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James Hague |
I remember getting frustrated while writing some of the later games I did
for Antic, like Current Events. They were a big mix of BASIC, assembly
subroutines, and assembly code that ran during the vertical blank. I
crammed as much code as I could into a 256 byte routine that would fit
into page six, wrote down the entry points into the code by looking at
the symbol table the assembler spit out, and then used those constants in
USR calls. What a mess! I think they looked pretty sharp for BASIC
games, though. E-Racer almost looked like it was written in 100%
assembly. Almost.
Looking back, I think I succeeded in being original. Rockslide! was the
least so, being based on one part of Sega's Pengo. But Uncle Henry's
Nuclear Waste Dump could be classified as a Tetris derivative, except
that I wrote it in 1986, which was before Tetris was released. The other
games, like E-Racer and Current Events, are still pretty different, even
today.
Did you ever take into consideration making the programs short so
the readers wouldn't lose their minds?!?
I tried to write games with a minimal amount of graphics. This was not
only because they would be easier to type-in, but because I designed all
the graphics by hand on graph paper. The Electroids only had 112 bytes
of graphics in the whole game. Good grief!
The Electroids was the first game I ever submitted to a magazine, and
ANALOG rejected it the first time. In addition to a few feature
suggestions, someone (either Charles Bachand or Tom Hudson, I would
guess) went through the assembly code and marked it up with lots of
possible optimizations. This was the first time anyone ever looked at my
code, and it really opened my eyes in terms of optimizing for space. I
tried to keep things small from that point on. Interestingly. optimizing
for speed, when writing in pure assembly, never occurred to me. These days people are speed fanatics, but you can go back and look at the
source to 8-bit games like Planetary Defense and see that the author has
some giant "multiply by 40" routine in there instead of a precomputed
table.
I typed in a lot of games myself, so I certainly knew what it was like.
I can actually remember typing in specific games like Livewire and
Planetary Defense.
What did you gain from publishing the programs?
A bit of fame, a bit of money, and, years later, a foot in the door of
the professional game programming world. Mostly, I just liked the
creative aspect of writing games. If I hadn't gotten into computers, I
probably would have gotten into cartooning or writing fiction as a
creative outlet. There was also a family sort of atmosphere about
magazines like Antic and ANALOG and I enjoyed being part of it. You'd see a game by J.D. Casten and the bio would talk about his previous
efforts, etc. To me, that's what made the 8-bit days great.
What have you been up to since your 8-bit days? Any games we should know about?
The last Atari game I wrote was E-Racer, in the summer of 1988, which
was published in the December Antic of that year. That was right before
my junior year of college. The 8-bits were dying, I never bought an
ST, and I was burning out on the whole computer thing. I didn't think
about getting back into game programming until late 1991, and I bought a
PC of the day to see what I could do. I floundered along, never picking
up momentum, until 1993 when I answered an ad looking for a "6502 hacker." I got a job writing Super Nintendo games outside of Seattle,
mostly because I sent a photocopy of the Bonk article and source code.
The 65816 in the SNES was basically a 6502, so it was both fun and odd to
be writing 6502 code again, and in many ways it gave some closure to my
whole Atari period.
My SNES work was pretty forgettable, though, as I ended up doing coding
for some unbelievably awful designs. The most notable thing I did was a
few years later, in 1996, when I was one of three primary programmers who
ported The Need for Speed to the Sega Saturn. After writing games on my
own for so long, I must admit that I was disillusioned after turning pro.
Working for months and months on a game that you can plainly see is
awful is discouraging like you wouldn't believe. Doing The Need for
Speed port was a total hell of fourteen hour days for months on end.At
the end, my name was buried in a huge heap of credits and the game didn't
even sell that well. I did stick in an easter egg, though!
I left in 1996 to start my own company, Dadgum Games
(http://www.dadgum.com), to make one last stab at the "crazy game
designer working in his bedroom" dream. Bumbler, Dadgum's first game,
was released in late 1996 and is a fusion between my old style of writing
games and modern computer technology. Bumbler comes with a freebie
game, Boingo Electro, that looks a whole lot like The Electroids, if you
get my drift...
I also dipped back into the old days and released a digital book of
interviews with classic game programmers, like the authors of Fort
Apocalypse, Alternate Reality, and M.U.L.E. That was a complete blast to
do.
What's the best language to program games in?
