With November 4th marking the 10-year anniversary of Ratchet & Clank’s release on PS2, PlayStation.Blog caught up with Ted Price, Insomniac Games’ president and CEO, to learn more about how this impactful PlayStation powerhouse came to be. To learn more about the development of this classic series, be sure to check out our recent post that showcases 10 years of concept art.

PlayStation Blog: What was the original base concept for the game?

“He cited Marvin the Martian as inspiration.”

Ted Price, President and CEO, Insomniac Games: After deep-sixing the concept we called “Girl with a Stick,” we had to come up with something else, and we had to do it quickly. Brian Hastings, our chief creative officer, suggested we make a game about a spacefaring alien who has an outlandish arsenal of gadgets and weapons, citing Marvin the Martian as inspiration. That idea clicked with everyone and we all started digging in to flesh out the concept.

PSB: Did you know you were working on something special? What were your creative conditions as you worked on it – uncertainty, confidence, terror?

TP: I don’t think we ever know something is truly special until well after the initial inspiration. Sometimes we get that “Yes, this is working!” feeling early in prototype phase, sometime it hits during production. With Ratchet though, we knew we had something promising when we built a test for Metropolis – one of the first worlds you visit in the game. We had Ratchet running around on platforms looking out over this vast city with streams of airborne traffic whizzing by. You could switch between the “suck cannon,” “pyrocitor,” the wrench and (I think) the blaster. It was a lot of smoke and mirrors because we weren’t using our final engine. We didn’t build out the backs of buildings, you could only travel a few meters in the world, and Ratchet was in his “brown” state, and I don’t recall having any enemies. But it convinced us and Sony of the potential for the game.

PSB: Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?

“What you see is a result of our team having fun.”

TP: We drew from all sorts of sources. Cartoons, sci-fi movies, popular culture… There were certainly some direct playful references to other properties in both the initial concepts and in subsequent games. Captain Qwark was partially inspired by The Tick. Metropolis with its flying cars and city canyons is reminiscent of The Fifth Element. Courtney Gears from Up Your Arsenal was a riff on Britney Spears, who was popular at the time. But these are exceptions rather than the rule: Most of what you see in the games is a direct result of our team just having fun in a universe with very few constraints.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realizing your original vision?
TP: Controlling scope was (and still is) our biggest challenge. We were moving onto a new platform with a new IP and we had very little time to get it done. We knew we needed to be ambitious for the game to stand out. But we also knew that if we spread ourselves too thin with too many features, the game would be half-baked. Dealing with this conundrum hasn’t gotten any easier over the years because players’ expectations continue to skyrocket for all platforms.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?
TP: It depends. Some of us consider “Girl with a Stick” as an important part of the Ratchet genesis, and Ratchet & Clank does owe some its mechanics and ideas to that concept. With that in mind, both Ratchet and Resistance went through drastic changes on their way to their final incarnations. However, once we had Ratchet up and running on the PS2, the changes were less severe. Ratchet did change in appearance along the way. When I look back at the original model versus what ended up in the final game, I see a big difference. We also continued to add mechanics to the game as we figured out what worked and what didn’t.

“We were yearning to jump back into the realm of oversized, overpowered weapons.”

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of?
TP: The crazy weapons! Coming off of Spyro, a series where the main character couldn’t use weapons other than his breath and his horns. I think a lot of us were yearning to jump into back into the realm of oversized, overpowered projectile weapons. We spent some time in that world with Disruptor but took a four-year break while focusing on purple quadrupeds with Spyro. We also latched onto weapons as a way to separate Ratchet from other platformers, which seemed perennially tied to bonking, bouncing, and punching. Finally, in my opinion, creating weapons without any real-world rules gave us a chance to operate at max creativity –- which is ultimately the goal for a lot of us in this industry. It really didn’t matter WHAT the weapon was, as long as it was satisfying and fun to use we knew we’d be able to make it fit.

