Jake Simpson (00:00)
my good friend Tom Forsyth, who has an interesting career in graphics and all sorts of other exciting stuff. And for I don't know how many years, I don't even want to think.

Tom Forsyth (00:11)
Thirty I I checked the other day, I've been a professional programmer for thirty six years.

Jake Simpson (00:17)
You can do you know what blows my mind though is I mean, how long have you been in the States now?

Tom Forsyth (00:23)
seventeen years.

Jake Simpson (00:24)
Okay, so seventeen years it's been in States and and I knew you before then. But I can hear the twang in your voice now. I can hear it. And that's disturbing because I've been here thirty years and I'm wondering do I have a twang in mind?

Tom Forsyth (00:38)
You mean a an American twang? Yeah, yeah. You you've softened a little bit over the years. You got a you got a couple of American co vowels in there, yep. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (00:40)
Yeah, it's the

You the wife makes me laugh. We were watching a video that we made of our walking around our apartment that we used to live in Chicago and and she's like, Who's that talking? That's me she goes, it just doesn't sound like you at all. Yes it does. No, no it doesn't. Yes it does. It's a ridiculous weird. She couldn't even tell my voice. Still, what can you do?

Tom Forsyth (00:56)
I'm like

You've also got Porsche. So so even when you're speaking English and not American, you're Porsche than it used to be. Yes. Really? Yeah, you're more you're more London. You're more like North London and less c sort of, you know.

Jake Simpson (01:23)
What in mate? What? Yeah,

nothing. My my wife says that half an hour after we touch down in England, like as soon as we touch down in England, I'm my accent becomes impenetrable. But all of a sudden I'm surrounded by other British people, and it's all like, you know, you're all witches and flutes and all that. And she says it takes me half an hour to settle down again because all of a sudden I'm surrounded by and it's weird when you come across other Brits again in America.

Tom Forsyth (01:41)
Exactly.

Jake Simpson (01:49)
Sometimes they start using terminology you haven't heard in years. And you suddenly sort of click back into, yeah, right, yeah. He's a complete jaffer, anyway. He's got no seeds, et cetera, et cetera. And you just don't hear a lot of that terminology over here. So yeah, anyway. I remember before Fortnite became a thing here, Fortnite was an impenetrable British word as well. People would say to What does Fortnite mean? And I realised after a while that I could say anything I wanted.

Tom Forsyth (02:12)
That's right. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (02:15)
it'll be done in a fortnight. People in America in in meetings would never challenge me on it and go, What does that mean? They'd always ask me afterwards and I'd be like, okay. Anyway. Okay, so Tom Forsythe, let's talk about you. So you're you're a chip designer now at Intel, is that right?

Tom Forsyth (02:29)
Yeah, graphics graphics cool.

Jake Simpson (02:31)
Right. But that's not where you started, is it?

Tom Forsyth (02:35)
No, no. Well, almost. No. No. No, no, I was never at Power VR. I was at three I was at three D Labs.

Jake Simpson (02:39)
L VL, right?

That's it, three dips. Sorry, that's the other one that's yeah, right, okay.

Tom Forsyth (02:47)
Right. No, no. I d I didn't start there. If you wanna if you're gonna go all the way

Jake Simpson (02:52)
Yeah, let's start at the very beginning. It's a very good place to

Tom Forsyth (02:55)
So my actual well, I started on the ZX Spectrum, the age of nine or ten, I forget which.

Jake Simpson (03:02)
Or it's also a Commodore, people called it the Sinclair Reptum.

Tom Forsyth (03:06)
It it was it was a a cheap computer and that was the good bit about it. It worked. I I begged my parents for this this color computer that was ninety nine quid. And yeah, that's good. got me into that programming thing. And

Jake Simpson (03:26)
Or did you adjust were you just using basic at the time?

Tom Forsyth (03:29)
God no, I I wrote basic for ages. I didn't even I didn't even know there was a thing that was faster than basic. Like I I didn't know basic was slow.

Jake Simpson (03:39)
Right, yes.

Tom Forsyth (03:40)
Didn't know anything. I was I was ten, right? This is how you program computers. You write basic. If it's too slow, well that's your problem, mate. And and it was it was only right at the end of Specy ownership that I discovered that assembly was a thing and learned how to do Z eighty. Fuck, fuck. Z eighty.

Jake Simpson (03:59)
There you go, see? There.

Tom Forsyth (04:02)
Z eighty yep. So I I did that for about six months and then I switched to the next one which was a QL which was terrible.

Jake Simpson (04:10)
sixty eight hundred. Sixty eight thousand it was the six sixty eight thousand with all the with the legs calve, right? Yes. Yeah. But it had all the sixteen bit, it was only a eight bit address bus because it had all the sixteen bit address card

Tom Forsyth (04:12)
No no no six.

Yeah.

Yeah,

in in internally and as far as programming it was a sixty eight thousand, it was just slower. and you've got it now.

Jake Simpson (04:30)
Yes, I do. And it has the infamous dongle on the back. Yeah. For those of you most of you listening to this probably won't remember this. When the original box came out, in order to make it hit at the time, they couldn't fit all of the guts into the actual box. So they actually released it with a little dongle that hung on the back of it. And those are you know, you're supposed to send it in to be replaced, Tom. You never did. You're supposed

Tom Forsyth (04:50)
I never bothered. I never bothered. It was fine and I didn't want to do without it. Thing worked. No, I don't want to send it in.

Jake Simpson (04:58)
built in it was one of the first con first computers that had built in software, didn't it? Have a built in spreadsheet and a built in word processor.

Tom Forsyth (05:04)
They weren't no, they weren't built in. They were they came on microdrives.

Jake Simpson (05:08)
right, yes. But you got free though, with the with the de with the box. Yeah. I have the built in micro drives, I

Tom Forsyth (05:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because Clive Sinclair believed this was a really good business computer. And he well, he believed that about the spectrum as well, and he hated people making bloody games on it. Yeah, it well exactly. And and the QL was I dunno, it was it was not one of his better machines. It was fine. But

Jake Simpson (05:27)
Sounds Steve Jobs.

