Jake Simpson (00:00)
Simon Cook. Wow, that's a nice now how long have we known each other? I'm struggling to remember a time when I didn't know you.

Simon Cooke (00:02)
Jake.

I think we've known each other now for about god, fifteen years, give or take. We used to hang out in some of the same online forums.

Jake Simpson (00:21)
Yeah, but I mean I'm just trying to remember we and we ran into each other the first time probably at one of the G D C parties or something like that, I think. I'm sure it's must have been something like that.

Simon Cooke (00:30)
Yeah. Right. I think in in person, yeah. And everything else was T C E.

Jake Simpson (00:37)
the Chaos Engine, that's right. Yes, of course. That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We talked to each other a lot there. It's been it it it's funny talking to various friends throughout this podcast, it's been one of those weird things of like, how you know, where do I know you from again? You know I've known you for so long that I don't remember time I didn't know you. So now you've been kicking around the games industry for years, right? 'cause you're and I up there at the same sort of age group as I am.

But you started out very differently though, didn't you?

Simon Cooke (01:10)
Yeah, so I started out back when I was fifteen. Well, I'd been programming before then, but when I was fifteen on the Sam Coupe home computer, which had come out in the UK in nineteen eighty nine, the back end of that, and then nobody could get them.

Jake Simpson (01:26)
Cooper, isn't that basically a TRS A T?

Simon Cooke (01:29)
No, no, it's kind of a super Sinclair spectrum. And they added Atari ST level graphics to it. unfortunately the CPU wasn't good enough to do really much on that machine, unless you went to extraordinary lengths. had a ton of memory, but yeah, it didn't have any of the hardware assist that a lot of the old game systems had, like Atari ST, Amiga, they all had these coprocessors and they were sixteen bit.

was it a data? Yeah. Whereas the SAM coupe had none of that, you had a Z eighty CPU and that was it. And so you know

Jake Simpson (01:59)
It's a general idea.

I'm gonna say because I collect all these old consoles and I don't remember that one. That's the weird thing. I'm gonna have to add this that up now.

Simon Cooke (02:17)
This was like right at the very back end of the life of the Sinclair spectrum. So like to kind of cement where that is, I was writing for Your Sinclair magazine as a result of doing a lot of stuff on the Sam Coupe. Like I I put out all these public domain demos and helped out in a few games, like Prince of Persia and Lemmings, and I think another one was Exodus, Parallax, I wrote the DOS for.

and hit some demos in and got in some trouble. but yeah, I did all of that. And then as I was doing that, because I was writing for this public domain magazine called Fred, which was run by Colin McDonald, who later went on to work for DMA design, and now I think he heads up Channel Four's video game program. So yeah, I I was doing all this writing for that magazine, and then York Sinclair came knocking.

And I ended up with my own column in your St. Clair magazine for a year until the magazine died.

Jake Simpson (03:20)
Wow. A column in a magazine. Yeah no, that's that's a dream, isn't it? You know, people listening to my words, me whittering on so I found your Sam Coupe. I've just looked it up and and I don't I don't recall ever seeing one of these. How bizarre. This it's funny, when you Google it, one of the pictures that comes up is actually the flan, not the not the Sam Coupe, but never mind. Those are possible to find, believe me, I've been trying to look for one for years. okay. Yeah, how did you get hold of one of these? I mean

suppose it is an eight bit British machine, so I suppose it is.

Simon Cooke (03:51)
Yeah, I I was on the waiting list. Like my dad was getting at me for Christmas. And like the first one that I got didn't have the hard drive well. Yeah, but I didn't even have a disk drive, it was all tape. So that was horrible.

Jake Simpson (03:59)
Property test.

I remember those, God. Remember buying so many, you know, the the T D K C thirty tapes, you know, back in the day.

Simon Cooke (04:17)
Did you ever do that old thing where you got the little like screwdriver and you had to kind of wiggle it in the azimuth adjustment of the cassette thing so you could try to get the thing to load? And then you pray.

Jake Simpson (04:27)
Yeah.

You'd never you never wanted more than a C thirty tape because the C sixties and the C nineties would stretch. and the C thirties stick. So yeah, I remember having stacks of these things. And I remember when I was a kid, 'cause the reason I'm a game developer, I really should talk about this a little bit, just 'cause I'm an interspersed 'cause I'm you wordy bastard. is because of Jeff Minter from Lamasoft. Lar Jeff Minter is my hero, always has been. And I met him very first at to

Commodore show at the Novotel London when I was twelve or ten or eight or something, I don't know, young. And we used to go to his house and he was a really nice guy. We used to go and spend the afternoon there and he'd show me the latest game he's working on, Sheep in Space or whatever it was, and Sipital, whatever. He was the worst pirate of video games I've ever met. you know, and we just spent the afternoon copying. This was this was I had a the 1512 disk drive by then, and then the Amiga had just come out and we were just we you know, we just

Go and buy a box full of discs before you go to Mint Minter's house so that he could you could copy everything. And he had all the American stuff as well, which we couldn't get. because he was he was selling his stuff to I can't remember, some C S E or something like that, some some American company he was selling it to. So yeah, that's wow.

Simon Cooke (05:42)
Do you r do you remember that he did the visualizer for the Xbox three sixty? Yes.

Jake Simpson (05:46)
He did the new well, I mean originally it was called the very first one was the C sixty four one, which was called not Color Space, it was called Psychedelia. That's what the original one was called. And then the one on the Atari ST was called Color Space. and then eventually he moved to the newon chip, the the the the chip they had that was inside.

Simon Cooke (06:05)
think there was there was another one in there too on the Atari S D Tripatron.