PSB: How would you like Ratchet & Clank to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?
TP: Ratchet is still alive and well, with Full Frontal Assault coming out in a few weeks. A lot of us at Insomniac are very proud that Ratchet & Clank is one of the last platformers standing and still going strong. And we all like to think that Ratchet has contributed to the evolution of platformers and action games in general over the last decade and a half. As a minor example, seeing radial quick-select menus in other games is a compliment to us because I think Ratchet was the first to have one (though I could be wrong). And I’m still waiting to see a sheepinator in another game. To be fair though, I think Heretic (1994) and Hexen (1995) were the first games to have weapons which turned enemies into farm animals!

PSB: Which of the Ratchet & Clank characters is closest to your heart?
TP: Captain Qwark. I love him because he’s always larger than life, always 100% sure of himself, and usually wrong. My wife tells me she knows people like that. Still trying to figure out who she’s talking about.

More Behind the Classics

• Behind the Classics – Jak & Daxter
• Behind The Classics – Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
• Behind the Classics – MediEvil
• Behind the Classics – Soul Reaver
• Behind the Classics – Syphon Filter

Raziel, the ‘hero’ of Soul Reaver

Ah, Soul Reaver. I remember it well! This gruesome little gem made quite the splash when it landed on PSone in 1999. As the wounded, ostracized vampire Raziel, your goal was to avenge yourself against the corrupt vampire lord Kain and restore balance to the decaying world of Nosgoth. I particularly remember the game’s inspired approach to combat; your vampiric foes couldn’t be killed by ordinary means, so after weakening them with hand-to-hand combat you had to hurl their broken bodies onto a sharp stake or into a patch of sunlight to finish them off. The level design was also a knockout, as Raziel was able to phase-shift into a spectral realm in order to bypass obstacles or solve puzzles.

But above all else, Soul Reaver is remembered for its story and characters. And we have the game’s director Amy Hennig to thank for that! As you’re probably well aware, Hennig later joined celebrated PlayStation developer Naughty Dog, serving as creative director and writer for Jak and Daxter and all three UNCHARTED titles.

Hennig graciously took the time to share her memories of Soul Reaver’s development, including some never-before-revealed insight into the game’s origins. Read on for the full story straight from Hennig, and be sure to leave your favorite Soul Reaver moments in the comments.

PlayStation Blog: What was the original concept for the game?

Amy Hennig, Director and Writer of Soul Reaver: I don’t know how many people know this, but initially, it wasn’t actually a sequel to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain at all – our original proposal was a concept for a new IP we named “Shifter,” loosely inspired by Paradise Lost. The protagonist was essentially a fallen angel of death, a reaper of souls hunted by his former brethren, and now driven to expose and destroy the false god they all served.

The Shifter concept was the genesis of the game that would become Soul Reaver; the core ideas were all there. The hero was an undead creature, able to shift between the spectral and material realms, and glide on the tattered remains of his wing-like coattails. We conceived the spirit realm as a twisted, expressionistic version of the physical world. The hero was bent on revenge after being betrayed and cast down by his creator – like Raziel, he was a dark savior figure, chosen to restore balance to a blighted, dystopian world.

When we were asked to adapt this concept into a sequel to Blood Omen, our challenge was to take all these ideas and merge them creatively into the Legacy of Kain mythos.

PSB: Did you know you were working on something special? What were your creative conditions as you worked on it – uncertainty, confidence, terror?

AH: You’re never really sure when you’re in the middle of a project. Because we were initially such a small team, we were able to work under the radar for a while, and this allowed us to tinker with some unusual ideas that might not have survived premature scrutiny or skepticism.

When we first shared the concept with our colleagues in the company, there was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea but also justifiable concern that we might be taking on an unrealistic number of technical risks. We pared back on some secondary features – we had originally planned to include shape-shifting (morphing) as well as plane-shifting, for instance – so we could focus on elements that were more critical to our core concept. By the time we unveiled the game to the press, we were starting to get the feeling that we might be onto something special.

