Jake Simpson (00:00)
Today I'm with our friend Matt Fritz. Now I've known Matt many, many, many, many years. Known each other for quite some time, but you've been in the games industry s donkeys years, even you know, as long as I have, frankly. Kind of surprised that we didn't cross each path much earlier than we we might have done, really. So, Matt, you're in Seattle. Sunny, foggy, snowy. What is it today, Seattle, right?

Matt Pritchard (00:23)
Yep.

I am in Seattle, though I started my career in Texas, but originally from Michigan, a small town outside of Detroit. Given my age and your age, it all goes back to where a lot of us got our start, which was the early home computer era, the eight bit computer era, and exposure to that. So

Jake Simpson (00:30)
From Texas or is that

Matt Pritchard (00:49)
First time I got involved in actually selling a game was around nineteen eighty two or nineteen eighty three.

Jake Simpson (00:56)
That would have been that would have still been Atari era.

Matt Pritchard (00:59)
Wouldn't it? It would it was. So the first wave of eight bit machines, the T R S eighty, the Commodore Pet at the time, the Apple two, and the Atari eight hundred came about. Mm. And originally I had a T R S eighty, which was pretty limited, black and white, the Radio Shack made those

Jake Simpson (01:18)
Right, radio show.

So it's a CPM machine, wasn't it?

Matt Pritchard (01:24)
No, it it didn't it really didn't have an operating system. So it had a basic and ROM, which was typical of those. So the first time I got a hold of one would have been the spring of nineteen seventy eight. My father was a science teacher at the local high school and he was the head of the science department.

Jake Simpson (01:44)
Just to jump in for a second, I just want our listeners to really understand something. That's the year after Star Wars came out. I mean, you know, so I just want to make the point that that Matt, just like me, is a very, very old friend.

Matt Pritchard (01:58)
Yep, it was a long, long time ago and

Jake Simpson (02:01)
Galaxy far far away.

Matt Pritchard (02:03)
sort of far away. But what I found, just kind of to to f to flash forward a little bit, is that the way I came eventually came into the industry, there were a whole bunch in our generation that entered very similar because i I don't think anybody new to computers in the last couple of decades can appreciate the birth of computers. computers that that we could get a hold of and the the links went to and so I was saying my father being a teacher and the head of the science department

Jake Simpson (02:23)
For home computers anyway.

Matt Pritchard (02:32)
What happened was is the school bought one single computer, first one in the district. It was a TRS eighty. It had sixteen kilobytes of memory and it had a cassette recorder for storing programs. And he brought it home just before the end of the school year. So it was at our home all summer that year. The kids back then had all summer off. I mean

Jake Simpson (02:54)
Secured then. Your fate was

Matt Pritchard (02:57)
As as I like to say, the the the computer showed up just before the interesting girl showed up, just by being on my hair and and being about

Jake Simpson (03:05)
Well, just walk past you. Yeah, right, okay.

Matt Pritchard (03:08)
Well, I was eleven at the time, and I think I turned twelve that fall. the computer made a whole lot more sense than the girls did.

Jake Simpson (03:15)
And and it's still true today.

Matt Pritchard (03:17)
It it is. It it truly is. But the you know, the exposure at that time to get that and and there wasn't much. There were books that had type in program listings and basic. A few of those were had been published in the late seventies, Creative Computing Magazine here in the States. And getting a hold of those and the exposure was pretty much on my own, left to my own devices. It sucked me in. And of course games.

I think the first book was a hundred and one basic computer games. And they were holdovers from the late sixties and seventies, mostly, you know, assume just a teletype style output. and Radio Shack had a few, you know, a couple arcade games at the time because this time this co corresponded with video games in the arcades just starting to show up. I think that was

Jake Simpson (04:01)
Defender

and ro you that kind of stuff, Roberton Defender, yeah.