Jake Simpson (06:10)
That was colourspace, I thought. I think Tripitron. I think Tripitron was on the Amiga and then then the thing that came along, the new on came along. The new on was the 3D chip that went into DVD players, right? Yeah. And then after that he did the original Xbox One. And then I don't know what happened. I mean basically I think it's still he he's basically just sticking it into all of his VR games at this point.

Simon Cooke (06:33)
Anyway, so I'm sorry. So one of the advantages of having Worlds at Xbox is that I can tell you that our boy Jeff really does not understand variable naming as far as professional engineering goes. Yeah, I've looked at the code for the visualizer and it's full of bars and moves and all kinds of things. Barely documented. You can like single letter variable names for functions. This is kind of, you know, worst practices from the eighties.

Jake Simpson (07:03)
not good. Well, yeah, remember in those days though, because it was an ASCII format you were saving out, the the lower, you know, the least number of letters you had, the you know, the the less space it took up. So you know you would do things like on a 64, you would do things like that. You know, he'd set this up with minimum variable names. I remember that. and yeah. Which never he was never taught to code, Jeff. He was self taught. He basically was in the middle of doing a math degree, I think in Cambridge or something, like Oxford or something.

And he got a really nasty disease and and with his grant money, instead of going to college, he stumbled into a store, bought a Vic twenty, and then went home and just basically had a temperature of a hundred and one and just sat playing with Vic twenty and that's where Lomasov came.

Simon Cooke (07:45)
Nice. And he's he's probably basically worked by himself for pretty much his entire career, right?

Jake Simpson (07:51)
He works now with his partner, Giles, who's a graphics engineer, and they live in a farmhouse in Wales somewhere. but yeah, anyway, so I I'm interrupting your story to to talk about Jeff, and I really shouldn't be s it should be about you, and I'm sorry. So yeah. Okay, so all right, so so there you are, at years old, with your own bloody column and people listening to your words.

Simon Cooke (08:16)
Yeah. Seventeen. I don't know. I haven't even gone to university yet.

Jake Simpson (08:21)
Does that go to your head or what?

Simon Cooke (08:24)
yeah, it did. In fact, you know, this is one of those things that I look at as that's where I peaked and everything's been downhill from there.

Jake Simpson (08:33)
I don't think that's true. I met your wife. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you please later.

Simon Cooke (08:39)
That was an entire other podcast that you should have stories. She's worked on more games than I have. This is Darcy Morales we're talking about. She used to work at Rockstar and various other places. And we met at Midway. Or surreal, as it was called.

Jake Simpson (08:53)
All right. So so tell me about like, okay, so you're seventeen, you've done this thing, then what? Where where are you next? What get what happens next?

Simon Cooke (09:02)
what happened next was a combination of going to university to do physics and electronic engineering, carried on being a journalist for a while. I was writing for Internet and Calms Today and Internet Today magazine and Net User and all of these things. One point I ended up somehow on BBC Radio doing a one night interview for a show about maths and dating.

And suddenly overnight I became an internet love guru. lasted all about five seconds. Cause I was I'd written an article about it for Don for Net.net magazine, which was the future publishing one. And everybody picked it up. And then the Daily Mail picked it up and rewrote it and completely got all the facts wrong, which is kind of odd when they're plagiarizing it. So yeah. It's it was a bit of a weird career. And so finished my degree, ended up

Trying to do journalism full time for a while ends up that like they don't like to pay on time. So making rent was getting difficult. So at that point I kind of said, Okay, what job can I get programming? Because doing games for a living didn't seem like a possibility at that point. So I found a little software company that a friend of mine from school's uncle was at and he'd been working for and ended up going there.

And then they bought a company in the US and I made the leaks the US because everybody there knew that I wanted to move out here.

Jake Simpson (10:39)
Which went up.

Simon Cooke (10:40)
I ended up just outside of Washington DC. So at this little tiny place that was doing mainframe capacity planning, biggest customer was the IRS. you evil man. Yeah, and at that point, like the IRS, probably still today, it was running on decade old computers. So it's like Windows for Work Groups, three point one one or something, and everything's running on floppy disks and everybody else has made the leap to like Windows ninety five by that point. Or NT.

So I was doing that for a bit. The paychecks kinda got a bit ropey for a while because that company started to go out of business in their wonderful new international conglomerate ways. And I ended up making my way over to the West Coast to work for Microsoft for a bit. And that lasted all the five minutes and I ended up at Sierra. But not the cool part of Sierra.

Jake Simpson (11:33)
Share it online. my there's a there's a name from the past.

Simon Cooke (11:36)
Yeah. So I was working on Family Tree software while everybody else, the floor down, was working on things like poker games and Johnny Drama, which was a game that was supposed to come out after No One Lives Forever but never got released.

Jake Simpson (11:51)
No one lives forever. That was Monolith though, wasn't it?

Simon Cooke (11:54)
Yes. So at the time, Sierra was basically funding all of the games in the local industry. Valve, Half Life One, was funded by Sierra and published by them. You've got No One Lives Forever, Monolith, which was funded by Sierra and published by Sierra. So at that point, Sierra was just pumping cash into the Seattle area and getting all of these games developers business and some of them, like for example with Valve, have just grown from there.

Jake Simpson (12:24)
Their experience with Sierra though, I mean, my understanding is that their experience is what's prompted Gabe says to say, Yeah, we're never gonna have a publisher again. But then again, when you've got s you've got Half Life money coming in, you know, you don't need to have another publisher to Do you know I've got to check a story 'cause just because Half Life any when any time anyone talks about Half Life, the original Half Life coming out, I get a little tiny bit bitter because we released Heretic Two from Raven.