I'm still a die-hard assembly programmer, because I think it's easy and
gives me the fewest headaches; assemblers tend to be a lot more bug-free
than compilers. I'm not against high-level languages, but the typical C
or C++ development environment is just so big and ugly! And C tries to
be both an assembly and high-level language and fails on both counts.
Are there any unpublished James Hague gems for the 8-bit lying around?
I've still got the collection of BASIC games I wrote when I was first
learning to program: Solar Challenge, Machine Gunner, Fast Fingers,
Galactic Garbage, and Fast Cash. The first four were excruciatingly bad,
each written in one sitting because I didn't have a disk drive, but they
were experiments in programming and game design. Fast Cash was the first
game I wrote that I'd consider playable and complete. It was one of
those "worm eats things and gets longer" games, of which there were (and
still are) far too many.
In the first half of 1985, I started writing a game called Spring Into
Action for ANALOG. A neat design, in my humble opinion; if it was in a
circa-1982 arcade it would have been as wildly surreal as Q*bert and Joust. But
work went slowly and by June I was so sick of it that I
deleted the source code in a fit of disgust. I worked on the design in
my head over the years and wrote a SNES version with my wife Jessica in
1994.We slaved away for six months and finished the whole thing, except
for sound, and some copies were passed out at the January 1995 Caste bottom had fallen out of the third-party SNES game market by then, so
only a few copies of the game exist. I've beefed up the design yet again
since then and have plans for a super-deluxe Mac version one of these
days.
Have you been following Atari since the 8-bit? Did you buy any other
system? (ST, Lynx, Jag, etc.)
I followed the ST from 1985-88, wasted a lot of time pining for one, but
never went ahead. One interesting footnote to history is that ST guru
Charles F. Johnson and I had our first published Atari programs in ANALOG
#35, back to back. Mine was Bonk and his was "G:", a printer driver. In early 1988 I had to decide on a new system for college, and I chose a
low-end PC over an ST because I could run Turbo Pascal on it to do
programming assignments.
I bought a Lynx in 1992 and had great fun with APB, Pinball Jam, S.T.U.N.
Runner, and Robotron. I was bitten by the nostalgia bug around
that time and bought a 7800 and all the games I could. This was before
people were too into collecting games, so they were dirt cheap and easy
to find.
I never bought a Jag, but the company I worked for had one and I bought
Tempest 2000 the week it was released. They knew I had an Atari bug, and
the head of programming was the guy who wrote LBASIC for ANALOG, so I got
to go to a Jaguar developers' conference in 1994.Very cool! The Jag
docs came in an old "Atari Home Computers" binder and I got to see
personalities like Jeff Minter and Leonard Tramiel and the fellow who
designed the Jaguar chipset. I'm glad I got to finally see Atari HQ
before they went belly-up. And Leonard T. came across as surprisingly
level-headed, not at all the bumbler that the Tramiels are usually
depicted as.
If you have a Lynx or Jag, how could your favorite & least favorite game have been improved?
APB was my favorite Lynx title. The only thing I could improve upon
would be to let you start on some of the advanced levels, so you don't
have to spend forty minutes working up to Day 20. Crystal Mines was my
least favorite. I loved Boulder Dash, but CM took away the free-form
nature of Boulder Dash and made it too much of a "figure out the exact
pattern" game. The temptation was strong to fling the Lynx through a
window.
I have mixed feelings about the Jaguar. The hardware was so cool, and
the potential was there, but most of the games were so raw and techie.
I get the feeling that a programmer cooked up a 3-D engine during spare
moments here and there, wrote a feeble little game around it, and then
marketing pushed it out the door. That's what Cybermorph and Club Drive
look like to me. Tempest 2000 was brilliant, though.
What was Atari's biggest mistake?
Somehow Atari lost its spark when it came to game design. The games for
the 7800 and Lynx didn't break new ground, they didn't have what it took
to get people excited. Don't get me wrong, I like the Lynx, but I don't
think the average gamer in 1992 wanted to play Robotron or APB or
Gauntlet. The Lynx and Jaguar ended up preaching to the choir: the Atari fanatics loved 'em, but nobody else cared.
Do you have any Atari-stories? (ie, "Atari contacted me one day...")
In 1992 I heard you could still get 2600 programming docs from Atari, so
I ordered a set for $40.Someone from Atari called me up and said "Do
you really want these? Do you have any idea how hard the 2600 is to
program?"
My thanks to James Hague for giving me some of his time for this interview. I really enjoyed it James!