Quantum heap as as a lot of people called it. I remember the keyboard being a bit bit tacky, but

Tom Forsyth (05:42)
It was it was super cheap. Yeah. Hey, I you know, I did a lot of my school work on it and it worked fine for that. So

Jake Simpson (05:48)
I did a lot of my college work on a Commodore sixty four, so yeah, I d a dot matrix printer and, you know, crappy works. So yeah, I'm I'm with ya. I did

Tom Forsyth (05:56)
But but then a friend showed me the the S the Atari S T and I was like, Well shit, gotta get this then, don't I? The Gold Gold Runner on the Atari S T I was like, Holy shit, I have never seen anything this awesome. I guess I need to buy one of these. So did. That was when I was a teenager, yeah.

Jake Simpson (06:13)
Yeah, I remember. I was an Amiga guy myself, but the I always respected the ST. I mean it's really weird that the Amiga Lorraine was released as a Commodore machine, but the Atari ST was developed by the Commodore sixty four team and was intended to be a Commodore machine and wasn't. And then the Amiga was supposed was developed by the the guys who did the Atari four hundred, eight hundred, J Minor and his group, and then that became a Commodore machine. It was all very weird.

Tom Forsyth (06:40)
Well the the the Amiga Company, J minor and that one were originally financed by Atari. Yeah. And they went so gratuitously over time that Atari refused to keep paying them because they, you know, they slipped by like two years or something ridiculous. And so Atari were like, What the fuck, guys? Where's the chipset? And so they went to Commodore and Commodore said, yeah, we'll pay you. you're almost done, aren't you? so so at the very last minute

All this amiga chipset goodness suddenly buggered off to Commodore and Atari ha had already booked all the factories and stuff. And so they had to design the ST in about six months flat. So it worked.

Jake Simpson (07:24)
It was, it was a nice machine. Didn't have any of the blitter chips or the Porsche or the co processor or the copper or anything like that, but it was still a very, very sweet machine.

Tom Forsyth (07:31)
Well

'cause 'cause fucking minor buggered off of them, didn't he? Sold them to Commodore. So anyway. Well shenanigans, man.

Jake Simpson (07:39)
Art

director partner that I had at Midway for a while, Jack Hager, was the original artist that the art program on the Amiga was written for. He was part of the Amiga team. I remember him telling me about how scared he was the day that they all got served notice. They all got sued by Atari. Atari couldn't sue the company, so they sued each individual in the company instead. He said coming out of his apartment in in where he was in California, he's like he got you know served, and he was like everyone went into work, look clutching their papers, looking at each other, going, shit, what happens now?

I never went anywhere, but it was just one of those like scary moments in life. Their signatures are all in the bottom of the keyboard. Do you that? If you take the Atari the Amiga one thousand apart, take the keyboard apart, because it's a separate keyboard, take it apart, their signatures are actually embossed in the bottom of the of the keyboard keybox. Yeah. Yep, yep. Which I have one of those, so yeah. And I have an Amiga two thousand as well. Anyway, okay. So off we go. You're here we are. Young spotty Tom is is loving his Atari, then what?

Tom Forsyth (08:35)
Then between between school and university I took a gap year. And I went and worked for microprose for six months. That was interesting. And that was my first taste of using an actual dev kit. So I you know, I was programming on a PC and dumping it down to an Amiga as a target machine. I'd never done that before, rather than always

Jake Simpson (08:58)
What was the what was the system? Wasn't PDS, was it?

Tom Forsyth (09:01)
No I was I was trying to remember what system I was using at the time but I can't know.

Jake Simpson (09:06)
Really

good one called PDS by Fu Katan and I forgot his name.

Tom Forsyth (09:12)
yeah. Doesn't ring any bells. It was it was fine and and it was an okay job. I I was writing a like a slideshow to show off the the idea was it would be a separate floppy, it'd ship with every Amiga game and you'd put the floppy in and it'd show you slideshows of other microprose games. Yeah, just advertising. So the job itself was kinda boring, but I got to work in the same office as

Jake Simpson (09:31)
Yeah, advertising.

Tom Forsyth (09:40)
Scott and Adrian who wrote a bunch of the flight sims. Mm-hmm. And so that was good. So, you know, I looked over their shoulder and learned how to do, you know, three D and BSPs and things like that. So that was good. And then I went to university and Where'd you go? Cambridge.

Jake Simpson (09:56)
Course you did. Course you bloody did. Some of us went to Hatfield, you know, and liked it. Right, yeah.

Tom Forsyth (10:03)
there you go.

The degree was ancient, it was like seventies tech. one was a wife, so that was that was useful as well. Yeah. There I have and also a bunch of friends who would later prove useful. So came out of university with a degree. I also worked summer jobs for Sega.

Jake Simpson (10:20)
Quite useful to help the moment.

Tom Forsyth (10:32)
So I w I worked there during while the Saturn the thirty two X were being launched.

Jake Simpson (10:38)
You know, I swear that I came across you. I went to a Sega development conference when I was still at Midway because we were looking at using the Sega technology for some reason, I can't remember why. And it was in San Jose, I think. There was somebody arguing. I remember I th I'm swear it was you on the stage and somebody started arguing with you about the best way the hardware implemented something. And I remember somebody at the at the end going, You y I swear it was you going, Well, y we can argue what you like, but that's what the hardware does and

So this guy just wouldn't sit down and shut up. And I swear it was you. I swear.

Tom Forsyth (11:11)
It probably was. So I worked mainly on the on the Mars, the thirty-two X. This is what it was. Which was a really nice little bit of kit. It was like the s the satin with all the stupid shit thrown away. And I did a lot of weird timings. Like that that little SH SH two it was, the Hitachi CPU, that was really weird. Had some weird characteristics. But I sort of figured them out. And so they got me up on stage doing some coding and showing like 'cause you could do

You know, one multiply would take three clocks, but then if you did another multiplier directly after it, that would only take two. It's very weird. So you got two multiplies in five clocks. How does that work? I don't know. It does. It just does. I just documented it and said this is how it works and that was probably that argument like

Jake Simpson (11:58)
It was about memory, tr memory and fast memory and slow memory or something, I swear.

Tom Forsyth (12:03)
Anyway, yeah, so that was kind of fun. that was that was sort of summer jobs for Sega.

Jake Simpson (12:08)
That was the first place that that conference actually funny enough was the first place I encountered Dave Taylor. He was running around with a Doom t shirt on a Doom knitted Doom sweater as well. Anyway, sorry, yes.

Tom Forsyth (12:19)
Then then I started my own games company after leaving university. 'cause I had a wife who wa had a regular income and I thought, you know, at some point I'll wanna start a company so I might as well do it now and I've got no debts or anything like that. Okay, yeah. so we did that for two years and like got dicked around a lot. We did like eight projects in two years 'cause they kept, you know, giving us some seed money and cancelling and giving us some seed money.