Simon Cooke (12:29)
Game New.

Jake Simpson (12:54)
And it turns out that it got released three days before Half-Life came out. we got completely steamrolled by Half-Life. And what really pissed me off about it was not it I mean, let's be clear here, Half-Life was a better game. I Heretic Two was not a bad game, but Half-Life was two was a better Half-Life was a better game, it really was. But it was also a year late. And we were on time. We we did we did Heretic Two in eleven months from start to finish. And I'm so terrifically proud of that.

You know, it was a great game, it was a great time, it was a really great development experience. We produced something of quality. I th I still swear by it, stand by, it was a great game, we did it. And then we got completely steamrolled by a game that was a yeah.

Simon Cooke (13:34)
Yeah. that's rough, man. That's really rough. it's funny though, because like do you know how Half Life and Valve kind of went a bit weird with Half Life Two?

Jake Simpson (13:35)
Never mind.

No, talk to the television.

Simon Cooke (13:49)
So Steam basically turned into a huge thing because of Half-Life 2, right? Because that was the first game on the surface. on the service, yeah. And what happened was they had a deal with Sierra for publishing the game. But Sierra did not have the online distribution rights. And that wasn't part of the contract, right? They only had traditional distribution in there. So Half Life Two came out and

Somebody had dropped the ball so badly at Sierra that they didn't realize that Valve was just gonna turn around and say, Hey, here's a Steam thing and release a game on that. Sierra's like, Yay, we've we've got the physical rights. And meanwhile everybody is moving over to online distribution. So it it was like some very clever maneuvering. Something similar happened like that with the South Park folks. really? Back in the day. Yeah. They the reason why South Park has done so well for Matt and Trey.

is because their lawyer originally said, Yeah, and we want all of the online rights to South Park and the T V stations, Viacom and so on, they were just like, we don't care. And so these days you look back at that kind of thing and it's like, no.

Jake Simpson (15:05)
So we got back to you. You're you're you're at Sierra doing family tree software. God, that that just makes me wanna bang my head against the wall, but okay.

Simon Cooke (15:15)
You know, it's funny, I actually had a lot of fun doing that. I came up with the idea of doing the first ever DVD product that Sierra did. Because originally this is a thing that ships on fifty CDs. my god. I know, right? And you can imagine the cost of goods on that. Yeah. but yeah, they have like social security databases and all this stuff that goes in this box. And at the time they were at war with Broadabund, both of them doing these net discount.

net to zero discount things where you buy the thing in a store and they give you the entire purchase price off as a discount. The only trick is you have to send your receipt into the company to get the discount. Right. And it ends up that about one in five people would never bother.

Jake Simpson (16:03)
So they're making a lot of money.

Simon Cooke (16:05)
Yeah. And it's like the psychological trick that just funnels people into your cash register. It's amazing. But there was two of them in the market at that point fighting against each other and very quickly, you know, that that's unsustainable after a while. Because, you know, it is a race to zero. So what happened was Vivendi came along who bought us out from Sendant, which was this

company that was doing I think it was a real estate company, who'd bought Sierra. And so they came along and it's like, yeah, we'll we'll take you guys on board. And very shortly afterwards they started doing layoffs. because their next acquisition was Universal. And so yeah, basically got ejected from Sierra at that point, unfortunately. as

did most of the people at Sierra. It was running as a skeleton label for a while until they resurrected it in the late two thousand. And then I ended up working for a medical and scientific instrument company, a little startup that was doing a tiny, like really small speaker sized mass spectrometer. And usually these things were the size of large bookshelves. And you'd find them in labs and so on. This one was a tiny one that was

desktop based and it was meant for doing like all kinds of building analysis and medical stuff and tricord. Yeah. Well that that was gonna be version two. We actually looked at doing something the size of a tricorder using basically it's kind of spread spectrum, but you do it in physical space. So you have this constellation of dots that

Jake Simpson (17:55)
Just to interrupt you for a second is it's really great, is that well when I'm recording this, I'm actually seeing video and Simon is demonstrating with his hands how this works, not quite getting the fact that we're in a podcast, but okay, keep going.

Simon Cooke (18:10)
don't worry. I I'm sure they'll get it. but yeah, so there's this random distribution of points in a two D plane, and then you fire out your beam of ions from those points and they go around a curve. But either way, it allows you to condense it down from something the size of a large well, smallish desktop PC into something the size of a tricorder. But that was always gonna be the V two. The V one we got about three weeks.

From having one of those go up on the International Space Station. Yeah. And unfortunately, like the company ran out of money. And like this this is like a common theme of the you know early two thousands is that everybody was still rocky after the dot com burst. So it's like layoff after layoff after layoff after layoff. This is why game developers have really poor retirement plans.

Jake Simpson (18:40)
Interesting.

True, yes, I absolutely agree with that. And I was I was just talking with Mike Arkin a little while ago and we were just discussing the fact that that people in our games industry, you know, there's no such thing as longevity. You know, the idea of you being anywhere for 15 years, we we were talking about Ara Aris, Arras, or whatever his name how we pronounce his name, Unity, who's been there for sixteen years, and it's like, well, you know, that's just astonishing because nobody has that kind of longevity in this industry. you know, I feel like I've been running my place like eight years now, and I feel like my God, that's the longest I've ever been anywhere.

By far by t times two, you know. yeah, there is no longevity in our industry because it's also so fast moving and also I think because a lot of game developers are not good business people.

Simon Cooke (19:34)
Frank? Yeah. totally.

I would agree with that.