As far as the creative conditions went – we were very invested in our original Shifter idea, so it naturally caused a bit of consternation when we were first asked to adapt the concept to be a Blood Omen sequel. But creative constraints can be inspiring and invigorating, and once we dug into the challenge, the concept evolved in all kinds of exciting ways.

We definitely had set ourselves a lot of ambitious technical goals, though – so, yes, there was a fair amount of uncertainty and terror about what we were undertaking!

PSB: Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s thematic elements, characters, or dialog?

AH: There were so many different inspirations, it’s hard to just name a few…
As I mentioned earlier, the original idea was very loosely inspired by the rebellious angels of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The spiritual structure of the world was based on the philosophy of Gnosticism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled by a malevolent “pretender” god, that humans are prisoners in a spiritual lie, and that mankind’s struggle is a fight for free will in the face of seemingly insurmountable Fate.

We wanted to give Nosgoth’s dystopian future a decaying 19th-century industrial aesthetic, while the look of the spectral realm was inspired by the twisted architecture and disorienting angles of 1920s German Expressionist cinema.

Regarding the dialogue, we obviously took a cue from Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, with its florid language and ornate monologues. We wanted to carry a similar style into the sequels. I also drew inspiration from the dense, literate dialogue of historical dramas like A Man for All Seasons, Becket, and A Lion in Winter.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realizing your original vision?

AH: Our biggest challenge, hands-down, was getting the data-streaming working, to allow us to have a seamless, interconnected world with no load events. I think we were one of the first developers to tackle this problem (along with Naughty Dog, on Crash Bandicoot). It proved to be way more difficult than we had initially anticipated – if I recall, we were still struggling to get the textures to dynamically pack correctly, just a couple months before release. We ultimately got it working by the skin of our teeth, but I wonder if we would’ve embarked on such an ambitious plan if we’d known how difficult it was going to be!

Our second challenge, of course, was figuring out how to store two sets of data for the spectral and material realms, and how to implement the real-time morph between the two environments. Our initial plan was over-ambitious, involving texture-morphing as well as geometry-morphing, but we realized pretty early on that our texture memory (and time) was too limited to achieve this. We came up with the idea of leveraging the 3DS Max animation timeline to attach spectral values to the vertices in the geometry – i.e., frame 0 was the material world, and frame 1 was the spectral realm (or vice versa; I can’t remember for sure). This way we could alter the x,y,z coordinates of each vertex, as well as its RGB lighting values, to create a twisted, more eerily lit version of the physical realm.

Our ultimate challenge, though, was schedule and scope. Conceived as an open-world, Zelda-esque 3D adventure game, Soul Reaver was incredibly ambitious. Crystal Dynamics’ Gex engine gave us a leg-up on the 3D technology, but in essence we were writing a game engine from scratch, while developing a new IP. These days, a developer wouldn’t think of attempting such a thing in less than three years (minimum), but Eidos wanted the game in less than two. In the end, we shipped Soul Reaver in under 2.5 years, but not without some unfortunate eleventh-hour cuts which still pain me today. The scope of the game was definitely too ambitious, but if we had shipped the game that Fall, instead of that Summer, I think we could have reduced the scope of the game more elegantly.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?

AH: Pretty close, considering all the changes we went through over the course of development. We had to cut content, but the core concept of the game remained unchanged (even going back to the original Shifter proposal).

To hit the August ’99 release date, we had to cut the last few levels of the game, and end on a cliffhanger that set up Soul Reaver 2. Originally, Raziel was going to hunt down and destroy all of his former brothers as well as Kain – and then, using his newly-acquired abilities, he would’ve activated the long-dormant pipes of the Silenced Cathedral to wipe out the remaining vampires of Nosgoth with a sonic blast. Only then would he realize that he’d been the Elder God’s pawn all along, that the purging of the vampires had devastating consequences, and that the only way to set things right would be to use Moebius’ time-streaming device to go back in time and alter history (in the sequel).

So the story would have arrived at a similar place, just by a different route. In the end, as much as I hated its bluntness, Soul Reaver’s “To Be Continued” ending probably turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because I think it opened up more interesting story options for the sequels.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of?