Jake Simpson (12:35)
Yeah.

Tom Forsyth (12:48)
So that was very frustrating. So after two years we had a grand profit of like fifty three pounds. And so I said, Yeah, fuck this, I don't want to do this anymore. and so I learned I learned one good thing, which is I never want to run a company or be a boss. And then I got a job at 3D Labs, got a proper job, writing DirectX drivers for, you know, graphics cards. And I got a little bit of hardware design there as well. And actually I met a very nice man.

called Nick Murphy, who was chief architect on the chip I was writing drivers for. And he was a very nice man and taught me lots of interesting things about hardware and how it was different from software. And as it happened completely different. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (13:31)
Well it's hard.

It's hard to get it it is. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Forsyth (13:38)
And as it happens, I am now working with Nick on this chip. Right now She's very, very surreal. We're we're back working on graphics hardware again. Except now I'm a hardware guy, not a software guy. So I did that for two years and like it was a good job and nice people and had a good mon manager and stuff. But there's only so many times you can look at the same ten thousand lines of code.

Jake Simpson (13:44)
Very circular, huh?

Tom Forsyth (14:05)
and extract, you know, one clock cycle here and there from it. And so two years was like, do something else. And as it happens, a bunch of friends from university were working at a games company called Muckyfoot in Guildford. And they said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, come along. So I joined them. The Guildford Mafia.

Jake Simpson (14:23)
Guilford Mafia.

Yeah. There's a number of game companies around Guildford, weren't there?

Tom Forsyth (14:28)
There

were a lot of So yeah, I joined just as Urban Chaos was shipping on the PC. And then I while the rest of the company worked on another game, I ported Urban Chaos to the Dreamcast, which was a lovely, lovely little console. Really elegant, beautiful little thing. And shipped that. That was j good. That was just me and a tester called Carl. Just nine months. You know, started with the PC source.

I had to trim it down quite a lot 'cause it didn't fit in the console, of course. yeah, shipped it. It's good. so that was my first proper shipped, published game, you know. Proper game dev, get the badge and the T shirt. There you go. That was good. And then then I joined the Startopia team for the last nine months of it.

Jake Simpson (15:18)
talk Startopia 'cause I mean I've it's a personal favourite of mine actually, I've got to say. I've always wanted to to write my own sort of s space station simulator. And I mean that's what it was really, wasn't it? It's a

Tom Forsyth (15:30)
No, no, no. No, it was nothing to do with space station. Come on. No, it was theme hospital. It was theme hospital in it was theme hospital in a space station. And from the start, like 'cause we had one of the Muckyfoot directors was a guy called Gary Carr, who I'm sure lots of people know. But you know, he were look like all four of the Muckyfoot directors were ex bullfrog, right? And so

Jake Simpson (15:34)
Was?

Tom Forsyth (15:59)
Gary and I think one of the others had worked on theme hospital. And so they were like, let's just do theme hospital again. We really enjoyed working on theme hospital. Everybody loves theme hospital. Let's do theme hospital again. We'll just put it somewhere else. And Guy Simmons, one of the other directors, was leading that and he said, Let's put it on space. So we put it on a space station. And I I say we, I wasn't, you know, part of the early game design or anything, but but that's what it was. And and we all like

Whenever you're in doubt about like how should a system work, it's well go play theme hospital and find out. So no, that was that was really fun to work on and lots of weird little things and there was lots of jokes in the thing and

Jake Simpson (16:42)
There was a sense of humor, that's for sure. And and the the fact that you could zoom out as far as you could as well, which was that was an unheard of thing. That was fairly new at the time as well.

Tom Forsyth (16:51)
You could zoom all the way out and you could just see the space station from the outside and that was really immersive. It was all fake to hell, of course. Like all the graphics was utterly fake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it looked really cool, so yeah, that's nice. The the better the my favorite thing about it was so it was, you know, it was set on a on a donut space station, right? So the floor was curved because the space station was round. But but the actual game didn't know that.

Jake Simpson (17:00)
Like video games are

Tom Forsyth (17:20)
Far as the game was concerned, the world was flat and just the ends happened to join each other. Only the graphic system knew that the world was curved, and so we'd curve it. And so we had you know, bent space and unbent space, and we're constantly getting the units wrong and so on. But the best thing was like when when you get combat and people had shoot at each other with lasers, so the lasers travel in a straight line in bent space.

Which meant that when they were rendered all these lasers are going in curves.

Jake Simpson (17:53)
As you do.

Tom Forsyth (17:59)
At short range you didn't notice, but when w at long range you see these things going whe like what? How is that doing that? d don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (18:12)
Yeah, who cares? It's all fun. I remember it being a great game and I remember enjoying the hell out of it. Yeah. And I

Tom Forsyth (18:17)
I still replay it every now and again, yeah. But did a couple of patches for it later and stuff.

Jake Simpson (18:20)
Right.

Yeah, there's a ZenX spectrum mode, I believe.

Tom Forsyth (18:27)
There is and I put that in, yep.

Jake Simpson (18:29)
so patches the colours so that you're individual ca blocks of eight by eight characters and

Tom Forsyth (18:34)
That's right. That's right. Only two two colours in an eight by eight and I did the the bright bit and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. No, it's pretty fun.

Jake Simpson (18:42)
Necessary, let's face it. I mean, why why would you spend time doing that?

Tom Forsyth (18:46)
I it took me like four hours and I was like, Good done, right.

Jake Simpson (18:50)
I just don't understand why I said in the first place, but all right. Okay.

Tom Forsyth (18:54)
There was there was lots of really stupid little things in there that we did just just just kiss larking around and yeah.

Jake Simpson (19:02)
Now yeah, there's a story, I think it's Matthew, who tells the story of a contract. The apocryphal story of the contract that that Mucky Foot had. I don't remember who was who published Telto.

Tom Forsyth (19:13)
Yeah. I think that was Iidos.

Jake Simpson (19:16)
There was a there's a apocryphal story about you guys having a contract and and you s this was prior to the time of of Word and you know review mode in Word where you could track changes. Mm-hmm. Apparently somebody inserted the words banana, banana, banana inside of one big clause just to see if anybody on the other side would ever pick it up, and nobody ever did, apparently.

