From The Archives: PF Magic
Following the disappointment of a canned console attachment, PF Magic barked up the right tree with the first game involving a virtual pet, laying the ground for a successful series and a hugely popular genre
Learn how a company on the brink of destruction turned it all around
In 1994, Rob Fulop felt his world crashing down around him, three years after setting up PF Magic with John Scull, a former marketing executive of Apple. The company had been set up to work on an innovative communications device for the Sega Mega Drive called the
Edge 16 – a 4800-baud modem which sat on top of the console to allow multiplayer gaming over telephone landlines. But the company funding it, AT&T, decided to pull the plug and PF Magic ended up sitting on the edge of oblivion.
“It wasn’t a good time and we were abandoned,” says Rob, still smarting at the decision. “AT&T had put $3 million into the Edge 16 and we’d developed the hardware and worked hard on the software, and yet they were cancelling the whole effort and writing it off. A lot of companies would have folded on the spot and AT&T was fine with that happening to us. We had to turn a corner and do something different but it was hard because our whole company had been devoted to this single product.”
Had the Edge 16 gone ahead, it would have proven to be innovative. Sega had released a modem in 1990 but it never made it outside of Japan, however the
Edge 16 was shaping up well for the US market and attracting attention from Microprose, Tengen, Gametek and EA. Sega was also on board, with each company eager to allow PF Magic to make the necessary tweaks to their games. When it was showcased at the CES in Chicago in the Summer of 1993, CVG magazine said it was “a nice glimpse of the future”.
Those who saw it, feted the device for its ability to dial Edge 16-owning friends and not only allow gamers to play together but chat at the same time. There was a socket for a Mega Drive keyboard and it boosted the console’s 64K memory by another 128K. Portable cards could also be inserted to store game data that could be
shared with a friend. “Your gaming pal may live on the other side of the city,”
CVG said, “but now you can take him on at Street Fighter II without either of you leaving the house.”
AT&T made the decision to axe the Edge 16 prior to its intended launch in 1994, by which stage, it had also been in development for the 3DO. “Luckily, we had half the money left and we turned on a dime, but we knew we only had one or two shots,” says Rob. Having already worked for Philips on a multiplayer party game called 3rd Degree for the CD-I in 1992 – “it was like a game show on television,” Rob says – PF Magic sought to become a straightforward videogame developer.
For Rob, this was a return to his roots. He had been involved in professional programming since 1978 when he graduated from the University Of California in Berkley and quickly began as an intern at Atari. After working in the coin-op division, he was asked to write games for the Atari 2600 and these included Night Driver and
Missile Command. Rob also cofounded Imagic
in 1981, creating such gems as Demon Magic.
He went on to formed Interactive Productions which worked with Axlon on games for a unreleased console called Control-vision that put titles on to VHS tapes.
One of those games was Night Trap, shot over 16 days in 1987 using real-life actors in Culver City, California, at a cost of $1.5 million. Five years later – and without Rob’s involvement – it was ported to Sega’s Mega-cd with extra footage by Digital Pictures yet it proved hugely controversial. Senator Joe Lieberman called it out for its violence and it was pulled from the shelves of Toys ‘R’ Us and Kay-bee. Sega took action in January 1994 and Rob felt hugely embarrassed.
“Even though my involvement was five years prior and I was now at PF Magic, my name was on the game and it was very upsetting to have it criticised so much,” he says. “The game was being discussed on TV and it was quite unfair, but it also was embarrassing to see it singled out as a very violent game.” As a result, Rob decided his next titles should be cute. “I didn’t want to make any more games that had any kind of violence in it,” he says. “This made sense to me.”
Even so, PF Magic released, Ballz 3D: Fighting At Its
Ballziest for the Mega Drive and SNES, and it did have a slightly violent edge although it had been developed with the Edge 16 in mind in 1993, before Rob made his decision. Published by Accolade and released in 1994, it had fighters made up of balls and it was quite surreal, infused with crazy characters including a farting monkey and a twirling ballerina dancer. Beat an opponent and their body of balls would separate and roll across the ground. A version was released for the 3DO, too.
The studio also developed Max Magic for the CD-I which allowed users to learn and customise 14 tricks, with the player using the controller to fool their friends with potentially jaw-dropping reveals. It worked on
Pataank for the 3DO, too, putting players in control of a ball inside a pinball machine. Neither of these did particularly well, however.
