Desert Island Disks: Mark Pierce
What cherished games would you take to the island?
Another classic coder reveals his past history and what he’d take to a desert island
Four decades making videogames and Mark Pierce is still in love with the arcades. Paul Drury talks to one of the big guns of the games business
We are intrigued. Mark Pierce has spent all his adult life in the videogame business, much of that in the turbulent arcade sector of the Eighties and Nineties, and currently heads up a company called Super Happy Fun Fun. Does the name reflect the kind of boundless optimism you need to survive for that long in the industry?
“You have to love games because making them isn’t always super happy fun,” he admits. “It’s very stressful. People think it’s cool when you tell them you work in games, but it’s like making doughnuts. Suddenly it’s 5am and you smell of grease.” Mark first started getting his coding fingers sticky in the late seventies while studying at The School Of The Art in Chicago. Despite the very limited graphical capabilities of the college computers, Mark, a keen artist from a young age, was hooked. “Then the Bally Astrocade came out and that let you program in Bally BASIC,” he remembers with fondness. “You could make little animations and I went nuts on that. I was like an idiot savant. I lived and breathed it.”
Mark created a paint tool controlled by the console’s innovative joystick and used it to produce demos, which attracted the attention of computer graphics pioneer and designer of the Astrocade’s chipset, Tom Defanti. He gave Mark a job at his company, Real-time Designs, the money and experience proving useful for a student in their final year of art school. “I’d go to CES shows and be trotted out to demonstrate how easy it was to animate stuff on the Astrocade,” says Mark. “What they didn’t know was it took me about five weeks to prepare it so it looked easy.” The chipset used in the Astrocade was virtually the same as the one Chicago-based coin-op manufacturers Bally Midway used in its arcade games such as Gorf and Wizard Of Wor, which led to Mark working on the unlikely arcade game Professor Pac-man. Developed for Bally by industry stalwarts Dave Nutting Associates (DNA) in 1983, the game had players – or ‘pupils’ – solving simple multichoice visual conundrums against the clock. “It was originally called Quiz Ms before they put the Pac-man label on it,” explains Mark. “I coded my own questions in Forth, copying them from Mensa books and did the little animations and a lot of the art [for the game]. DNA had some kickass graphics tools back then. I even started working on a Laserdisc game for them.”
During his time at DNA, Mark got friendly with Jay Fenton (later Jamie Faye), coder of Gorf, and Marc Canter. Together they formed Macromind and produced consumer versions of the tools they were using for the newly launched Apple Macintosh, releasing the very prescient Musicworks and Videoworks in 1984 and 1985 respectively, the latter ultimately evolving into the hugely successful Adobe Director. With such powerful tools, it wasn’t long before Mark turned them to game-making. “I had one of the most creative days of my life,” beams Mark. “I storyboarded my idea for Dark Castle to Silicon Beach Software, showing my design for almost every level on this flipchart. I ripped out the entire game in this one meeting and at the end, everyone kind of said, ‘Holy shit, that’s the game we’re doing!’”
Collaborating with Chicago-based engineer Jonathan Gay, Mark would send his art and level designs as Videoworks files from his home in San Diego by post to Jonathan who would turn them into playable code. This unusual method produced Dark Castle and its sequel Beyond Dark Castle, both big hits on the Mac. “We topped the charts for three years running,” says Mark proudly, “but it was heavily pirated. Even today, if people ask me what games I made, Dark Castle is the one they’ve all played… but it was always a pirated copy!”
During the making of Beyond Dark Castle, Mark decided to move to California, for the weather as much as the work opportunities, and ended up joining Sente, the company formed by Nolan Bushnell and several Atari alumni, such as Ed Rotberg and Howard Delman (later Wendi Allen). Mark worked on the art for arcade title Bug Bash and then in late 1985 interviewed at Atari, taking along his Macintosh to showcase his work. “They had artists and they had game
“I was like an idiot savant. I lived and breathed computer graphics”
Mark Pierce
designers and engineers but they didn’t really have people that did both, like me,” he smiles.
