Creating games at Rhythm & Hues

I worked for Rhythm & Hues Studios, a feature film VFX and animation studio, across four job titles, nine feature film productions, a video game production, two Oscars, and an initial job as a games industry consultant. I also met my wife working there. In this post I describe my first two jobs at R&H. 

My initial job at R&H was as a games industry consultant. In the early 90's Rhythm & Hues had their Executive Producer, Sherry McKenna, and a star Art Director, Lorne Lanning, leave their executive team to launch Oddword Inhabitants. This departure by Sherry and Lorne was, to a slim degree, triggered by my being hired by John Hughes, President of R&H, to investigate the viability of Rhythm & Hues starting a games division. My consulting role was to write a report and make a presentation for their executives on how the games industry operates, both business wise and technically, the difference between game and TV/film animation production standards, the different tools, the different production stages and pipelines, and the greater complexity of all the interactivity programming. That was a 30-day gig, landing right after the meltdown and layoffs of 3D0 and just before my landing my job on the Sony PlayStation's OS Launch Team. After submitting my research and presentation, R&H senior staff debated and ultimately delayed starting a games division. Their hesitation, I am told, is one of the triggers that led to Sherry and Lorne leaving to start Oddword. 

My second job at R&H started less than a year after my previous consulting gig. Working for Sony lasted just shy of of year, as the work finishing the PlayStation OS in Tokyo completed in less than 6 months, and after returning to Santa Monica, CA, the management at the new Sony Computer Entertainment of N. America HQ burned through multiple complete sets of game dev staff before replacing their initial studio management. I was in the 2nd or third group of mass quits at that fledgling studio. After losing Sherry and Lorne, Rhythm and Hues was eager to start a games division. After my in-between work as a PlayStation OS developer, R&H's senior management made me a great offer I accepted to start their games division. The year was 1994, and the VFX work for the film "Babe: the talking pig" was in production. The R&D developer that created the VFX process to make Babe's animals talk, Larry Weinberg, was also assigned to the new games division, along with one of the studio founders Pauline Tso. 

The initial R&H games division work was an attempt at an "ice hockey in space sports simulation game" with ice rinks able to have spherical, torus and other fantasy 3D shapes. Perhaps this initial high ambition concept was good, because it exposed multiple critical issues with R&H management's initial assumptions.

• The real time rendering capabilities were too limited for the player character designs, as well as the ice rink designs, much less teams of players and the rink on screen together;
• The art direction and modeling departments found the PlayStation hardware limitations required an expertise existing staff were not willing to develop;
• Culturally at the time, video games were considered "ghetto work" for feature film VFX artists, and we found staff would rather quit than be assigned to work in the games division;
• The PlayStation development hardware was $40K a workstation, very hard to get, and just to preview work digital artists had to queue and schedule for the limited PSX dev kits we had. 

Clearly another strategy needed to be developed, a strategy that made the VFX artists want to work on games division productions, and somehow sidestepped Sony's expensive development hardware. Brainstorming with Larry Weinberg, we came up with a new game engine design and production pipeline that satisfied our constraints:

• Where the PlayStation was limited to 5000 polygons 30 frames per second, that is a crippling 3D model budget.
  • However, treating that as 5000 compositing layers updating at 30 fps is another story. 
  • If we treat the PlayStation as a compositing engine for pre-rendered imagery, there is no polygon rendering limit beyond the current limits imposed on the studio's feature film productions.
• Additionally, there is a video decompression chip in the PlayStation, so feature film quality animation could stream off disc, with interactive game-play handled via compositing pre-rendered 3D characters into 3D scenes, z-buffered at run-time for character and scene integration.
• An existing in-studio compositor's source code formed the basis of an SGI workstation based PlayStation Game Engine Emulator, which anyone in the studio could run on their desktops.
• The open ended nature of video game objects, weapons and characters with an unlimited polygon budget appealed to the digital artists because such work looks good on their reels.

We had a few technical hurdles, such as writing a z-buffer for the PlayStation, which had none, so game characters could 3D walk into scenes, correctly passing behind background set pieces and parts. I wrote that z-buffer; you can see it in action in the video below when characters pass behind cables and gangways, which were all in the pre-rendered background and matted out via the z-buffer. We had more advanced for-the-time features, such as streaming data interleaved with video, so the game appeared to dynamically be larger than could fit into memory. The game was very data driven, with the game logic taking place in a 3D geometric simulation separate from the graphics, but driving those graphics as well. We wrote a game scripting language, and streaming data compiler. All our work was in the C language. Overall, treating the PlayStation as a compositing engine worked out very well.

Eggs Of Steel was the title of the game

However, what did not work out so well was the selected age demographic of the game we made. Strategically, the thinking was the majority of PlayStation games were targeting teens, while the pre-teens and younger aimed games were few. The plan was to target those missed elementary aged gamers, thinking they were an overlooked audience. Large game publishers seemed to think so too, and we ended up with a large-for-the-time game budget financed by Square/Enix. The game was ambitious, with a fairly good sized team. A fair amount of "Looney Tunes" style stretch and squash action and humor is in the game. However, once published the existing PlayStation marketing channels for elementary aged games simply did not exist. The game magazines targeted teens, the game reviewers praised games they wanted to play and ours was reviewed to be childish, the game departments at stores and game release events were not elementary age friendly places, and the game flopped.

Between the time I'd initially consulted for R&H and the the time game division was trying to eek out more revenues with foreign language ports, four years had passed. While planning the internationalization changes of the game I was offered the Managing Engineer position at a local successful game studio. I accepted that position at Adrenalin Interactive and ran their studio for a few years while also developing titles.