AH: I’m extremely proud of how our relatively small team managed to pull off all those groundbreaking technical challenges. And as a designer, I still take pride in the originality of Soul Reaver’s vision, and the unified way we were able to mesh the game mechanics with the fiction – e.g., devouring souls for sustenance, and the way the spectral plane was integrated into the health system; how the combat mechanics were designed around defeating immortal vampires; the ability to glide on broken wings; and the balance between Raziel’s mechanics in the spirit and material realms, especially the ability to use the morphing terrain to your advantage. In many ways, I think it’s still the most well-designed game I’ve worked on.

PSB: How would you like Soul Reaver to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?

AH: Fondly, I hope! Even thirteen years later, I’m humbled and gratified to have fans and colleagues come up to me and say how memorable the game was for them, or how it influenced them as young game designers. The series still has an enthusiastic fan base, and is remembered affectionately in ways we couldn’t have foreseen all those years ago.

I hope it’s remembered as a well-constructed game with an original vision and an engaging story, and as groundbreaking in terms of what we were able to achieve on the PlayStation at the time. Our approach to voice acting and performance was also innovative for the time, the way we brought the actors in to record their dialogue together rather than in isolation. The performance capture process we use on Uncharted today – where we involve the actors as collaborators, and have them play the scenes together on the stage – owes its origins to the techniques we established for Soul Reaver fifteen years ago.

PSB: Which of the Soul Reaver characters is closest to your heart?

AH: It’s impossible for me to choose between Raziel and Kain – they’re two inseparable sides of the same coin (so to speak). As a character, I probably like Kain more. Although ostensibly a villain, he’s really a classic hero, fighting for free will in a world shackled by Fate. Raziel is a more tragic figure, a pawn, and that makes him sympathetic – but he’s also a deeply flawed character, blinded by self-righteousness and vengeance. I loved writing for both of them.

More Behind the Classics

With an HD remake currently in development, we caught up with the game’s creator to find out how the 1997 original came into being. Sit back and enjoy – and if you’re new to the title remember that it’s available to download on PSN.

Fred Dutton, PlayStation.Blog Europe Manager: What was the original concept for the game?
Lorne Lanning, President, Oddworld Inhabitants: On a very practical level, we were striving for a deeper and more engaging sense of story and emotional character development for games. We brought character development, production design, animation, and effects from the film industry. We wanted to feel like you were playing not just a challenge, but someone’s fate – someone that you had to be responsible for.

On a more philosophical level, I wanted to take the most pop of pop culture, and convert it into meaningful modern day myths that would have great appeal to a wider audience. We also believed that people could find more empowering messages through gaming. So we targeted the anti-hero as our main character. Abe wasn’t the muscle-bound superhero that you wanted to be – he was the rather pathetic chump that you actually are. It was about rendering the journey out of the more powerless beings that we see ourselves as and at the place we most typically are, which is at the bottom of the global corporate food chain.

On a business level, we believed that if we could crack the conceptual goals mentioned above, then we had a chance at establishing a quality brand that distinguished itself by offering its audience a more intelligent – albeit sarcastically ironic – perspective to engage with.

At the time, we believed that the space was wide open to create a brand of quality and integrity around the dysfunctional cracked mirror of our real world as reflected into our mythically hilarious and pathetic world, then we could establish a brand that would stick into the future.

PSB: Where did you look for inspiration when deciding on the game’s look and feel?
LL: While 3D was the big emerging new real time tech of the PS1 era, it didn’t appeal to me at all as I had already been dealing with 3D graphics for a decade before I talked Sherry McKenna into founding Oddworld with me. We knew very well the capabilities that 3D was not going to deliver for console gaming at that time. Instead, we focused on creating the lifelike aspects of the characters and environments. Their animations, their sound effects – we were aiming for it to feel more like film.