Matt Pritchard (04:04)
That would a couple those would come a couple years later. The first ones would be Space Invaders. It'd be a little simpler. And then and the very first home consoles coming about about that time. So there was this convergence of time. I remember I still remember the very, very, very first game I wrote, which was I had a ship that went from left to right across the top of the screen. The ship was four pixels wide by one pixel, and it moved, and I had a cannon in the bottom center of the screen. And if you press the letter C.

It would fire a projectile that would move up the screen and it may or may not have hit hit the ship going across the top. My programming skill early skills at that time were so great, however, that if I waited too long, the ship left exited the screen on the right before the shot got to the top. I think it crashed or something. and that was all there was to it was just a press the button, watch a projectile go up, does it hit something? I gotta

Jake Simpson (04:59)
to interrupt you for I got a little story of my own that I just wanted to interject there which is I mean I was on the Commodore 64 when I was learning to code although my first programme that I ever wrote was on a RML 480Z which was a big massive black solid steel with a proper keyboard computer that that had a Z80 processor that all the compu these schools had. These these things were bought and they were bought simply because they were so robust. I mean these you got a bunch of kids smashing on these things right they were huge and solid and they again used tape drives although

Some schools actually had a a centralized disk unit. So all the machines would share one disk floppy system and you could you could put your floppy in and then that computer could connect to it and you could record your stuff. And everyone had BASIC either on tape or on so you had to load BASIC first and then you load your you know basic parser and then you'd run your your basic program. Assembly language. I remember spending a weekend with Mark Greenshield's book, who I was a f I follow him on Facebook now, it's really bizarre. But I spent a weekend to decide to learn assembly language.

And I kind of got to groups with it. I had a little basic, you know, a little tiny little compiler. And I I spent the weekends and all I did was I generated a sprite and I pressed one key and the sprite was supposed to move up a step and then I pressed I think this it was yeah, it was A and Z, I think. A moved it up and Z moved it down. And that was it. That's all it did. when I ran the program, if I pressed A, the sprite appeared at the top of the screen, and if I pressed Z, it appeared at the bottom of screen. And I must have spent two days.

Pouring over this, trying to figure out what was going on. Why did it jump? Why wasn't it going up a step at a time, whatever? And eventually it was pointed out to me by a friend of mine that there was no delay loop. This was assembly language, which meant basically if I pressed A, through really looped through really, really quickly until it hit the top of the screen and stop. And then if I pressed the C, it would just rip through. It wasn't like I was doing one key press read per frame. It was just all being done quickly. So yeah, that was fun.

Yeah, I just thought, you know, these kinds of stories they're quite funny about, you know, when you f first start out the mistakes you make, so

Matt Pritchard (06:58)
Yeah, and but the thing is it is it hooked us. Yeah. It hooked me. And then a year or two later there was a Atari computer we got at the school, along with a couple more T R S eighties, and I got exposed to the color and the graphics and obviously, you know, most people know it's kind of synonymous thing nineteen seventy nine Atari Star Raiders. And you know

Jake Simpson (07:17)
Sixteen K, dude. Sixteen frickin' K. That the engineer, the writer of that, some as a German dude, needs his feet kissed every morning.

Matt Pritchard (07:25)
Yeah, they amazing stuff. And and of course, you know, the imagination was blown. And so I started writing my own games in basic, you know, taking some original work, some taking modifications of stuff from magazines at the time. and when I was in high school, I was working on games, it just it just felt natural to just write them. I took one list game that was a listing in it from Soft Side magazine, and I greatly modified it, enhanced it, and made it my own, so to speak. And I wasn't the only one who did that.

