The Making Of: Eyetoy: Play
It’s 15 years since Sony’s Eyetoy and its launch title Play put gamers on screen and made them part of the action. Retro Gamer cleans windows and karate chops mini ninjas with original team members Ron Festejo, Pete Marshall and Eric Matthews
i will never forget the reaction of the audience. Women gasped. men smiled. i turned to my boss and said, ‘i want to work on that’ Ron Festejo
ron Festejo remembers the exact moment when he knew he simply had to work on Eyetoy. It was when Rick Marks, the creator of the technology, was brushing a cluster of spiders off his face.
“They were asterisks, actually, but Rick said we had to imagine they were spiders,” laughs Ron. “I will never forget the reaction of the audience. Women gasped. Men smiled. I turned to my boss and said, ‘I want to work on that!’”
Ron, who had previously been employed at Psygnosis and was then a producer with Sony, was part of a 2,000-strong audience of developers and marketing people at a conference organised by the company’s European head, Phil Harrison. With the Playstation 2 just launched, Phil invited Rick over from America to demonstrate his groundbreaking work on stage, which connected a camera to the console, and challenged the assembled internal studios to find a way to bring this exciting technology to market.
“One of our biggest challenges was figuring out what we were actually going to release,” explains Ron. “We spent a lot of time pursuing the idea of a colourtracking game that used a wand but colour-tracking is always dependent on good lighting, something you couldn’t guarantee out in the real world. Phil made it clear, ‘There can be no light issues’. I actually had that quote printed out and posted next to my monitor.”
Initial prototypes had the player using a makeshift wand, essentially the plastic ball which came with the Aibo robot dog stuck on the end of a pencil, tracing shapes in the air to cast spells. Creating reliable gesture-recognition proved tricky, requiring lengthy calibration and consistently good lighting, and there was a jarring disconnect between the player’s actions and the disembodied wand on screen. Plus a lucrative Hogwarts tie-in would be problematic given EA owned the Harry Potter licence.
So the wand disappeared and instead it was decided to focus on using motion to control the action on the screen rather than colour-tracking. “It was just so immediate,” says Ron. “You move and things happen, which was still magical in people’s eyes. It reduced a lot of the lighting issues, too. The move to motion was absolutely the right decision but trying to convince people to work on small, motion-based games was hard going. They all wanted to work on triple-a titles!”
One such programmer was Pete Marshall. He was part of Sony’s Camden studio, soon to be merged with the Soho studio to form Sony London, and was working on Fall Of The Artificer, a big-budget, high-concept, third-person action game. “It was going okay but then we visited our Cambridge studio and saw how they were getting on with Primal,” says
Pete. “We thought, ‘Holy shit, these guys know what they’re doing!’ That got us thinking maybe we should be doing something else. I was at that conference where Rick showed his demos and the tech did look interesting, plus Ron was really into it so I thought, ‘Maybe this will work?’ I mean, I’m a coder so I’m a natural sceptic.”
Pete, who had previously collaborated with Ron on 3D action adventure game Kingsley’s Adventure, agreed that motion control was the way to progress and not just because of the instant appeal of players seeing their own image on screen. “Simple motions were what we could do well and do most robustly,” he explains. “That was one of the mantras. This has
to be a robust piece of technology that goes into peoples’ living rooms and bedrooms. That was injected into our brainstorming session – for a game to work, it really needed to use motion.”
So after toying with the idea of creating a virtual pet experience, the team focussed on a party game collection. It brainstormed ideas for simple, motiondriven minigames which would eventually evolve into the dozen that comprised Eyetoy: Play. And what a diverse bunch they were. Kung Foo had you performing your best Bruce Lee impression as you swatted attacking ninjas away with your fists of fury. Keep Ups turned you into a football show-off as you used your head, shoulders and a little Maradona-style ‘hand of god’ to keep the ball aloft and Plate Spinner recreated the Generation Game for a new generation as you desperately tried to keep your crockery intact.