It was film that was the key inspiration, but from games the most fun I personally had, aside from pure racing and arcade-style games, was the great early side-scrollers like Prince of Persia, Out of This World and Flashback. I loved those games, but most importantly those games made me feel like I was controlling a lifeform more than a piece of art in some challenge contest.

The animations, the locked camera, the movie-esque tone and vibe of those games blending story, action and adventure in clever, focused ways engaged me in ways that I found more inspiring.

So while most developers were heading for 3D, we were heading for deeper characters and more emotionally meaningful play. For me, it was not about the tech. It was about the narrative and having the gameplay take some interesting new twists to make the mechanics of challenge more tightly interwoven into the character and story.

PSB: It really set the standard for 2D visuals when it was released. Was it a tough game to develop?
LL: It was hell. We had all kinds of things going wrong, and quite frankly it would have failed to reach the shelf had Sherry McKenna not been one seriously badass negotiator and strategist. The team stuck through some hard times and people wanted to do a great job with the project, but Sherry was the enabler to make all that happen. She kept the money flowing while other companies were being cut.

Considering the obstacles, it was harder than I ever imagined it would be. Logically speaking, we should have failed, but our deep commitment and our absolute determination under the leadership of a relentlessly optimistic force – aka Sherry – we actually prevailed. But it was a killer building the company, an engine, and the game all with one budget. It was painful.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short? Any regrets about the checkpoint system?
LL: Well, yeah, the checkpoint system was such a cluster**** it was maddening. This was down to coding issues and having a very challenging time getting code and design and direction on the same page. It was a new company, it was new people working together, it was a crazy ambitious effort for us… and we completely screwed the save system by release. UGH! It hurt, but we shipped and while it was imperfect we swore we wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. We fixed that issue on Abe’s Exoddus and even created the “quick save” to really drill that issue home that we would never make that mistake again.

PSB: What do you see as the game’s legacy? How would you like it remembered?
LL: I think the game served a lot of people who wanted to see deeper and more developed characters in games that had more real world relevance to them. I believed, and still do, that the audience wants richer entertainment than they are currently getting.

I also hear a lot of people in the business claim the game inspired them to want to start making games. But I have to say the most intangible rewards were the heart-breaking and inspiring fan mails from people whose lives the game so deeply affected. It’s uncanny the impact the game had on some people, but it was why I personally wanted to make the games.

I believed the power of the medium could have greater and more nutritious impact that added something to people’s lives and perspectives on the high-jinxed world around them, full of lies and deception being brought to them by governments and corporations.

There was one fan who swears the game saved his life, who was actually a 72 year old man who we decided to name a character after in our second game, Abe’s Exoddus. He was Alf Gamble. When we read his hand written multi-paged letter… all of us cried. It was a killer, it was sincere, and it was a heartbreaker.

More Behind the Classics

The second entry in our Behind the Classics series is a real lost gem – SCE Cambridge Studios’ wild, wacky supernatural adventure MediEvil. First released on PSone back in 1998, it put you in the shoes of Sir Daniel Fortesque – an undead knight unwittingly reanimated by the evil sorcerer Zarok who embarks on a quest to liberate the kingdom of Gallowmere.

A sequel followed in 2000, with a PSP remake also popping up on PSP in 2005, however, it’s the original game that remains most embedded in the memory. With Sir Dan soon to enjoy a comeback of sorts as a playable character in PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale, we sat down with original designer Chris Sorrell to find out more about the game’s development.

PlayStation.Blog: What was the original concept for the game? Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?
Chris Sorrell, Game Designer, MediEvil: The first design proposal for the game had the working title ‘Dead Man Dan’ and described a game that was a fusion of Capcom’s Ghouls’n Ghosts with the art style of Tim Burton – especially the look and feel of The Nightmare Before Christmas. In both cases these were things that I was a huge fan of back in the mid ‘90s. Lead artist Jason Wilson shared my interest in dark, gothic influenced artwork and we worked together to define the look and feel of the game.

