason I behaved the way that I do growing up is because she was very strict on me and we were a very poor family.
MARKEYJESTER:
However, on the plus side, is that really the reason or am I just using that as an excuse to justify why I don't need to make any serious actions, why I don't need to change? Oh, well, I don't really want to go around doing interviews for other jobs. I can just blame it on the fact that I'm struggling because I was brought up hard all that time. I could just pass the blame. It's a horrible thing to do because you get yourself stuck in a rut. It's hard. It is. I know I'm not the only one, but I'm not a mind reader, so I can only concentrate on me just as you can only concentrate on you.
AR:
Right. You just hope you find someone who equally matches that.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah. But also it's just taking responsibility as well. I don't want to blame other people for my mistakes. I want to take accountability because if I can say, "Okay, that's my fault," well, I can fix it. I can't fix it if it's someone else's fault.
AR:
Right. You're only in control of yourself. If you try to control others, if you try to worry about the control that you have over others, it's just exhausting and it takes you nowhere.
MARKEYJESTER:
Mhm. Somebody put up a video on YouTube one time. I think they took it down, but I remembered this. I can't remember what it was, but they reckoned I was a savant, like an autistic savant, because of all these creative things that I've done that are kind of out of this world. I wouldn't see it as that. I really thought about it and I thought, "No, because of the consequences." If you imagine if you are somebody who's struggling because you have some sort of mental condition like autism, maybe not, something like that: okay, it's not your fault and whatever. Maybe this, as I said before, if it's not your fault then you can't fix it, right? But on the flip side, all of the wonderful things that you've done, you didn't do them. It was the autism that did it. Despite the fact you put all that hard work in, it's devalued. I'm sure that the person who made the video didn't intend for that. They weren't being nasty or anything. They were praising it like it was some amazing thing. But they devalued my hard work.
AR:
It wasn't just Markey's work anymore.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, it's like the Rain Man. I forget his real name now. All those incredible things, him being able to count all the stuff in the jar really quickly. He didn't do that. That was the autism. You couldn't explain to me who he was without this mental thing.
AR:
God that's a great example.
MARKEYJESTER:
He doesn't exist. He's not real. He's a carrier for autism's excellence and downfalls. People believe in a spectrum and fair enough, I guess. I don't like the idea of passing off my faults to some other thing to blame that for it. I'd rather take responsibility because when I do succeed, I don't have to pass the rewards for the success to someone else. That's the way I see it. That's the way I've really thought about this.
AR:
Doing it yourself. It sounds like this has been a long journey for you.
MARKEYJESTER:
It has been. I would love for it to be the case that anybody listening right now has been through a similar path and there's some sort of connection. They're like, "Oh yeah, I understand that. I know exactly what that feels like." Maybe it will help them. I don't know. It would be nice, wouldn't it?
AR:
Certainly did with me.
MARKEYJESTER:
If we've got the solution, well, if we've got the solution to everyone's problems in this conversation, that would be amazing, wouldn't it? [laughs] That's my views on that.
AR:
Thank you for sharing that perspective on it. I just can't thank you enough. That was very personal. I appreciate you both trusting me enough to share that and making that public. I think you're right. I think, honestly, a lot of people can relate to what you're feeling in part or in whole. A lot of people look up to you. So many people look up to you. I would venture to guess more than you know.
MARKEYJESTER:
Yeah, I don't really hear it very often, but who knows? Maybe.
AR:
Well then here's me telling you. [laughs]
MARKEYJESTER:
No, it's very kind of you, but the last thing I need is an ego boost right now. I'm trying to get away from all this. You have to be very careful, as I mentioned before. It's my pleasure. I promised you the truth and that's exactly what you get. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask.
AR:
Thanks Markey.
Transcript sourced from https://segaretro.org/Interview:_MarkeyJester_(2025-12-20)_by_Alexander_Rojas and migrated into devquoted with linked people, tags, source metadata, and media where available.