“Philips and 3DO put the money up for these titles but they were our concepts and our intellectual property,” says Rob. “We were drawn to the machines because they would allow you to work with real images and audio and that was a new paradigm which could open us up to new things. Unfortunately, the trouble with the CD-I was that the early adopters were a techie audience and not the mass market Philips was targeting, so it was a technology that never really found itself.”
With that in mind, PF Magic turned to developing games for the PC and Mac and Rob’s decision to concentrate on the cutest possible games manifested itself in a title about dogs. “I had wanted to develop a digital pet for years and I’d had it in my notes for a long time,” he says. “It now felt right to go ahead. The idea was to create a dog that you could pet and it would respond. We took the technology we made for Ballz and created a puppy dog from the spheres.”
Dogz: Your Computer Pet was a sensation, predating the launch of the Tamagotchi by a year. PF Magic had chosen a dog as its debut animal after visiting the department store Macy’s at Christmas and being told by Santa that kids constantly ask for a puppy. By creating the character out of spheres, they would be able to keep track of how they’d connect and produce a dog with smooth, fluid animation. Players
would determine what their dog needed based on their knowledge of how they behave and use a cursor to interact, feeding, playing and teaching tricks.
“When you look at Dogz, it’s hardly a new invention,” Rob says. “Dogs exist in the world and we were taking inspiration from that. The innovation was putting it on a computer. Players knew what to do: they could throw a bone and play fetch because they know how a dog is supposed to work. It fit within the paradigm of creating a game that was new and exciting with a track record.”
Dogz, designed by Adam C Frank and Ben Resner, was given away for free as a demo that came with five days of virtual food. The hope was that players would become attached to having the pet on their desktop and, once it began to get hungry after the supplies ran out, stump up $20 for a lifetime’s supply so that they could keep playing. “The dog would be crying for more food and if players didn’t pay 20 bucks, it would continue to whine,” Rob says. “It was quite manipulative, but we worked on the premise that if you give a puppy away for five days and ask for it back, most will want to keep it. We sold a million Dogz.”
PF Magic’s stock was riding high. Dogz’s success and the approach to selling it put the developer on the map and it began to consider follow-ups. It was largely self-publishing, finding working on games for computers to be more cost-effective than for consoles (“its much cheaper to put a game on floppy disk than take a risk on cartridges”). Besides, Rob didn’t believe Dogz would work well on console.
“It wouldn’t have been a good match for the Playstation because it was a game you played for 15 minutes every day,” he says.
The developer’s 50 staff at this time was therefore split. Half worked on the pet-based games of which Catz was next, leaving the other half to work on games that never saw the light of day. “We really wanted to make a 3D adventure game but our ambition was greater than the technology allowed,” Rob says.
It wasn’t long before PF Magic concentrated entirely on their breakthrough formula. Oddballz: Your Wacky
Computer Petz was released along with sequels for Dogz and Catz. A Petz CD-ROM combined the original animal games and Oddballz and there were more outings for Catz and Dogz to follow.
“We had a team that knew how to do this kind of game so we thought we may as well leverage it,” Rob explains. “So we made dogs and cats and birds and pigs and we added two characters on the screen which could interact and make a puppy and that was a big deal. So it turned into a kind of early internet game. Lots of people were creating clubs and swapping pets and all that kind of stuff. Once we started, it wasn’t difficult to figure where we should be going with it all.”
By 1998, however, Rob was ready to sell the company. “We’d staffed up, adding marketing people and sales people and built our development team and we’d gotten over the struggle to make the first products and raised more finance,” Rob says. “We had avoided the route of becoming a developer-for-hire because you can never have 50 people on staff relying on other people paying you but I was tired and John was tired and we weren’t getting on that great.”
The pair sold the company to Mindscape which had been bought by The Learning Company. The latter was then sold to Mattel and Ubisoft acquired the Petz series in 2001, continuing to make additional games until 2014. Rob does have some regrets. “I’m sorry I sold PF Magic but you’ve got to make that tradeoff,” he says. Yet having taken a company from the brink of collapse to once that pioneered a genre, we’d say he arguably bowed out at the purr-fect time.
our ambition was greater than the technology allowed Rob Fulop