PSB: It was an ambitious title for its time – what were your biggest challenges in realising that original vision?
CS: MediEvil presented a real mountain of challenges. The game started life as a project of a small, cash-strapped independent developer – Millennium Interactive. In addition to bringing together a brand new team – none of whom had really made a 3D game of this scale before – we were in ‘sell’ mode almost from day one, with the future of the studio riding on our ability to attract a major publishing deal as quickly as possible. We were initially working on multiple platforms including Windows and Sega Saturn as well as PlayStation before we finally had the chance to demo the game for Sony. Thankfully that was probably our best pitch ever: SCEE had some really inspiring people in management, they loved MediEvil, and within a few weeks we were signed to make an exclusive PlayStation game. In a few more months we became Sony’s second studio in the UK.

Of course another layer of challenge came from the fact that, like most other developers at that time, we were still feeling our way with 3D. Things like camera and character control presented a lot of interesting new challenges and required us to try out a number of approaches before we settled on solutions that seemed to work.

PSB: How close to your original concept was the finished game?
CS: Actually really close. Over the course of development the game became less arcadey and a little more of an adventure – which, being a huge Zelda fan, I was very pleased about. As for the game’s look, I think that was extremely true to our initial goals as you can see if you track down some of the concept art that’s out there on the internet.

PSB: Which element of the game are you most proud of, and which element, if any, do you feel fell short?
CS: At the time I might have said I was most proud of how our team pulled together to finish the game without compromising on the quirky attention to detail or scope of the game. Looking back now, I guess I feel most proud of the fact that we managed to create a game which – and I believe this is down to the game’s personality and charm – a lot of people still seem to remember. As a developer, it’s a real privilege to be told that your game brings back fond childhood memories for someone and that seems to happen quite often with MediEvil.

Where do I feel we fell short? Well I would have liked to travel a little further down that ‘Zelda’ path – I think a genuine, deep adventure set in the MediEvil world could have been something quite special. The game was also supposed to feature Morten the Earthworm – who lived in Dan’s empty eye socket. Alas, he didn’t make the cut.

PSB: What do you see as the game’s legacy? How would you like it remembered?
CS: Certainly I think we were one of the first games to capture that Tim Burton vibe and I think there may have been a few spooky themed action games that followed MediEvil where the developers probably looked at what we had done. [2002 Capcom fantasy adventure] Maximo springs to mind. I’d be quite happy if people remembered MediEvil as ‘that game with the weird, grunting skeleton dude with one eye and no lower jaw who throws his own arm like a boomerang’.

PSB: A PSP version came out in 2005, but the series has been largely dormant since. Do you ever think about where you might have taken the franchise?
CS: I’d certainly love to work with Sir Dan one more time and I have lots of ideas that I think would make for a great new MediEvil game. Sadly I think it’s an unlikely prospect since I no longer work for Sony, not to mention how times have changed in the years since Dan first left his crypt.

More Behind the Classics

When I took over the SCEE PlayStation Blog a month or two back, I promised you a few new regular features. Today, I’m happy to unveil the first of them: Behind The Classics. Every fortnight (well, that’s the plan at least), we’ll be talking to the creative force behind a vintage PS One or PlayStation 2 title. To kick things off, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin was kind enough to lend us his time to discuss the making of seminal 2001 PS2 platformer Jak & Daxter.

We’ve got the next few entries in the series lined up, but please feel free to leave your suggestions for future interview subjects below. Manage your expectations – these people aren’t always easy to track down – but we’ll do our best.

Anyway, without further ado, over to Andy…

What was the original concept for the game? Was it a deliberate attempt to create a PlayStation 2 mascot to rival Crash Bandicoot?
Andy Gavin: Of course we wanted the franchise to be as big – or bigger – than Crash. And while this didn’t quite come to be, it was certainly our goal.

The formulation of new game ideas involves two aspects: genre and style. As to gameplay genre: on the PS One, good-looking, free roaming 3D seemed impossible. The machine lacked any hardware sorting or clipping, and had a relatively low polygon count. Plus, the AI challenge of creating a camera that didn’t leave players feeling queasy was extremely daunting. So we locked down the viewpoint to improve graphics and focus on traditional Donkey Kong Country-style gameplay.