Mark joined the team working on Super Vette, which sadly wasn’t a game about a fantastic animal doctor but a driving game, the ‘vette’ short for ‘corvette’, a model of car which is usually small and often comes in red. He was paired with another new recruit, Bonnie Smithson, one of the few female engineers at the company. “Atari kind of understood that the first game anyone works on will be a failure. They used the pancake analogy – the first one off the griddle always sticks. The vision was to combine Outrun with Spy Hunter and everybody accepted we’d fail…”
The renamed Roadblasters was in fact a surprise hit and suddenly Mark was “blessed with the stink of success,” as he puts it. He was given the title of ‘artist designer’, a new role at the company, and he and Bonnie were given free rein to develop another title together. The result was the charming oddity Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters, released in 1989. “This was the one that stuck to the griddle,” sighs Mark. “It didn’t lose money, but it wasn’t a barn burner. It was innovative and a lot of people liked it but I spent way too much of my life on that game. I must have spent two years drawing every picture in it. It was a labour of love. I learned about working too hard on something.”
Mixing puzzle elements and adventurous exploration with multidirectional blasting, the graphically rich Robot Monsters is full of clever touches and secrets to uncover but proved just too complicated for the average arcadegoer looking for a quick gaming fix. Which helps explain Mark’s next project. “Klax was definitely a knee-jerk reaction after working so hard on such a complex game,” he tells us. “I wanted to do something simple. The Tetris phenomenon had happened and our president at the time, Hide Nakajima, said we needed another puzzle game. This was August 1989 and they wanted it ready for the ATEI show in London in January. I said okay and everyone thought I was a kissass and that I was crazy! But I was young and into substance abuse, like so many of us were in the Eighties.”
Joined by the straight-laced Dave Akers, Mark took inspiration from a famous scene from perennial US TV favourite I Love Lucy, which had our heroine frantically sorting chocolates from an increasingly speedy conveyor belt. He spent weeks just drawing static screens of what looked like puzzle games, with arrangements of squares and triangles, until the basic layout of Klax was arrived upon. Dave mocked up a demo on the Amiga and soon fellow coders in the Atari labs were queuing up to play it, which was always a good sign. “Those four months making Klax were a magical time,” twinkles Mark. “We went from nothing to me standing on the floor of Earls Court in January 1990 presenting the finished game with Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough playing in the background.”
The game did well in the arcades but even better in the home market, the simplicity of the design making it easy to port to even aging micros like the ZX Spectrum, and Mark himself handled the Mega Drive conversion. He also worked on arcade beat-’em-up Pit-fighter, which pioneered the use of digitised graphics and entailed recruiting real-life muscleman to pose for the in-game fighters. “When Gary Stark, the lead engineer, and I were looking for a model for the ‘ultimate warrior’ in that game, we had to hang about in gyms, scoping out guys, then ask them if we could take pictures of them for a game,” he says, stifling his giggles. “I was not comfortable.”
Based on the movie Bloodsport, Pit-fighter was a commercial success but rather than opt for a sequel, Mark decided to apply the new tech to the scrolling beat-’em-up. “I wanted Guardians Of The Hood to be like Double Dragon with digitised graphics but it turned out to be a total turd for a number of reasons,” he admits. “That project had the most incompetent engineer I’ve ever worked with in my life and that can totally scuttle a game. It was a nightmare project.”
Whilst the bug-ridden, clunky Guardians Of The Hood failed to make an impression in the arcades, Mortal Kombat stepped
There was a lot of love and respect between us at Atari and the Midway guys. We were making great games and partying hard” Mark Pierce
into the arena and eclipsed Pit-fighter for the rest of the decade and beyond. Indeed during the early Nineties, Atari as a whole found itself rather overshadowed by its rivals. “We hit a rough spot,” says Mark. “EA hired a whole bunch of people from us and they really eviscerated Atari. Like, they stole John Salwitz and Dave Ralston, who had done Paperboy and Rampart, and that took some of the soul from Atari. They even took Ed Logg, who had done classics like Asteroids and Gauntlet, and he was actually crying when he left.”