“The more people saw it, the more everyone realised how accessible it was,” smiles Pete. “During the prototyping, you still used the controller for the menu screens and stuff, but we decided we should get rid of it. We went through a period of rapid iteration and trial and error, seeing if an idea would actually work using very basic graphics and if it did, it was a keeper. Once we had a few strong ideas, like Kung Foo and Keep Ups, and we saw the reaction we got from people, we became more and more confident.”
Soon players were triggering a fireworks display in Rocket Rumble, a homage to early
PS2 title Fantasvision, and tickling spirits away in Ghost Catcher. Boxing Chump was an early favourite, an entertaining reimaging of those Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots from the Sixties, though as much fun as clocking a mechanical monkey clearly was, it could be frustrating when your well-timed punches apparently passed painlessly through your opponent. “We were fully aware it was imprecise,” admits Pete. “It was a constant battle. That whole robustness thing – trying
eyetoy was really cool and quite magical but we had no idea if anyone would buy it Eric Matthews
to make it as accurate as we could but being robust enough so if the lighting changed it could still work… like, if someone opened a window in their bedroom, a dark scene would suddenly become whited out and we had to be aware of all those technical issues. There was a trade-off between accuracy and what would work in the real world. That was always a consideration and also drove the ideas for the games themselves.”
With the focus on easy-to-grasp minigames, some of the team understandably worried that seasoned gamers would find the experience too shallow, yet the upside of this was the possibility of tapping into a hitherto overlooked audience – the extended family of those established gamers. In these pre-wii days, the idea of getting your mum, little sister or even your granny playing along was still quite revolutionary and the concept of engaging those new to gaming was beautifully illustrated in the opening tutorial video for Eyetoy: Play, which starred a greyhaired grandma getting groovy with the technology.
“That was Phil Harrison’s idea,” smiles Pete. “He did lots of flying across to the States and Virgin Airlines had this really cool preflight video, telling you the safety stuff, and he got them to do it. It was supposed to show you that setting up and using Eyetoy was so easy, even your granny can do it!”
Eyetoy: Play certainly embraced the new, both in terms of audience and in rethinking what a console title could offer. As well as the 12 mingames, there was Play Room, which allowed players to mess about with various filters and see themselves submerged underwater or streaming rainbows from their fingertips. There was even an affectionate nod to
Rick Marks’ initial onstage demo of the technology as you fought off an onslaught of spiders. Also included was the ability to record short video messages to the PS2’S memory card and share them with other users, a decade before Vine turned the six-second video into a 21st century art form. Given many Eyetoy cameras were located in bedrooms, did Pete ever worry overexcited users might create ‘adult content’?
“Porn never occurred to me,” protests Pete. “I was thinking of the privacy side of things, though, and how people might feel about having a camera on top of their TV looking into their home. That’s why we had the big red light on when it was active. It’s funny because now people have cameras everywhere.”
Play was certainly on the cusp of a change in the way we interact with consoles and technology in general. The film Minority Report, released
while the project was in development, had made us all dream of a future where we controlled super computers with a wave of our hands and the growing proliferation of webcams and broadband connectivity hinted at the Facetime and ‘selfie’ era to come. In hindsight, the Eyetoy can be viewed as deftly tapping into the zeitgeist, a cheap and accessible gadget perfectly suited to a generation falling in love with seeing its own image on screen.
“I know you can look back and say that but we weren’t thinking it at the time,” explains Eric Matthews, the design manager on the project, with a degree of admirable honesty. “We didn’t know if anyone was going to play this thing or even who exactly we were aiming it at. It was really cool and quite magical and different but at the same time, we had no idea what we were going to do with it or who was going to buy it… if anyone.”
eric, who had been in the games business since the Eighties and was one of the founding members of the Bitmap Brothers, admits to being sceptical, at least initially, about whether Eyetoy would find an audience but he was at least clear about which game ideas should be pursued. Together with Ron, he came up with criteria to determine whether a prototype would be progressed or jettisoned, and encouraged everyone in the London studio to draw a quick sketch of any game concepts on a single sheet of paper. “We would score ideas on things like, ‘Does it use the video feed? Does it make you the star of the game? Is it social? Is it as much fun to watch as to play? Does it encourage movement?’ We’d go through the game ideas and rate them and that decided if they went in. And we were trying to offer something unique, so if we thought we could play it better on a traditional controller, then it wasn’t going in.”