But with Mario 64, Miyamoto showed that free roaming was possible, albeit on the N64 and with no small dose of camera frustration. By the time we began Jak & Daxter in January 1999 newer games like Banjo-Kajooie vastly improved the playability. Clearly, on the PS2, full 3D could be great.

Did you draw inspiration from anywhere in particular for the game’s look and feel?
Andy Gavin: With Crash we enjoyed enormous worldwide success in no small part due to our collaboration with Sony’s worldwide producers. So for Jak & Daxter we set out to create a character and environment that merged elements from worldwide cultures. You can see the result in Jak, who is a hybrid of Western cartoons and Eastern manga. We asked every Naughty Dog artist to spend a couple of days sketching concepts for the look of the game. We threw these on a giant table and picked elements we liked as a group.

It was an ambitious title for its time. What were the biggest challenges in realising your original vision?
Andy Gavin: Like every first-on-a-system Naughty Dog game, Jak had a rocky development. First of all, the PS2 was difficult to program, particularly in those early days when no workable examples or libraries existed. On top of that, I made the audacious choice to write the entire game in a programming language of my own design called GOAL, creating a brand new compiler and debugger from scratch. In addition, to realise the ambitious graphical goals, we invented a roster of brand new technologies: several different level of detail systems, perhaps 10 rendering engines, seamless loading from DVD, advanced runtime physics and joint animation systems to rival the offline tools. It was really, really crazy and basically took us about 20 months just on the engineering side before the engine was able to produce the kind of levels we wanted.

Can you tell me more about the mooted third character and why it was axed?
Andy Gavin: There never were any serious plans for a third character. But we had more ambitious plans for Daxter in the beginning. He was supposed to be able to hop off your shoulder and run around and do stuff. That didn’t happen until the second game. Same with the vehicle stuff. We squeezed the racer in, but barely, and we had much more aggressive plans for it.

How close to your original concept was the finished game?
Andy Gavin: Very close. We wanted to put you into this beautiful, fully-rendered fantasy world and yet allow full interactive exploration. We wanted no loading, elaborate storytelling, a camera you didn’t need to manually control, and both classic platform and vehicle gameplay.

Which element of the game are you most proud of?
Andy Gavin: I’m both most proud and most torn over GOAL, my custom language and development environment. This ended up being so much harder than I thought, and is certainly the most sophisticated programming I’ve done in my career. In the end it was pretty awesome, although not without its quirks. I’m also supremely proud of our completely load-free seamless-world. We were the first to do this – I even have a patent on it – and few have attempted it since. It was a lot of work!

And let’s not forget Jak’s control, which I personally programed. Jak has really good control, as good as any game ever. His animation is incredibly fluid, yet he is supremely responsive to both the player and the environment. Even basic elements of his control system were written and re-written a dozen times.

How would you like the first Jak & Daxter to be remembered? What did it bring to the video game medium?
Andy Gavin: The single most important thing that it brought to the medium – and there are countless smaller things – is its consistent and complete integration of the game and story elements. This comes to full fruition in Jak 2, and continues peerlessly today in newer Naughty Dog games like Uncharted. Jak has a detailed and involved story, but it’s never a semi-interactive movie, it’s a video game! The storytelling does not come at the expense of the gameplay.

Which of Naughty Dog’s PlayStation characters – Crash, Jak & Daxter, or Nathan Drake – is closest to your heart?
Andy Gavin: Crash and Neo Cortex are my favorites, and I also have a really big sweet spot for Daxter, who is such a hoot. The Uncharted characters are awesome too, but I can’t take any responsibility for them, so the connection isn’t as personal. And don’t get me wrong, I love all of my babies, even back to the forgotten ones like Keef the Thief, but really Crash’s wicked orange grin melts my heart, and Cortex is who I secretly wanted to be… If I were a cartoon :-)

More Behind the Classics