The exodus of quality staff was compounded by under investment in cutting edge technology and a management team that lacked vision. Having finished Road Riot 4WD in 1991, Mark was all ready to leave Atari and set up an independent development studio but was persuaded to stay with the offer of stepping up to become Head of Product Development. So began a long and sometimes painful restructuring as Mark tried to reinvigorate the company but by the mid-nineties, his determination to create cohesive, autonomous, properly resourced teams began to bear fruits. As someone who had ‘come up from the trenches’ of game development to a position in management, he had an understanding of the technology required to produce quality titles and felt very positive when Atari Games became part of WMS Industries, which also owned Midway Games.
“There was a lot of love and respect between us at Atari and the Midway guys like Eugene Jarvis, Mark Turmell and Ed Boon,” Mark says. “We’d all known each other from shows. I mean, we were the arcade business back then. Now we were the same family! Plus Midway had this 3DFX hardware which was state of the art. It was an incredible time… we were making great games, hitting our targets and partying hard.”
The run of great games had begun in 1995 with Area 51, a cracking gun game which cleverly tapped into the alien conspiracy theories of the day, and continued after the buyout with the racer San Francisco Rush. Both games were hits
in the arcade and at home via their many console ports and they each spawned several sequels. With confidence riding high at the company, Mark made an erudite case for revisiting one of Atari’s most beloved treasures. “My recollection was that I said, ‘Why the fuck aren’t we doing Gauntlet again?’ Some people were like, ‘You can’t touch Gauntlet,’ like it was this sacred thing. I was like, ‘Duh!’ We have this great 3D hardware now so not doing it would just be stupid.”
Mark’s eloquence won the day and Gauntlet: Legends, released into arcades in 1998, proved a huge money spinner, channelling the co-operative/ competitive spirit of the original. However, Mark was becoming increasingly disillusioned with his senior management and left in April 2000 to set up his own development company, christened by Mark’s first employee, Mike Bailey. “He said he’d always wanted to work at a company called Super Happy Fun Fun,” remembers Mark. “He answered the question far too quickly, like he’d been waiting all his life to be asked it. It was the stupidest fucking name I’d ever heard but I got to like it and it stuck.”
Mark’s new venture initially got a contract to develop a title for the PS2 and Gamecube but was hit with the triple whammy of publisher Vivendi pulling out of the deal, the Dotcom bubble bursting and the crisis of confidence in the business community which followed the 9/11 attacks. They survived for a while handling ports, including Alias and Turok from console to PC, and then started picking up small contracts for mobile titles. “It was hell,” says Mark. “You had to buy like 500 phones to make sure your game [worked on them]. I am proud of Slingo, though. It was a cross-platform, networked game in 2005 which let you play against people on their PC with your mobile phone. And you could chat! There were a lot of firsts with that…”
Mark also highlights their work on Tilt-a-world, which used a phone’s camera to detect movement and allowed you to roll a ball around on the screen by tilting the handset. This was before Nintendo’s Wii made motion-sensing technology commonplace and led to a relationship with Jakks Pacific, the market leaders at the time for plug-and-play units, which was trying to incorporate motion controls into its products. “We helped produce Ultimotion Sports, which was a poor man’s Wii,” explains Mark. “It was brilliantly marketed and pretty good for $39. They advertised it on the shopping channel and in one day, they sold 50,000 units. I swear a lot of old ladies thought they were buying a Wii for their grandchildren.”
So began a fruitful relationship with Jakks, with Mark’s company producing a string of plug-and-play games over many years, including, at Mark’s suggestion, a home version of the hugely popular coin-op Big Buck Hunter which sold an incredible 1.4 million units, mainly in the US. During this period, Mark was pushing to invest in better hardware and when Jakks pulled out of the market, his plans for second generation plug-and-play gun games came to fruition with Sure Shot HD.
“I want people to be able to download and play big-name coin-op gun games at home with real arcade controls on their HD televisions for under a hundred bucks,” he states proudly. “We want to bring the arcade home!”
Thanks to www.arcade-museum.com, Shinobi and Martyn Carroll for help with this article.
“I said I could do Klax in four months and everyone thought I was crazy” Mark Pierce