Tom Forsyth (19:37)
That is completely true. and I believe it was Disky, I I I believe it was Mike Disquette inserted banana banana banana in in one very boring clause. And they went back and forth in the negotiations and they were taking ages and just going on and on and on. Finally they got to an agreement and they're about to sign it. And Disky's like, Ooh shit, hang on. Flip flip flip flip. yeah, just one small thing.

Jake Simpson (20:04)
All right, no, I can sell it.

Tom Forsyth (20:07)
Yeah.

Jake Simpson (20:07)
get away with that kind of stuff these days, can you? Right, so Startopia, then then comes

Tom Forsyth (20:20)
So we signed it. We had we had two new consoles, PS two and Xbox. We'd never done anything on either. We had like eighteen months start to finish and we had to ship the day the film shipped. So we could not move that. So we knew up front it wouldn't be a great game, but we'd get it done.

But everything was so time constrained. The PS two was being a nightmare to code for. We had three guys working on the PS2. The Xbox was fine. I I did that. And so did Mark Rose help me out with that as well. But the PS two was just being a pain in the ass. It was okay. You know, it's a competent movie tie-in. It's fine.

Jake Simpson (21:05)
There's stories there. I w I wanna explore some of these stories because there are stories. yeah. the the AI story.

Tom Forsyth (21:11)
well the the AI is yeah. So it's Blade, right? You run into you know a building, beat some guys up, you run to the next place, you shoot some guys, you know, you you wander through buildings murdering vampires. As you do. But Disky Disky was like, These guys are really dumb. I wanna put some smart AI in. So the the whole point of the game was that you could fight multiple people at once. It it was it was your favorite game, Robotron, right? We stole

Jake Simpson (21:24)
I should do.

Tom Forsyth (21:40)
the controls from Robotron. So you moved with one stick and the and and the direction you moved the other stick in, that's the direction you punched. And the whole idea was that you could get surrounded by hordes of hordes of of enemies. We wanted like thirty vampires on the screen. And you could just beat them all up. And so so he put in this thing where he put in this AI thing where if you beat up a vampire enough and he was like low on health, he'd run and get a mate.

and and bring his mates to help him. And the idea was you'd see him doing that and go, no, you don't and like, you know, shoot him in the back of the head or something like that to stop him. What actually happened was you'd walk into the f in the front door of the building or whatever, five guys at attack, you go, bam, bam, bam, you know, beating up all five one at once. And then one of would run away and you wouldn't really know why, but you'd beat up the other four. And then a couple more vampires would come into the room 'cause he's he's buggered off and pulled them in, right?

And then you keep beating them all up. And then one of them would run away and you wouldn't really know why. But y you just keep beating these guys up. And then a few he'd bring in a few more. And this would go on for hours. And you could literally spend like twenty minutes in this first room beating up these vampires. And eventually you'd run out of I thought, fuck, that was twenty minutes of fighting just okay. And then you go, Where is everyone? You've emptied the entire level of every vampire. And so you just wander through this empty building and we're like

Jake Simpson (23:02)
Happened.

What?

Tom Forsyth (23:11)
And we finally figured out it's because of this bloody AI. And so Disky's like, yeah, well, I'll threw that away. Nobody wants smart AI. They want fun AI. Two very different things.

Jake Simpson (23:24)
That's a great story. That's a great story though. It's a great story of unintended consequence.

Tom Forsyth (23:29)
Unintended

consequences and we couldn't figure out like what is going on. Finally figured it out. So

Jake Simpson (23:35)
Well if you had spawn closets as as you know, we got into in Doom and Quake and all this but spawn closets gets around that. And you have to in those because they couldn't have the they didn't have the processing power to run thirty bad guys at the same time, so

Tom Forsyth (23:49)
Right. Well we had a portal system, so if you weren't in the right portal the the bad guys just stood there, so we didn't have that problem. I don't we had a few monster closets and they were kind of shit, so we tried not to. Right. I say we, I didn't do any of the game design, I was just a graphics person. There's a couple more stor good stories. One of the problems with with Blade, so the film starred Wesley Snipes, right? Yeah. But he'd only signed the license for the film, not the game. So the game

couldn't have Wesley Snipes in it. Even though it's about Blade. And the only person that's ever played Blade is Wesley Snipes. So we had to have a guy that our Blade in the game had to look like Blade, but not Blade Wesley Snipes. And this drove people nuts. They were going back and forth and back and forth. So they'd do a character and they go like, no, he doesn't look enough like Blade. So they do another one. No, he looks too much like Wesley Snipes. Like

Jake Simpson (24:34)
Okay.

Tom Forsyth (24:46)
Who the hell like someone at, you know, the licensing department was was making this judgment call and all we'd get was like a yes or a no back. It drove the artists absolutely batshit. Anyway, we eventually got this this this character working fine.

Jake Simpson (25:03)
EA has a has an interesting story about James Bond in that rat realm. In that in that when they were doing the one of their Bond games, they could not they didn't have the licenses for the actual individual bonds bonds themselves. So what they did was they took every one of these six or five or whatever is blonde bonds at the time, they stuck them in a blender and blended them all together and came up with an amalgamation of all of the faces together. If you blend all these for all, you know, five bonds together, this is what he looks like. That's what they put in the game.

Tom Forsyth (25:33)
The other the other big problem with Blade was so, you know, we we'd watch the films and the films are really dark and moody, right? Yeah. And and they're really really bright contrasting colours, right? You've got Blade, he's you know, Wesley Snipes is a really dark guy. He's got black hair, he's wearing jet black leather, and his weapons are all like silver or black. And so he's hanging around with vampires, you know, who famously don't like sunlight. Mm-hmm.

And so in the film it's all just, you know, flashing bright colours and so if you do that in the game, which we did, you can't see what the hell's going on. You can't control them. You don't know you can't see like you know, this isn't PS2, right? We don't have fancy colours, they're all like mushy crab. And so we just had to add a ton of basically disco lights everywhere. So they're you know, like there's a sewer level.

And this sewer level has the best lighting you have ever seen in a sewer, like floodlights everywhere and blue mood lights and red warning lights. It's just the most brightly lit, you know, underground lair ever. It just and it just looks sort of goofy. But you could at least see what you're doing. Well, so after that we did we did a bunch of you know, pitches at various people, and we did a bunch we started a bunch of games, we did

Jake Simpson (26:44)
All right, so I'll

Tom Forsyth (26:55)
Constantine, what else? There's an airships pirate game and Bulletproof Monk and all this sort of stuff. And we just couldn't get a deal to stick. They kept getting canned. Finally the publisher, I forget which publisher it was. I wish I could, because I'd fucking name and shame them. But they just yanked the plug. They just said, No, we're withholding all payment until you do, you know, X impossible thing. And so the director's like,

Sorry lads, we can't keep the studio open. And they were very square with us. You know, they said, Yeah, sorry. We could drag you on and we could not pay you, but no, we're just close up shot. We're in Guildford, plenty of other jobs in Guildford. Go get And they they wound it up and fair play to them, but you know, that's the life of a pu of an indie. Yeah that

Jake Simpson (27:44)
It's nomadic. There's a certain nomadic nomadic aspect to making good video games for it for another company, yeah.