Jake Simpson (19:46)
Much more

interested in making the game than they are in making the business that goes with it. But anyway, that's a conversation for another time. So you are now making tricorders. by way by the way, even though I mentioned to him that he was doing his hands, he carried on doing it. It's ill.

Simon Cooke (20:04)
I can't help it. You should see me around neural whiteboard.

Jake Simpson (20:08)
I'm right behind you.

Simon Cooke (20:12)
reason for that. but yeah the so what happened after that was after even more layoffs, I ended up going to Surreal. Now I had two choices at that point. I could have gone to and this is like December two thousand four. I had an offer on the table from Google and I had an offer on the table from Surreal. And Surreal managed to convince me that they had an amazing profit sharing plan. So I went with Surreal.

Now, that's the one that I like to call my thirty million dollar mistake. Yeah. Like Yeah. That was that was fine though because ultimately at Surreal I met my wife and I have a daughter who's eleven years old because of that. And if I hadn't gone to Surreal I wouldn't have had many of the most

Jake Simpson (20:45)
We will have one of those, don't we?

Simon Cooke (21:05)
amazing game dev experiences, like life experiences of my entire life because we crunched and we crunched really, really hard. And you know, those those experiences form friendships and relationships that just last forever. You know, there's nothing quite like being put through that crucible. I don't want to say anything crazy like it's like going to war with people because that would be ridiculous and

Jake Simpson (21:36)
But it is a stressful situation and and stress shared stress often results in, you know, in combined experiences, as it were.

Simon Cooke (21:44)
totally. Yeah. And there, we worked on let's see, we finished up suffering, ties that bind while I was there. The funny thing is I was in there for the interview and I've showed up because it's like, cool, game dev job. I want to go back to doing that. This should be awesome. And in the lobby I see this full size stand up cutout of TORK, his main character in the game. And it's like, The suffering. I'm like, No. Wait, these guys did the suffering? No. Because I hadn't figured out that

And I hadn't done my research. that Surreal had done the game, right? You know, so I'm having a complete fanboy moment as I walk in there. And it it was just absolutely amazing. But yeah, so we finished up the sequel, and that was a lot of long hours, had one of the most painful bug experiences I've ever had in my life, which is kind of crazy. like right as we're going back.

to shipping this thing, one of the D V D burners broke and was corrupting data. So yeah. So all of a sudden the bug count shoots up through the roof and it's all over the game and nobody can figure out quite why. Because these are systems that have been working fine. And everybody's crunching because we've got like that October release date. And this is maybe July, August, middle of the summer, when nobody in Seattle wants to be indoors because it's so

Dreary the rest of the year. So we're all piling into this and it's just going on and on because there's bugs appearing in systems that have been working fine forever, right? It's like this data's out of range. Okay, that's causing a crash. Okay, well we'll patch it up and we'll put asserts around it and blah blah blah and do all this stuff. And nobody could figure out why. And then I was like, god, okay. So I figured out that somebody had one of the producers had copied.

the data off one of the DVD builds back onto the server. For no good reason that I can think of, right? Because usually you want data to all flow the opposite direction. What happened was I did more experiments and I got copies of every build and I went up onto the server and did like hashes of all of the different builds and everything else. And I went through and analyzed every single one and I found out that one of the DVD burners on one of the servers

Jake Simpson (23:50)
Yeah, cool.

Simon Cooke (24:10)
Which had DVD burners in them just to make it easier to dump these things out, was broken and corrupted. And it had been churning out these coasters for a while now, and nobody had noticed it. And it caused this two-week long fire drill, right, as we're trying to ship the game. So then I just grabbed a huge big Sharpie, drew a big X, do not use over the front of this DVD burner, and

We rebuilt all all the content and then hey presto, the game is working again. After two weeks of people

Jake Simpson (24:46)
Everybody

goes to Disneyland, right?

Simon Cooke (24:48)
Yeah, pretty much. Although the funny thing is, for some reason at Surreal, I always ended up being the guy who right as we're doing a huge demo and everybody's been crunching for a while and they're being given a couple of days off to recover from that. I'm the guy who's on call when, you know, the demo's gonna happen. And then the moment they discover something's broken, I have to make my way into the office and fix everything and figure out what's going on. And then

trying to get the time back afterwards. It's like, No, no, no, that w that we were given those days off then, this is now at which point I'm like, Yeah, you know what? No, sorry, I'm I'm going home.

Jake Simpson (25:30)
I remember working on when her speaking of heretic too earlier on, I remember when we went gold. that day when when QA said, Yeah, you gone gold, it's great and I remember the the the core engineering team, it was probably about seven of us, went out to Old Chicago, which is a franchise bru pub that has like fifty different beers on it. and we proceeded to get really quite blasted. I mean, you know, you do green, you know, gold gold is a big celebration, right? So we went out and we just

Got loaded. And then the next day, I'm the only person who showed up because everybody else was so incredibly hungover. I mean I was too, but everyone I I showed up to work. And of course, QA had found a showstopper. And I'm the only person there. So I'm like, I mean, inf unfamiliar code. I don't know what I'm looking at. I'm like trying to figure it out. And in the end I did, they figured out what the problem was. and it was, you know, something desultory as all b all b bugs at the end of the day tend to be. I think it was brackets around a

macro. There weren't brackets around a macro. And so if you include that macro and then you do math on that, on the result of that macro, you change, you can materially change the order of of precedence of the macro. Right? So

Simon Cooke (26:45)
Yeah, 'cause it's not a function and people expect it to behave like a function. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (26:51)
Code replacement, it's just a text replacement, it's all it is. and so yeah, when we put brackets around it, everything worked again. I think that was what it was, I don't remember. But I remember being the only person in that day and and feeling like, Well, that just sucks, doesn't it? And I'm I'm hungover too. Everyone else is at home sleeping it off. I'm like, anyway. All right, so you're serial and and then

Simon Cooke (27:07)
Yeah.

