Difference between revisions of "Interview:Tom Sloper"

Revision as of 12:32, 20 August 2008

GDRI: What was Sega's presence in America at the time you were working there (this was before Sega of America had been established, but they obviously had a division in the US)?

TS: I see on your website that you have this written about Sega Enterprises, Inc.:

"American subsidiary in the early eighties. Published and supervised the ports of Sega games to home computers and consoles. Did they have any in-house programmers? Did they make any arcade games of their own? Shows up on arcade flyers and home releases from 1982-1984."

Your site also mentioned Sega Electronics, Inc. That would have been the arcade company. After David Rosen and Hayao Nakayama formed Sega in Japan as an amusement machine company, the first US operation was in the San Diego area - Sega and some other arcade company initially merged, but I'm blanking on the name of the other San Diego company [ED: Gremlin Industries]. I'm pretty sure Sega Electronics, Inc. is the company that made the Star Trek arcade game, if that helps.

I don't know if this is entirely correct, but it appears that Sega Electronics, Inc. went away when Sega Enterprises Inc. (hereafter, "SEI") was formed as a result of the acquisition of Sega by Gulf+Western (slash Paramount Pictures).

[ED: Didn't Gulf+Western buy Sega in 1969? GDRI is currently trying to contact other people about Sega Electronics.]

The company list on your website doesn't mention the closure of SEI at the end of 1984 and the creation of "Ages" (Sega backwards) to clean up the remaining financial issues, IP ownership matters, etc. SEI was headed by Jeff Rochlis [from Disney Imagineering], and one of the SEI VPs was Gary Niles, who'd been Jay Smith's VP at Western Technologies.

Yes, there were in-house programmers at SEI and yes, they were working on an arcade game (Congo Bongo [II]). My design for Congo Bongo [II] [I called my treatment "The Revenge of Congo Bongo."], in which the hunter pursued the gorilla through a lost valley of dinosaurs, was rejected because Rochlis wanted the game to take place on amusement park rides. Sam Palahnuk wrote an approved design, and it was being worked on at the end when the video game industry crashed and burned.

The Japanese office, Sega Enterprises Ltd., saw the writing on the wall and bought itself back from Gulf+Western before the boom fell. SEL then opened its new American office in northern California in '85 or '86. My friend Steve Hanawa was an SEL employee. He'd originally worked at Sega in Japan, then was transferred to San Diego. He moved to L.A. after the Gulf+Western acquisition. His office was across the hall from mine at SEI until I was laid off, and Steve moved up north when SOA opened. I interviewed with David Rosen for a job at the new SOA, but it wasn't one of my better interviews.

That said, I don't know if I've actually answered your question. My job at SEI was "game designer," but mainly what I did was work with external developers on ports of arcade games to consoles and personal computers.

GDRI: The Sega Master System games you produced at Activision say on the front of the box "Distributed by Activision." Did Activision and Sega have a special deal in place (i.e. Sega published, Activision merely distributed)?

TS: Sort of. [Then head of Activision] Bruce Davis met with Nakayama-san and hatched a deal so Activision (Mediagenic) could be the first publisher on all three platform holders' systems at the same time. Until this, Nintendo apparently held a tight rein on its licensed publishers. Publish on our system and our system only, that kinda thing.

The games were developed by Sega and published in Japan by Sega, but published/distributed by Activision in North America. I worked (by fax) with Sega R&D 2 on localizing the games for North America. One thing I remember in particular was the cockpit-view outer space game (title escapes me at the moment) [ED: Galaxy Force]. It had a flaw in that it was hard to know when you'd been hit by enemy fire. All of a sudden, you'd unfairly be dead. So I went back and forth with them (by fax, remember) a few times until we hit on a solution - I wanted them to make the view of black outer space flash white, and that was too hard technically, so they made the whole screen flash white whenever you got hit. That fixed the problem.

GDRI: So was Sega R&D2 the division charged with developing those Master System games?

TS: You surmise correctly.

GDRI: Was Joe Montana Football/Hyperball [GEN/MD] being developed completely internally?

TS: Yes.

GDRI: You co-produced the Genesis version of Mondu's Fight Palace (which eventually was released as Slaughter Sport). Do you know who developed that? Can I assume that was another victim of the problems at Mediagenic?

TS: It was developed completely internally. Bruce had the studio kick off development on video game consoles internally, and at the time, I was the only producer in video games. I was the guy who was supposed to oversee all those internal projects and all the video game projects we were doing in Japan. I was sent to work in the Japan office, thank goodness, so I wasn't present for the fun that followed.

GDRI: Do you know who developed the Game Boy version of Alien vs. Predator?

TS: I don't remember offhand, but that project is one of my favorite horror stories I tell to my design/production students at USC.

GDRI: I ask this not knowing if you were privy to what was going on at these Japanese companies (our research indicates that the Japanese publisher of the Super NES version [IGS] outsourced development to another company [Jorudan]).

TS: I don't remember the details offhand. Maybe we sublicensed AvP to one company for the two platforms. I vaguely recall working with two different Japanese companies to get the SNES and GB versions localized and approved for US publication.

[ED: ASK Kodansha published the Game Boy version in Japan.]

GDRI: What was Activision Japan? Was anything developed there, or was it merely a production/publishing house?

TS: When I was there in 1990, we were actually Mediagenic Japan. But since my games always bore the Activision logo, I just always refer to the company as Activision.