Eric, after lengthy discussions with Ron and Phil, encouraged the team to move away from traditional game mores, such as complicated scoring systems and unlocking levels through dogged determination. The latter decision, to allow all the minigames to be playable from the start, so incensed some team members that they went so far as to ask for their names to be removed from the credits, which seems something of an overreaction in retrospect. But then this was new territory and Eric explains it wasn’t really until the Playstation Experience show in the summer of 2003 that the team had an inkling of what the general public would make of their work. “We took three prototypes – Wishi Washi, Boxing Chump
I remember seeing a kid and his disabled gran playing eyetoy together at the Playstation experience and i took a photo Ron Festejo
and Dance Floor, which became Beat Freak. I was there with the head of marketing, Simon Rutter, standing at the back, looking at these lines and lines of people queueing up to play them, saying, ‘This is crazy!’ We thought we had something unique but we never imagined we’d have that many people… and so many different people – mum, dad, grandma, the kids. We were thinking, ‘This could do less than a 100,000 units or over a million’, we just didn’t know.”
as it turned out, Eyetoy: Play sold over 4 million copies and the camera went on to shift more than 12 million units in the following five years, spawning over 20 dedicated Eyetoy titles. Many more games utilised its innovative features and its critical and commercial success had a lasting effect on how Sony, as well as their competitors, viewed the potential audience for their games – and how they might be played. “It was quite an important game to have worked on,” reflects Eric. “Making something that the whole family could play, from really young kids to grandparents, something they could play together, seeing that enjoyment and knowing you’d done something quite unique.”
Pete, who together with Eric currently works with Sony’s VR tech, agrees that Eyetoy was the first step on an exciting new road. “There’s a definite link with what I do now and what we were experimenting with back then,” he says. “Those early demos Rick showed with colour-tracking and the work we did on the wand idea, you can see that in the Move controllers that came later and right up to PS VR. Of course it’s a lot more advanced now and there’s a lot more data coming in and out but it does trace back to Eyetoy.”
As for Ron, he recalls the project with fondness. After Eyetoy: Play collected two BAFTAS, including the Technical Achievement award, he took them home to show his mother. “I was always into games and spent a lot of time in my room playing them when I was young,” he says. “I had left school at the age of 15 without really knowing what I wanted to do. All these things worried my mother, who was the only parent I had, and she tried to convince me to continue with my education. It was important for me to show her what I had a hand in doing and that it was recognised in a real way. She’s been proud of me ever since.”
Eyetoy: Play was not just a source of pride for the Festejo family. Sony has continued to develop camera tech, right up to the current PS4’S Playstation Camera. Its venture into developing novel devices for which Eyetoy spearheaded can not only be seen in Move and PS VR but also the hugely successful Singstar series and the child-friendly Wonderbook project. Sony’s rivals clearly took note, too. Microsoft’s Kinect owes the Eyetoy a debt and though Nintendo’s Wii tends to get all the credit for bringing motion control to the masses, remember that Eyetoy: Play 3, released a year before the Wii, included a bowling game and Kinetic beat Wii Fit to the yoga mat by two years.
Reaching a new audience and making gaming accessible to all is something Ron recalls with obvious pleasure. “I remember seeing a kid and his disabled gran playing Eyetoy together at the Playstation Experience and I took a photo,” he says. “It was truly special for me to capture that moment. It’s the moment you hear of from all types of creators. The moment when all the late nights and stress was absolutely worth it.”
Thanks to Ron, Pete and Eric for their stories and photographs.