Tom Forsyth (27:50)
yeah, so that was what was that, four, five years, something like that?

Jake Simpson (27:55)
Good line, good run though, in those days.

Tom Forsyth (27:57)
Did fine, yeah. And then and then the fucking publisher pinged a few of us and said, hey would you like to come back on consulting fees to finish this game? And we're like, that is the mol most insulting thing I have ever heard, mate. And for some reason they thought we wouldn't be talking to each other anyway. We managed to outbid each other on the on the So we got the hourly rates up to ridiculous things. Meanwhile

Jake Simpson (28:22)
No.

Tom Forsyth (28:25)
course we're all we've all got jobs elsewhere, so it's not gonna happen anyway. But we were just like, all right, I'm gonna pitch, you know, five hundred bucks an hour. All right, I'll pitch six hundred. We just drove up this insane bidding scale and then finally just went, Nah, we're we've all got jobs elsewhere, bye. So then I came to the US and worked at a place called Rad Game Tools. I did granny animation middleware for two years, which I thought

Jake Simpson (28:35)
Yeah.

Tom Forsyth (28:54)
You know, whatever, it's a job, the pay's really good, but it's gonna be shit, isn't it? Actually it was fantastic. Like Rad is this wonderful tiny, tiny studio. I don't know. Yeah. Group of people. And I I still remember that time. It's one of the best times of my career. You know, there was one developer per project. Jeff the boss was was fantastic and I really enjoyed it.

It was weird. I really, really enjoyed my time working on Granny. but then at some point Intel came along and said, Hey, we'd like to build this group of small, simple cores on a chip. And it didn't have a name at the time. And Mike Abrach and Mike Sartan were working on it. And they they wanted a Direct X expert. And I was the Direct X expert in the in the building. So they wrote me into this thing and said, you know, what's the ramifications there?

And I got more and more into it. And finally Jeff the boss said, Look, this has taken up too much of your time. And I thought he was going to tell me to stop doing it. And he said, Well hire someone else to do Granny. You go do this. that's cool. Yeah. So so I did. And and I became and I got more and more into the architecture and the instruction set of these chips. Because they started off as like a Pentium with SSE on them. And we sort of fairly quickly realized we'd need some extra instructions.

And so while A Abrach and Sartan figured out what the software wanted to look like, I got more into designing what the instruction set looked like. And then we got it a name called Larraby. And I actually joined Intel full time because there were things I couldn't do as a contractor. Yeah, now I'm suddenly at Intel and I am an instruction set architect. And I'm like, What what happened there?

And then, you know, Larrabee did its thing and that's been documented pretty well. but fundamentally what what we got out of it was the AVX five twelve instruction set. So I'm actually the person who has added more instructions to X eighty six than any other anybody else, as far as I know.

Jake Simpson (31:14)
Which is very

Tom Forsyth (31:16)
Very

weird for a software guy. But these things happen. It's very odd. So then, you know, I was at Intel five years or something. Larraby sort of wound down, did Xeon Phi, which was the same thing really. And then AVX512 shipped, and that was that. And I was kind of getting bored. I was doing some stuff at Intel, but there wasn't anything big to do. And then Mike Abrach.

pinged me one day and said, you know, how are you getting on at Intel? I was like, it's all right, you know. And he said, how'd you like to come work with me again? and and by the way, when I worked with my Gabrash at and Sartan at Red Game Tools, that was one of the most ferociously productive times in my life. Like bouncing ideas off those two guys was just amazing. I mean I still remember when

Abrach and I sat down in an office. Well I sat down in his office and I said, Look and we figured out how that rasterization was going to work. Like the bare bones of it. And I I still remember that. And then then he he went away and I actually had to make it work and make all the corner cases work. But yeah, just so productive. Anyway, so five years later, yeah, Abrah says, Hey, you want to come work with me at Valve and we're gonna resurrect

V R and then do AR. Which I thought was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard, but you don't say no.

Jake Simpson (32:49)
No, not to my game brush, that's certainly and not Valve either.

Tom Forsyth (32:51)
And not Valve and not Mike Arash. And I thought, fuck it, let's go see it. If anyone can do it, that team can. So did that. and we worked on that for a while. And we quickly figured out that AR was too bloody hard. Like what we wanted to do was was, you know, wearable sunglasses wandering around the streets, you know, with AR, right? The the dream. And like you quickly realize, like, yeah, that's impossible.

Too many things to solve at once. So we eventually whittled it down to, okay, let's just start with VR. And we got every every headset, every existing headset known to man, and they're all shit. even them you know, the really the ten thousand dollar military headsets are all just they were terrible. They give you nausea all o all over the place. And then you know

Jake Simpson (33:44)
Because this is an interesting thing in that you were saying about nausea is an interesting thing. Because I remember talking to my c Mike Abrach about his time at id. And he used to say to me that his time at id was basically every day going in and then stumbling out of the office at five o'clock, ready to vomit, because he couldn't handle the 3D aspect of the, you know, the big screens with the with the true 3D graphics in it. He had enormous problems with that. And I'm like, and so you go off to make VR?

Tom Forsyth (34:11)
Yeah. No, it's a really weird thing. He was we quickly figured out he was the most susceptible person in the office. So he was the canary in the coal mine. Yeah, it might a look y you might think your algorithm's working fine and your prediction's working fine. Give it to Abra Ash. He put it on and go, this is terrible. Anyway. All right.

Jake Simpson (34:30)
Okay then, right.

Tom Forsyth (34:31)
Try again. Yeah, he was very, very sensitive. why he agreed to do that, I don't know. But anyway.