Which of course Yeah, and then well actually Midway had already bought surreal when I got there. Okay. And so they they were already part of the family. And then we were

Jake Simpson (27:24)
question can I just interrupt you say can I ask question you were working with Palipo weren't you so power's ex-Ravan and he actually was speaking about Heretic2 he was the engineering lead on Heretic2 actually and I was I was the second him and that was an interesting because he's one of the few developers I've ever met who has the the the tweak gene.

In that he can take a non fun game, spend a weekend just tweaking the values and make it fun. I mean one of the only other people I've ever met that can do that is Mark Tremel on NBA Jam. NBA Jam, up until probably about a month before it was due to shit, was not fun at all. And then he spent a weekend just sitting, tweaking the numbers, and you come in on Monday morning and all of a sudden it's fun. And it was just wow, what happened? And and Pat Lippo has that capability too. So, you know, credit where credit is due. So yeah, sorry to interrupt you, keep going.

Simon Cooke (28:13)
Yeah, well funnily enough, Pat joined right after well, I guess he he must have joined right before the end of Suffering Ties That Bind because what we all moved on to next was this is Vegas.

Jake Simpson (28:27)
Right.

Simon Cooke (28:28)
And so the

same. Yeah, this is like right as the transitions going through console generations from Xbox One, PlayStation 2 to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The Wii hasn't quite come out yet. It would in another year or so. And so yeah, we're we're all looking at the existing engines that we're using for these games. And Midway as a whole makes this decision to put out

their next set of games on Unreal Engine three. And part of the reason for this is because originally they were going to buy Criterion and use their engine, but Wind of this got out and got covered in the gaming press and so on. Hey, Midway's gonna buy Criterion. So in swoops EA Yeah. Renderware. In swoops EA to buy out Criterion right out from under Midway. So they can't do that. And like

Up until this point, everybody's been using their own custom in house engines. So a decision got made to move the entirety of Midway over to Unreal Engine three, which at that point wasn't quite working. And because it's a brand new engine and it's meant for the three sixty and the Xbox and and the PlayStation three. And so, you know, this is all coming up and

It's new and exciting and everybody piles on board with about six or seven different games all meant to ship in the first couple of years on this thing. And unfortunately, one of the first problems that we ran into was this clocks on a shelf problem, which is like you've got all these grandfather clocks on a shelf and they've got these swinging pendulums, right? eventually what will happen is every single one of those clocks will synchronize.

So that all of their pendulums are moving perfectly in sync. And the reason this happens is like for physical things like Clarks is resonance. That shelf is going to vibrate and until all of the pendulums slow down and vibrate just enough so that they're all moving in lockstep. Right? And it's just crazy phenomenon, and you can try it for yourself. It's kind of cool. Now, in software development, what happens is

When you've got large numbers of teams all working on the same engine with all of these different services and subsystems that they're working on, everything basically synchronizes to the slowest thing that's gonna happen. So they had this like staggered. Yeah. So they had this staggered release plan where it's gonna be, yeah, Blitzer League is gonna come out here and Mortal Kombat's gonna come out here and like the Van Diesel game.

Jake Simpson (31:05)
Denominator.

Simon Cooke (31:18)
Wheelman is going to come out at this point and This is Vegas is going to come out and Area 51 Black Sight, I think, was the other one. and Stranglehold was probably the most successful game to actually manage to ship out that whole mess. probably down to Messes, Anakini and Elmore, the two Steves of Midway who've like now spun off to do this company disbelief that will optimize your games for you.

so yeah, all of this stuff comes together in one big lump and probably kill Midway. Because part of the problem was that right at the start, Unreal Engine three did not work on PlayStation three. And a big reason for that is because Playstation Three's architecture was basically a boat anchor around most developers' necks. It looked great on paper.

Jake Simpson (32:12)
The multi all the little V U units.

Simon Cooke (32:16)
Yeah, the the

Jake Simpson (32:19)
Views

well, they were called something else, weren't they?

Simon Cooke (32:21)
Yeah, cell up. Yeah. Yeah, it had this cell system, the emotion engine, or was that PS2? Anyway. so yeah, this clever it's basically DSPs in a ring, and they shove data in this pipeline that follows around the ring and then falls out the other side into memory. And it's if you can keep that thing pumped up and charged with data, it's a fantastic way to do all kinds of programming. but

Jake Simpson (32:23)
Yeah, so that's right.

Simon Cooke (32:48)
Xbox three sixty did something different. They just stuck a big fat GPU on it and more cores that were general purpose cores, and of course that's way easier to program for. So, you know. and the hardest part of the PlayStation 3 thing was that like a PC, where you've got graphics memory in your graphics card and graphics and regular memory that your CPU is using, the PlayStation 3 had a split memory architecture. So you had

Graphics memory and you had main memory and you had to copy stuff across the boundary and carefully manage where that memory was living. Otherwise, you know, you'd run out of space. So it effectively had like if you can do it the really clever way, you would just put all of that stuff in memory and just access it normally, and that's kind of what the Xbox let you do. And so moving to PlayStation.

Like if you're thinking about doing this the easy way, the first thing that anybody's gonna try to do when they try to bring this up is gonna use half as much memory for their games. Cause then they don't have to worry about the divide. They can just put a copy on the other side.

Jake Simpson (34:01)
Right. You're not managing necessarily you're duplicating.