I was the first American to work at Activision's Japanese operation. Our mandate in 1990 was to facilitate licensing. "Licensing in" referred to licensing US or UK titles to Japanese publishers, and "licensing out" referred to licensing Japanese titles for publication in our other markets. Because my experience was in production, I also facilitated localization efforts.

Bill Swartz replaced me in Japan. After Bobby Kotick and partners acquired Activision in 1991, Bill became the head guy of Activision Japan. The office employed producers and marketing people, but not programmers and artists. It wasn't a development studio, if that's what you're asking.

GDRI: A company called Home Data made a version of Shanghai for the Mega Drive in Japan (Dragon's Eye Plus: Shanghai III). Any reason for not just releasing that instead of making a new game (Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye)?

TS: Home Data's game stunk. The graphics were ugly, and the game didn't have any interesting features to add. Bill Swartz hated it and didn't want us to publish it on our own label. So I hired Brian Rice, a Chicago developer who'd been involved in some previous Shanghai development on Amiga or something [ED: DOS]. Producing that version opened my eyes to the possibilities in an evergreen franchise like Shanghai and revitalized my design sensibilities.

GDRI: Some of the naming of these Shanghai games is a bit of a mess. I'm looking at a list here, and there's Dragon's Eye Plus: Shanghai III, Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye, Shanghai III: Dragon's Eye, Super Shanghai: Dragon's Eye (which was released in the States as Shanghai II: Dragon's Eye)...Is there an explanation for this?

TS: Bill and I noticed that, too. Every time we made a new Shanghai of our own (as opposed to licensing to a Japanese publisher), the marketing folks wanted to bump up the Roman numeral, but Bill and I knew that Japan was already out of synch with any numbering, and that numbering no longer made any sense whatsoever. Bill and I talked, and he proposed two rules: 1. No more numbers; 2. The word "Shanghai" should always be first in the title. But Bill didn't want to play the bad cop with the Japanese publishers. He asked me to do that. By this time, I'd been through the Alien vs. Predator mess with 20th Century Fox, and I knew exactly how the bad cop game ought to be played.

But even though we'd established this naming protocol, I had to make an exception with Sanrio Shanghai. There was no denying that Sanrio had the bigger name and had more clout. I did have to enforce some design rules on that one, though - they weren't going to implement the most user-friendly features, and I insisted that for kids, those were imperative. But now I've wandered.

GDRI: You were also the producer of a Super NES game called X-Kaliber 2097 [Sword Maniac in Japan], whose soundtrack and storyline was changed dramatically for the American version. Would you have been the person responsible for those kinds of decisions?

TS: Yes. Activision had recently moved to Los Angeles at that time, and our staff was very small - just the core members who'd made the move. Kelly Rogers was our QA guy, and he'd started getting into the L.A. club scene. He recommended a band to me for this game. I gave them a listen, and I agreed that their sound would be good for the game.

GDRI: Having worked and interacted with American and Japanese game makers, did you notice any differences between the two in terms of developing games?

TS: Of course. They called artists "designers," and they called designers "planners." But more significantly, they didn't believe in writing game design documents. Case in point: Alien vs. Predator SNES. I needed a GDD to provide to 20th Century Fox to get design approval. It took quite a bit of back-and-forth and a little arm-twisting to get them to write me something. And when I got it, it was just 3 pages of bullet points. Reading it, it seemed like a reasonable concept. Not spectacular, but reasonable. And I didn't have time to ask them to do more.

Fox approved it, but when we got the actual game from the developer, we (Bill and Fox and I) were surprised (and I don't mean that a good way). It was a fighting game. The predator (the player character) was punching aliens most of the time in the game. Going back and re-reading the design, I finally saw that I could have figured this out if I'd been better at reading between the lines. The document said that the predator would run into pickups which would give him cool predator weapons and as an aside, when the weapons were gone, he'd have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with the aliens. It wasn't at all clear that most of the time, he'd be punching the aliens.

I asked the Japanese what they were thinking, and they said "fighting games are very popular in Japan now."

Also, if you give a Japanese developer a GDD, they don't treat it as a guideline. GDDs are taken literally there. Tony Van wrote a design for Die Hard NES and when I got the game back from Pack-In-Video, I was blown away by how the game was exactly like the design. Give a design to a developer in any other part of the world, and you'll see all kinds of liberties taken. But not in Japan.

My first experience with that was the story I tell on my site in article 19 about the scrolling landscape in Space-N-Counter [game calculator]. I'd laid out the landscape in my GDD as a series of frames. The Toshiba programmer took that literally and said there wasn't enough ROM to program it that way. I asked, if the landscape was one long piece of data and the screen was like a "window" moving along it, would that fit? He said it would, but when I asked him to just visualize it that way, he asked me to give it to him that way. I used scissors and Scotch tape to make him a paper image of the game's landscape, and he was able to implement it from that.

GDRI: Could you tell us about your time at Atari Corporation?

TS: That was the worst job I ever had in games. But it was also the best learning experience I could have asked for. The company "structure" was basically a bunch of little independent kingdoms. Every interdepartmental request was a negotiation. Sam Tramiel would say, "Just talk to so-and-so and he'll help you with that." I'd go to so-and-so and he'd say, "Oh yeah? What's in it for me?" I had to solder my own devkits! And getting my developers paid. Hoo! Don't get me started.

GDRI: What games were developed at Datascan?

TS: Maybe two or three Vectrex games (one of which was 3D Narrow Escape), a Pac-Man clone for CP/M computers with text display monitors, and my game Spatial Madness.