Jake Simpson (34:40)
Yeah, it's a strange thing for him to want to go into bearing in mind his susceptibility to nausea. I

Tom Forsyth (34:44)
It was

this is extremely useful having him there, right? Yeah, I suppose. So you know, and then we we got a a ping from John Carmack, you know, who obviously worked with Mike A Bash. And John said, Hey, there's this kid called Palmer Lucky and he's got this box of magic and you need to see it. And that's how we got hooked up with Oculus. And we got the o the original duct tape prototype in and then eventually DK one and you know we'd we were doing all this

Fundamental research, right? It this was all very fundamental research. And then me and Joe Ludwig said, Look, I this research is all very good, but the way you learn stuff is you ship. You ship a game. And we want to figure out how this will all fit in a game. And so me and Joe said, well, you know, what can we ship in? Like we we need a game to ship in. So one of the teams at Valve at the time was the Team Fortress Two team.

Nice thing about them was they had a very fluid architecture and they shipped an update every two weeks. Like every two weeks a Team Fortress two update would ship. And we're like so we we could just go in there and we could add VR to TF two and we don't have to like they're shipping anyway, right? We don't need any of that infrastructure. We just put the code in there. And Team Fortress two experiments with all sorts of crazy things all the time.

And so so yeah, we we and we did the thing they talk about, which is we unplugged our desks, we rolled them along the corridor, up in the freight elevator, to the T F two thing. I mean, obviously we we warned them we were coming, you know, pushed our desks into the T F two cabal, plugged them in and got to work. And yeah, we got that all working and shipped it and and we learned something very important.

Which is that if you're gonna make a game in VR, Team Fortress Two is probably the worst one in the world to use. We made a lot of people very, very sick. It is I mean it you know, it functionally worked, but you run so fast in TF two. And and like if you play the scout who bounces around like a frickin' jack in the box.

my god, you can make people so sick so quickly. and we learned the fundamental rules. Like there's nothing technically wrong with this. The latency's good, the optics are good, everything's good. But if you move people around when they're not physically moving, boy, they go green. That was very interesting though. so yeah. Okay. Yeah. The frustration at Valve was that we couldn't ship anything, right? The the

Half the team were like, this is really annoying. Valve can't ship stuff and we wanna ship stuff. Right. And so the the opportunity came up to move properly to Oculus and do their SDK. I was gonna be sort of second graphics guy, second to a guy called Andrew Reese, who was the only graphics guy at Oculus at the time. There were the there was it was I think I was employee sort of thirty.

thirty something at Oculus. So I joined them remote, you know, I was still up in Seattle. They were down in Orange County. And so I was gonna be, you know, taking some of the load off Andrew. And that was all arranged and that was great. And then a week before I joined it, Andrew was hit by a car and killed. So I'm like, holy shit. And so you know we joke about the bus factor. How many of your engineers have to be hit by a bus before your product

Jake Simpson (38:28)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tom Forsyth (38:35)
Yeah, right. And I you know, literally I was hired in just the right time and it just we just spread the bus factor out to two. Bam! And he's dead. And that was and I didn't really know him, but you know, everyone else at the company was just in shock because he'd he'd been a friend to a lot of them for a long time. but yeah, the bus factor's not always a joke. Anyway

Jake Simpson (39:00)
aren't you? I to run shot there, I was just say with what happened to our friend Jeff Stuart Gilray, who's he was you know Stuart was a good friend to many of us and I'm sure you've come across him too, he ran a studio in Leeds in England called Just Add Water and ran it for like 15 years, I didn't realize it was been around for so long. but hearing after he had passed from COVID, hearing his second in in line, my friend Les, trying to work out how to just run payroll.

For example, you know, and it's all on one guy and you're like, I went away immediately after this this had happened and wrote a document for like this is this is where all the accounts are, this is where all this this is how I run payroll, this is how I do this, this is this is how you log in and do this, this is where my you know just because if anything happens to me, you know, my company goes under as well. So it's a it is a sobering moment realizing we're all extremely mortal and it could end at any moment. So

Tom Forsyth (39:56)
It i it really is. And and especially as seniors not senior citizens, senior senior engineers. Our job is to disseminate that in information. So but yeah, you know, I assume you know, Oculus was this tiny little startup and I assumed we'd do this for six months and not much would happen and we'd probably run out of money because the boss, Brendan, was ridiculously enthusiastic. He kept talking about

you know, shipping a million headsets and I'm like, Wha what the hell are you talking about, man? Like companies out like us don't do that, but he seems to get the money from somewhere, persuade people. And he just had an amazing salesman's touch. And I kept like trying to rein him in, like, is that actually true? He's like, Well make it true and you know, all that sort of stuff And I thought, Well this company's fucking doomed, isn't it? well, you know, they pay me well and we're having fun

doing some technology. And and then of course he he did it properly. Like like he he was the one that persuaded Zuckerberg to buy us. Two million dollars to I think we're like sixty people at the time. I don't know how much of that two billion is real money and how much is just fake money, but well we got some some of the real money out of it, so that was good.

Jake Simpson (41:05)
billion dollars, I believe.

Tom Forsyth (41:23)
you know, worked at Oculus Facebook for quite a while and three three years? I think it was three years, something like that. Anyway. And and we shipped the we solved a lot of problems in PC VR and and it was fun sparring with John 'cause so John Carmack was doing the the mobile V P VR and I was doing the PC VR and then, you know, I got more and more of a team around me and and we had fun, you know, sparring on what was the best way to do things and

It was good. Good. Enjoyed that. Okay. But now Now I'm back in Intel, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jake Simpson (41:56)
So now you're back at Intel, right?

Back making more chips and stuff like that, which we won't go to because obviously that's heavily NDA s stuff, so we won't be talking about that. So the one thing I have to ask you about, or well talk about is this. I come from this little town in in England called Hern Bay. Now, most of you would never have heard of it, and that's fine. It's on the south coast, or it's southeast estuary coast is where it's actually, and in Kent. it's just about ten miles north of Canterbury.

And it's a very small town and you know, it nobody's ever heard of it and it's never been a big deal to me. And then and I made some joke or something or other some comment on on a forum that both myself and Tom are on. And Tom suddenly chimes in with yes, I remember the the cold wind in Herne Bay and blah blah blah and I'm What do you mean you remembered the whole what do you mean? How do you possibly know what it's like to live in Hern Bay? And he went, I spent three years there and I'm like, What what what? What? How is this possible? How do I not know this?

Tom Forsyth (42:58)
Very odd.

Jake Simpson (42:59)
Yeah, your wife was a vet there.