Simon Cooke (34:03)
Yeah. So like all these technical challenges got in the way of actually doing

Jake Simpson (34:10)
Yeah, the target itself was a was a very specific target. It was and it handled things radically differently than the the Xbox did it, which was much easier. As you say, I remember those days. Yeah, I remember all of that.

Simon Cooke (34:21)
Yeah, that that was that was fun though. I loved those CPUs. Like the in order execution power PCs. If you knew what you were doing, you could optimize the hell out of those. You could do all kinds of fun stuff in assembly language and with intrinsics and prefetching things into memory so that you could really, really make that hardware sing that you couldn't really do on later CPU.

Jake Simpson (34:48)
Well, the thing the other thing I think that was for me was that this was a lot of engineers' first experience of multi core architecture. Really. the Xbox three sixty in particular, because there were three cores and so six threads, one of which I think was always eaten by the the Xbox

Simon Cooke (35:07)
Yeah,

one one was the system thread and

Jake Simpson (35:10)
Right. You still have five of them. Yeah, but you have four five others. You know, so you're getting into true multi-threaded environments here. Whereas before with the PlayStation Two, I'm not sure you'd really consider the two S the two vector units to be a separate, you know, they're separate cores, but they're not handled in the same way where they could you could put general purpose computing on them. And I think that that was a lot of a lot of the question. And the other thing about the vector units, of course, was that limited memory space, which meant that you couldn't just you know, you had to task the job in there with very limited memory.

both in and out, and then you had to pull the you know, DMA the memory out when you were done with the processing and in it was a bit of a pain in the ass to work with, very honest with you. But as you say, massive amounts of potential you could throughput if you knew what you were doing. But the trouble is that particular architecture comes much higher in the game engine than, you know, it's not just replacing a graphics API. It's completely changing how you render things in the first place.

Simon Cooke (36:02)
Totally. Yeah I mean th this is the equivalent of if you remember the old I think it was the N sixty four, it might have been the GameCube. But one of those two had a GPU that was completely different to anything else that was out there because it rendered everything as quadratic patches, I think. So like it was amazing because here's this GPU that thinks in curves. It does everything in curves. It doesn't touch a triangle anywhere. And then you realize that the rest of the world is moving in the direction of triangles.

Jake Simpson (36:31)
Polygons, yeah. Yeah. Quiet. Well, that's we live and learn. And you know, we're now at PlayStation five and Xbox Series X, I can't remember what the hell they're called. Simon, you used to work at Microsoft. Like who is making these decisions on naming? Can can we can we take them outside and shoot them? I mean, really.

Simon Cooke (36:55)
No. I mean so when the Xbox One came out, I was sitting in a conference room and watching the announce with everybody else. And this was the era of TV, TV, TV, TV, TV. But when they announced the name, there was kind of this moment where everybody's staring at each other going, d did we just do that? What am I gonna call the Xbox One now? Because the Xbox One is this one that came out before the three sixty. So n

Pretty much overnight everybody decided to start calling it the OG Xbox.

Jake Simpson (37:29)
okay.

Simon Cooke (37:32)
And it got renamed. But yeah, so yeah, we're skiffing ahead a bit. So it's okay. Let me quickly go from there. So I met my wife and we decided quite rightly that working with somebody because she was my programming producer. She wasn't originally, she was in QA when I first showed up. But eventually our relationships became mildly antagonistic.

Jake Simpson (37:38)
Sorry, I apologize.

Simon Cooke (38:00)
Have you ever come across this idea that different roles in game dev are meant to be slightly friction based? Yeah, because it was in

Jake Simpson (38:09)
Between production and engineering, yeah absolutely.

Simon Cooke (38:12)
Yeah, you might see.

Jake Simpson (38:14)
And engineering as well. Yeah.

Simon Cooke (38:17)
yeah, yeah. Because that friction is where good stuff happens. Like people

Jake Simpson (38:21)
It rises both of you. It r it rises makes both of you rise to to higher than you were, yeah. Agreed. Yeah.

Simon Cooke (38:27)
But it's it's terrible if you're in a relationship and that person's managing your schedule. So so yeah, I decided it was time to leave. I went to X ray Kids Studios, which was run by Jeff Matsuda and Brian Weiser and Mike Christian. And those guys had been working on Google's Google Lively project. And they'd been spun out by Google because Google had this thing where

Google rarely hires people who aren't engineers. So they want everybody to have that background. Of course, these guys are artists, right? Jeff Matt Suder designed a bunch of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes and characters. He designed Batman for Batman Beyond. Wow. If i if you look him up, he's got this huge background in comic books and design. He's worked for Warner Brothers in animation for years. And so, you know, Google doesn't hire that kind of person usually.

What they do is they contract them. And like many people in the software industry who are on contracts, there's a limited amount of time you can actually be on contract to a large company because of permit laws that came out in the nineties. So it was a whole bunch of lawsuits. So what happened was Google said, Well, we still need to work with you on this. Tell you what, we will fund you starting up your own company, which became X-ray Kid Studios.

And luckily they decided that they wanted me to come on board to be their director of engineering and also as it happens as time went on I became their biz dev guy. And there was this point where so 2008 the market collapsed and there was this huge recession, right? And like financial ruin, housing getting screwed up everywhere by the banks. And so what happens is

All of a sudden, y you can kind of tell when bad times are coming because all of a sudden, if you're doing any kind of contracting for people, or even if you're working inside of a company, all of a sudden people kind of retrench and pull back a bit and belts tighten and you can feel this happening, conversations get a little bit more difficult and so on. and so what happened was a bunch of the development work, we we were designing games for the HoloLens at that point. We didn't know it was a HoloLens.

At that point it was a little handheld AR device by the Zoom team. But eventually all of that stuff became HoloLens. Right? but we designed about 18 different video games for it. And then all of a sudden one day Microsoft turns up and says, Yeah, yeah, we're canceling this. And you know, it was pretty obvious that part of this was just everybody's trying to save money because the bottom has falled fallen out of the market. So

We decided to do a last ditch attempt to go and pitch games all around the industry that we could think of because we wanted to be a full game development company. And this was how we were gonna spin it all up. So I set up meetings with Ubisoft in San Francisco, with Warner Brothers. we had meetings with Namco. I think I tried WB. We had a meeting with Microsoft Game Studios.

Which was kind of interesting because we were pitching to them a couple of games. One of them was a fighting music game. And the response we got was something along the lines of, Well, music games are kind of done right now. Could it be a zombie game? And you know, could maybe you know, you target it as something else. And then another friend a couple of weeks later tried to pitch them a different game. They'd actually somehow figured out they could do a game with Kanye.

Like a music teaching and mixing game. And I think the same group said, Well, we like the idea, but could we do it with Snoop Dogg instead? Which is like that that's a bit weird, right? Cause you know, that you have Kanye. The whole thing is Kanye would like to do this and he's gonna fund part of this. So why why would we bring in Snoop? Nothing against Snoop. Anyway, so we ran out ran around this Fury trying to get this game called the ninety-nine

out and into the world. And we actually got a couple of nibbles from Ubisoft. Unfortunately, they want to see a tech demo. And by that time we're out of money. So I've been spending the last three months doing nothing but working on biz dev and setting up pitches and things like that. And I haven't had any time to do work on the engine. So at that point it was like, we had a couple of last sputters that happened. We even

I think we looked at doing a pitch for what became Project Spore. I think that was the name of it. The the Build Your Own Game game.

Jake Simpson (43:24)
We'll write we'll write you mean.

Simon Cooke (43:26)
no Which one was the Microsoft one that was kind of a I should know this, one of my current co co workers worked on it. Project Spark, maybe.

Jake Simpson (43:28)
All was the maximum.

I don't know. yeah, it it doesn't sound like anything I I remember but

Simon Cooke (43:44)
This was kind of a precursor to a called Kodu that was out in the Xbox Live Arcade thing. Anyway, we put a bid in on that and then the company crumbled. And so next thing that happens is I find myself going to work for Xbox is advanced technology group. So made my way into there and that was fun. I got to work on the launch of Connect. I

Did a lot of coding hacking stuff on the Skyrim Dragon Speech. To do that. And yeah. Xbox ATG is a fascinating place. Lots of really

Jake Simpson (44:25)
We should explain what it is, 'cause there's a lot of people listening who know who don't know what Xbox A G G what E T G even stands for, or what it does.

Simon Cooke (44:31)
Yeah. Okay. So the funny thing is, whoever looks at Xbox ATG, whether it's inside of Microsoft or outside, has a very different view on what it is and they rarely agree. but the basic idea is the Xbox event technology group are a group of developer advocates and technology specialists inside of Xbox. And their job is to research game development techniques.

and best practices that show off the best part of the Xbox hardware and then go out and teach game devs how to use those to make games run better on Xbox. And then while they're working with those game devs, they help them come up with new stuff and help them with the problems that they have writing Xbox stuff and feed that information back into the platform. And so this entire thing becomes a huge flywheel.

of education, research, and expertise, and it basically hoists up the quality level of Xbox games. Kind of improves the bar. And

Jake Simpson (45:37)
And and if I understand this correctly, it also provides a roadmap for next iterations of the hardware.

Simon Cooke (45:46)
Exactly. So one of the things that we can do is we can say, Hey, it's quite clear that devs are having problems with this, this, and this. it'd be great if the next version of the hardware was beefier, had more capabilities in these areas and so on. And also

Jake Simpson (46:01)
I generate APIs as well in terms of like, you know, but they need help in this area. Everyone's trying to do it themselves and it doesn't really work it'd be really helpful if we had an API that did this shit for them.

Simon Cooke (46:12)
Yeah, exactly. And like some people would just look at ATG as being the voice of the developer, which isn't entirely true. They they're kinda this motor that just sits in the middle of all of this and works on both sides of the equation. And there's really nothing like it anywhere else in the industry. These days I'm at Google working on Android. but the like elsewhere, other places they might have

pieces of it, but those pieces tend to be split out in lots of different places.

Jake Simpson (46:45)
Well mean that's partly as well though. Partly the because of the fact that they're a hardware manufacturer as well as a software manufacturer though. The only other people who really could do this, possibly is Nintendo, which is unlikely, or Sony. And Sony has a version of ATG. I mean I think Yes but Byr Byron and Jamie J Jamin works

Simon Cooke (46:59)
Yeah, they have their iC.

Yeah, Jamin and Byron both work over in ICE and that came out of Naughty Dog, from what I remember. Right, yeah. Like Sony bought Naughty Dog and then built their ICE team into like this hardware advanced team that do all kinds of cool stuff, who are really the opposite number of the Xbox AD.

Jake Simpson (47:29)
But ACG is well known. I mean I certainly have used you many times. it's a well known resource. And and you get to to talk to actual people who know what the the the back end of the API looks like and how to use it. It's a very, very, very helpful, helpful group. Although, as you say, internally it gets looked at as a bit like the redheaded stepchild of

Simon Cooke (47:51)
Well that's that's the funny thing, right? Is that if you look on paper, ATG is a cost center and always has been kind of a cost center, right? It's like it does it produce anything? kind of. It produces bits of tech here and there that get put into stuff like auto HDR mode.

Jake Simpson (48:08)
And it and it produces better

But it gets it produces better games, but it's much more harder to quantify. You can't metr metricise that, you know.