Tom Forsyth (43:02)
Yeah, so so right out coming out right out of university, that was the first job she found. And and I you know, I was like I say, I was running my own company and I so I could run it from anywhere. And so we moved to Herne Bay and we lived there for

Jake Simpson (43:17)
I'd already gone I'd already gone by that time. I was I was out of the country by that time. I I'd found the railway station. But what was really bizarre, here's the really weird connection though, is that the the veterinarian that your wife used to work for, my sister ended up running their offices for them. I mean not over the same time period. This was like, you know, twenty years later, but still. It's a weird little way, you know, thing. But to hear that you'd lived in the town that I came from is a very, very weird thing. Because I'm

Most of the time I tell people I'm from Canterbury because most people haven't ever heard of Hernbury anyway. And I spent more time in Canterbury than I ever did in Hern Bay. But it's a weird thing to to to hear somebody else talking about living there and like, hey, what? You know, and even we can even talk about a couple a couple of pubs and like yeah, I remember that pub and yeah. Yeah, very, very weird. But anyway, yeah, it's strange, strange way the life connects you two, isn't it? Yeah.

Tom Forsyth (44:09)
Yeah. And that's I mean that's been true, you know, like this thing about like I'm now working with Nick Murphy again. Exactly. After after, you know, twenty five years or thirty years or something. It's that weird.

Jake Simpson (44:15)
Yeah.

I well in a weird situation, I remember giving advice to a very young John Maver not John Maver a very much young Bob Berry when he was starting out making a game in Florida with his studio called Digitalo. They did an unreal first person shooter. And I was working at Roman at the time and I remember him asking me some stuff and you know, and hey, hey, you know, w how does this work? And what do we do? Just, you know, general advice that I would give and nothing really, you know, tremendo amazing. And now I'm ending up working

For Bob Berry. But he is now working for you. But he said it is a small world in terms of the number of people that that that you run into. Yeah, and how the the circular nation of it. It's a very small world, but yeah, it's all very good. So Seattle then, how is Seattle? I mean you've been there a long time now. Have you ever you haven't lived anywhere else in the States, have you?

Tom Forsyth (44:52)
Yeah. So why not?

No, no. Rad Game Tools was here and moved directly here and and I've lived actually I've lived in the same house that whole time as well. So Valve was down the street and all the other companies I worked for remotely and still do. Right.

Jake Simpson (45:22)
Yep.

Because Intel's in Portland, right?

Tom Forsyth (45:34)
Intel's everywhere, man.

Jake Simpson (45:36)
They're very large here in Arizona, mate, and you which is which was an amusing thing that I had to tell you about, bearing in mind you work for it. But yeah, it's they've got enormous places here in in Arizona.

Tom Forsyth (45:46)
They they do. They got a f big fab in Arizona. They just they just signed a thing for a some in Ohio or something? World's biggest fab, maybe America's biggest fab.

Jake Simpson (45:58)
Well, they need to bring the chip ship building in back into America 'cause then might be so done in China at this point.

Tom Forsyth (46:02)
No, In Intel has always been distributed. It's it's equal Portland, Israel, I think there's some in Arizona. And where else? I've forgotten now. Yeah, you know. The idea is to be, you know, meteor proof, right?

Jake Simpson (46:18)
Mm. Well, yeah. Mm. Good luck with that. It depends on the size of the meteor, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. so okay, we're about an hour into. So I think, yeah, now's a an appropriate time to to wrap up. I mean, it's amazing. The number of people that we know in s in in common is quite staggering as well. I mean, we should also before we go, we should talk a little bit about your little hobby. Your your little car hobby that you have.

Tom Forsyth (46:23)
Well yes.

I do. I race cars. I race a K seven, yes.

Jake Simpson (46:45)
You guys are catering.

how many do you owe?

Tom Forsyth (46:50)
Only two, no, I'm planning on third one though.

Jake Simpson (46:54)
Gonna say, I thought you were threatening to buy a third one.

Tom Forsyth (46:57)
I am threatening to buy a third one. So sevens have been through my life quite a bit. When I was dating my wife, one of the things that we discovered is both of us remembered the sixties TV series The Prisoner. And the which is very surreal. I I highly advise anyone watch The Prisoner because it's very weird, even for the sixties. One of the iconic things is in the opening sequence, the the title character who doesn't have a name.

played by Patrick McGuinn. He drives a Lotus Seven sports car, which if you don't know what one of those is, go type Lotus Seven. And it's it's barely a car. It's it's a I call it a coffin with wheels. And it it's about that size. It barely fits two people. And it's a beautiful little lightweight British sports car. And I always loved the look of it. It's so bonkers and iconic. And so you know Louise and I and my wife

You know, rewatched this series and it was even bonkers. Anyway, when once we got married and we had a little bit of spare cash, we thought, you know what we should buy is a Katerum is a Lotus 7 or a Katerum 7 by the time that time. the the rights moved to a different company because Lotus wanted to stop building them. And we went to a motor show and we did not fit in it. It's so small, neither of us fitted in it. And what I mean is I lowered myself into the seat

And then I just sort of wedged, my hips sort of wedged in the car, and my my arse was about two inches off the seat. And I was just like, you don't make a bigger one, do you? And they were like, No, this is how big they come. Like So I just can't buy one and they were like

Jake Simpson (48:40)
Patrick McGuin must have been a short ass.

Tom Forsyth (48:42)
It must have been must have been. So yeah, we're just like, shit, can't have one. And we kept seeing them and they're they're really good on the track and British motoring press go on about them constantly. And we're just like, Yeah, but we can't fit in them 'cause Moved to the States and I'm sitting in my office at Rad and one of these draws up outside. And I'm like, Holy shit, I didn't even know these were in the States. So I run outside and I meet the driver and I, you know, tell him this story about how I've always loved them and I don't

Jake Simpson (48:55)
Blah blah blah blah. Anyway.

Tom Forsyth (49:12)
don't fit in them. And he says, you're fitting mine. It's the new big one. And it turns out that Caterum had just started making a slightly wider one. It's it's it's five inches wider. So that's two and a half inches per seat. And I sat in it, fitted. Not so I went home and said, Hey, they made a bigger caterum. And you know, we had to go down to Denver, but you know, about six months later we were test driving our caterum in Denver. And that and then we got one and

It's in British racing green with a yellow stripe, proper prisoner colours, and we've had that car for fifteen years now, and we still have it, and it's still wonderful.

Jake Simpson (49:50)
I thought you've taken me for riding it and scared the pants off me the way your gear changed. But yes, it's literally standing start to we're doing a lot of a lot of and because you're so low and over the actual axle itself.