Simon Cooke (48:16)
Yeah, i i getting those KPIs that everybody loves to actually show the impact in terms of raw dollars of a group like ATG is really, really difficult. Even though, in my opinion, they're kind of essential. Right.

Jake Simpson (48:31)
Yeah, I I absolutely agree with that. Having been on the receiving end of needing it. Absolutely. we should talk a we should mention X Fest.

Simon Cooke (48:42)
Yes. X fest. I got I I ran that conference for about five years, I think. Maybe six.

Jake Simpson (48:50)
We should explain what X Fest content has

is is besides if you're not developer, you know, you people would never have heard of it.

Simon Cooke (48:57)
Yeah, so X Fest is a conference that is for a long time it was and still is viewed as the premier game development technology conference in the world. So basic there's nothing quite as meaty as the content that you would get from X Fest. It's all like people in the trenches telling you really, really juicy technical information.

That you can use directly that day.

Jake Simpson (49:29)
It's not it's not abstract stuff like G D C often tends to be. This actually gives you numbers and and code, snippets and samples and all that kind of stuff, yeah.

Simon Cooke (49:37)
Yeah, and often at breakneck pace. the logistics were handled by over the years two people, Clint Woon and Carly Jane, and both of whom were absolutely awesome at what they were doing. And you know, but for me, my goal was make sure I understood the audience, make sure that I understood the stuff that we needed to tell them, make sure that I knew what they needed to know, and make sure that we can ramp them from a one one level to four one.

within the course of a single talk, every single time. And like this is one of the things that gets really, really

Jake Simpson (50:13)
What did you do with your other hand? No, actually don't answer that.

Simon Cooke (50:21)
Yeah. So like th this is one of those things that like it it looks easy on the day, but it takes about three months to do a good conference.

Jake Simpson (50:30)
I just have to echo that. my wife actually does these conferences for Venture Beat right now and yes, and she before that she did Casual Connect for five or six years. I am yeah in awe of the organizational ability of people like that because there's so much more that goes on behind the scenes than is apparent on the day, you know?

Simon Cooke (50:48)
Totally. Yeah, it it's it's rough and something always goes wrong. And like I I liken it to you c you could do it as a mechanical kind of really stretcher and organized process, but in reality, jazz is probably the best metaphor for it. If it's working well, it's jazz. It's loose because it has to be loose. If it's too tightly wound, then things start to break down and you lose the ability to fix things on the fly.

And the reality with all of these conferences, you could do it in two weeks. You could do a huge and like X Fest was like fifty-eight talks over the course of three days, which isn't bad for something that just a group at Microsoft is doing. I think I had a hundred and fifteen or so people reporting into me for that at one point. Yeah. But it was fun. And like this was only like part of my day job. So, you know, part of the year was do X Fest and the rest of the year was do everything else.

Jake Simpson (51:36)
Fire.

well, when you say it was fun, I remember running into you in London when you just flown in to run X Flex over the street. And I remember you being jet lagged and well we we were in some pub, weren't we? it was it was a some pub that was just frequented by comedians, I think, or something. I don't remember what it was. But it's right around the corner from where you were staying. And I just remember looking at you thinking, Christ, you're gonna run a conference in a couple of days and you are washed out, exhausted, tired, jet lagged and yeah, here you are drinking Stella with me, you know.

Simon Cooke (52:17)
But that that's the trick with the first night, right? Is you've got to get hammered the first night. Like some people use melatonin, but the most reliable way to get over jet lag that airline pilots have used for decades is get smashed and then sleep and you will wake up in the time zone that you're in.

Jake Simpson (52:36)
I mean, you know what? Who cares really whether it works or not? I mean it's just a good thing to do. Yeah, right. Well, yeah. On the other hand, at my age, yeah, starting to start to lose that, I think. 'cause it the the recovery time just gets longer and longer and longer. I can still go out and yuck it up just like the best of them with the best of them. It's just that now the entire next day is now completely dead and some of the day after is also dead. And it used to be if you do this all night, get up a midday the next day and do it all again. Yeah.

Simon Cooke (53:00)
Yeah.

I have tricks to get around some of that. Like once upon a time the the internet was ringing with the hangover cures I came up with and I've refined them since. Like it used to be all this thing about have coconut water and eat eggs and bacon the next day because of the neurotransmitter precursors and B vitamins and all this. And then over the years I boiled it down to drink mineral water while you're getting drunk. Like alternate.

And have some before you go to bed. And then before you go to bed, take one Zertec, one B one pill, so thiamine, and a magnesium pill, so magnesium oxide, something like that. Just a little low dose one, you find them in the grocery store. And then the next morning you take the B one and the magnesium again and have some eye drops on you to put in your eyes the next day. And that will pretty much do it for most people.

Jake Simpson (54:04)
Making

he's making hand signals again.

Well there you have it, folks.

Simon Cooke (54:10)
those of you watching at home in colour,

Jake Simpson (54:14)
have been watching. yeah, it's so there you go, folks. An actual hangover to cure. who knows if it works. I know Simon, I'm believ prepared to believe actually the science behind it. So yeah. all right, so it's been an hour. So we're gonna have to to sort of cut it off at that point. But I just want to say thank you very much for spending the time to talk to me. It's been very great. you know, again I've known you for so long, it's it's funny covering over some of the stuff we already know, but it's it I always hear stories that I haven't heard before, which is even better. So

Simon Cooke (54:44)
Absolutely my pleasure.

Jake Simpson (54:45)
Yeah, it's great. I appreciate it. Thank you very much and good luck with with all the future stuff at Google.