Tom Forsyth (50:01)
You're like, everything it feels twice as fast as you think. Thirty miles an hour in that car is exciting. Yes. And then yeah, a couple of years ago, the the chap who I took my K trun for as a mechanic, he said, Look, I've got a batch of race cars I've got in. Do you want to do this properly? You've done a lot of track days, you've done a lot of fast, you know, track days. Do you want to do this properly and go racing with me? He was an he's an ex he used to be a professional race race car driver.

Jake Simpson (50:30)
Yeah.

Tom Forsyth (50:31)
He's a stick

and he can really, really drive. And he had this racing car and it was a Katerum racing car and it couldn't be made into a street car. It had to be a race car. And I said, Yeah, but I haven't got a truck or a trailer or any of that crap and I've got no space to put one. And he said, no, no, I'll do all that. So the deal is he the car stays at his big shop, he brings it to the track. I turn up, I jump in, I race it, I get out, I tell him what went wrong, and he goes and fixes it.

Fantastic. I'm I'm what they call a gentleman driver.

Jake Simpson (51:06)
Okay, fair enough. All right.

Tom Forsyth (51:07)
Car

turns up Car turns up, I jump in, I race it, I get out, hand him the keys, fix it, Jeeves.

Jake Simpson (51:16)
And it's worth pointing out that this this car has cameras on it and you you tend to record a lot of your races, isn't that right?

Tom Forsyth (51:25)
I record

I record all my races. I put all on YouTube. So they're all on you know, if you Google like YouTube, Tom Forsyth Racing, Tom Forsyth Caterum, you'll find them all. They're all there. Now I I don't edit them 'cause it takes for forever, but they're all there. There's some interesting exploits I've had.

Jake Simpson (51:44)
You showed me a brown trouser moment of the car spinning all the way around and

Tom Forsyth (51:49)
That

was this year. That was this year. That was amazing. Yeah. Well sorry, last last year. Last year's season. Yeah. Yeah, came round a turn and suddenly the back end got away from me and we we think there was a spot of grease on the track because it's you know, it was I've been round that turn at that speed all the time. I know that track very well. And it but the the rear just went sideways. The car came around and and that part of the track, there's no runoff.

Jake Simpson (51:54)
Lost. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Forsyth (52:19)
Just concrete walls either side. And I have seen so many cars smash themselves to bits there. And I remember it coming round, and it went 90 degrees to the path of travel. And the nose of the car is about two feet away from this concrete wall. We're going sideways, and like everything slowed down. And I remember looking at this concrete wall going past my nose at about 100 miles an hour, going.

I I remember distinctly having two very clear thoughts. Number one, well, I guess I'm buying a new car then. And and number two, I looked over my right shoulder and I saw a bunch of BMWs, you know, coming up. And I just think, I hope they don't hit me because that'll really hurt. Now none of did. And and somehow that car didn't hit the wall.

Jake Simpson (53:16)
No,

Tom Forsyth (53:16)
Only

did it not hit the wall, so it it rotated so from forwards it rotated 90 degrees right, it rotated another 45 degrees right, so it's now facing mostly backwards. And then it straightens up and it comes all the way back and faces forwards again. And I go, and you can hear me going, Fuck! And I select first gear and I'm off again.

Jake Simpson (53:41)
Off you go again, yeah.

Tom Forsyth (53:43)
And I'm back in the race and I'm just like, I don't know what the fuck happened, but I'm in a race car that still works and I got some BMWs to catch. And I passed four of I I think I came third in that race despite that absolute brown trouser moment.

Jake Simpson (53:52)
Yeah,

Well you're a lucky man, that's for sure. You are a lucky man to be still alive and to still in one piece. Still, this is this is what you do for fun and that's more power to you, frankly. Anyway, okay, we're gonna call it a day now because it's been an hour. So I just want to say thank you again for spending your time with us and talking about your career because you you're definitely one of the unsung heroes. I I should point out that anytime I have any 3D math problems, Tom is the one I go to and go, Hey Tom, how do we do blah blah blah blah and he's great because he can explain it to me and I cannot get it and I go

Explain it again and use more words. And he goes, certainly and and he's never like condescending about it. It's a you yeah, I don't think you're aware of the reputation you have as a good educator, Tom, but you really do have it.

Tom Forsyth (54:39)
think the tip is it's difficult to strike the balance between over explaining something and and you know condescending to people and under it explaining it so they don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Right. And I think if you start off briefly and then you say, you know, did did you get that? or, you know, tell me which bits you didn't get and then they say, Yeah, so I understood that. It was good. But what's this? And you realise, okay, they've never met this concept. Let me explain that concept. I think that works well.

If you just start explaining in depth immediately, they either like if they know that stuff, you just like, whatever, I know this stuff. Or even if they don't know the stuff, like they're like, Yeah, how does this fit in the whole picture? And you got no frame of reference. So yeah, but it's always tricky. You know, you gotta be careful it doesn't turn into a Twitter conversational, you know.

Jake Simpson (55:23)
Yeah.

I think the best the best one I think ever was when I remember I I came up with a new way of lighting something and it was basically wrapping a texture around an object. So the idea was that the light itself would fall on the object and you'd have a texture that wrapped around the object and it would tell you what lights were actually affecting it. And I remember being very excited about it and I remember writing an email to Tom, hey, I've got this idea. Blah, blah, blah this is this. And Tom went, wrote back and went, Yeah, well done. You've created such and such. And that was developed in nineteen seventy, but and I'm like, fuck. I thought I was being clever.

And then at the end of it I I sent an email saying what I thought was being clever, but never mind then and he comes back and he goes, Yeah, but think about it this way, you came out with it all by yourself. That that somebody else might have got there first, but you did it all by yourself, which is you know so that was a nice

Tom Forsyth (56:12)
E every graphics engineer has reinvented so many algorithms and you always think you're bloody clever. And then someone goes, yeah. Like I I remember I nearly actually wrote a paper on an algorithm that I'd come up with. I spent so long on it and I found brilliant bloody shadowing algorithm and I was like, so clever and it worked and was really elegant. And then someone said, yeah, that's this. A guy guy came up with it in nineteen sixty eight. I was like

Jake Simpson (56:42)
Yeah. Yeah, no matter how clever you are, there's always someone who's been cleverer before before you. Never mind. Okay, again, thank you very much for your time, Tom. I really appreciate it.

Tom Forsyth (56:47)
Right.

Pleasure.

Always a pleasure.