Who actually then sold that because in the last year, one of the sites that reviews old RPG games pinged me up about reviewing it. Wow. And I found out that another person who modified the same original source was somebody who tangentially also worked on the Age of Empires series, which we'll fast forward to on there. And I forget what was it? Not RGB Codex, RPG Codex, but it was it was a dungeon crawler type of game. And I on the Atari, I modified it and

beefed up the character graphics significantly, expanded it, added some features. And what was interesting at the time is what we had were magazines, paper magazines, kind of a thing you just don't get today for computers. In the back of, I think it was Antic magazine, they had run these little mini classified ads where they sell you like a ninth of a page. And I saw that there was a company selling some stuff for the Atari that was in my area, maybe

an hour's drive away or whatever. And I called them up out of the blue and asked them if they might be interested in selling this this game that I had written. And I wound up selling that and a graphical adventure through them. They took out an ad and we maybe sold twenty five to fifty copies of it. I found that the guy had s had set this up with his son is basically as a tax write-off. It was a little business for a tax write-off. the Dungeon Crawler game got put on, you know, in Ziploc baggies with a single floppy disk, consignment at the regional computer store.

Which was I believe the something called like the the computer depot in in Dahl Hospital or something like that. They sold computers and toys and whatnot. They tended to be very specialty stores in the very early eighties. So somewhere in there I made my first money selling computer games circa nineteen eighty three. I think I made something like forty or fifty dollars.

Jake Simpson (09:38)
Wait, somebody alert the IRS.

Matt Pritchard (09:40)
yeah, I don't think so. The but that got me hooked on doing that. But then what happened is you know, you turn eighteen, go off to college, things happen. I didn't finish college, but then I needed to find a way to support myself in the eighties. And so business programming and and bespoke vertical market software, I got into that and and did that for several years, but I never lost my love for games. So going on

To the early 90s, around 1992, I was working, I think at a time for a company that now is owned by Intuit, the TurboTax Maker. So I was working in the compiled quick basic language on what was an income tax processing software, one of the big leaders for CPAs at the time. And I can tell you that is a field of software development where there is no room or margin for individual creativity.

Jake Simpson (10:34)
Sure, yeah.

Matt Pritchard (10:36)
Saw magazine that came out. I should say that during this time I was still poking on my own. I took an interest in graphics programming, especially about the time the IBM VGA card started coming out. And I spent a couple of or no, this was the two fifty-six color sixty. Yeah, the VGA and that came out in eighty nine. It was ninety one or so I could afford a cheap VGA card on my two eighty six computer and

Jake Simpson (10:50)
right, it's easier.

Wasn't it i it aims to put enhanced graphics adapter?

Matt Pritchard (11:04)
EGA was enhanced that could be And then VGA. Right. And it was the one that had the 256 colors in the actual color palette of a quarter million, you know, six-bit color, and then later be eight-bit color. And you know, the re and all the time, you know, every few years, you know, the resolutions went up, the capabilities went up. Moore's Law was going on. I just didn't realize it as much at the time. But yeah, my 286 gave way to 386 computer. And I was working on

Jake Simpson (11:09)
Stupid name, but whatever. Yeah.

Matt Pritchard (11:33)
learning assembly language and writing graphics code and assembly and I remember reading Dr. Dobbs journal

Jake Simpson (11:39)
In my gay brush. My gay brush is a black book, right?

Matt Pritchard (11:42)
actually he wrote the columns. He was writing about modex graphics. I used that as a starting point and started writing sort of a next higher up level library and assembly of remotex routines like you know drawing arbitrary lines or blitting sprites or copying you know text bitmaps up and stuff. And he wrote about how to set everything up, but then you know then the next level of manipulating it, I was writing a library and assembly and actually had uploaded that on Bolton boards. When I saw this magazine,

premier issue came out of this magazine, I want to say ninety two or early ninety three. Saw it in one of the big computer stores back then we went to these giant computer superstores, and it was called Game Developer. I picked up the first copy and I wrote them, called them, I forget which I did, and asked them if they were interested in they were looking for people to write articles for them. They came back and they said yes. Well I was still working doing the business programming by day, which by this time I had been migrated over to doing stuff that dealt with processing

loan applications and having to print out forms back on the early laser printers and and all the stuff in the banking stuff. I was writing started writing articles on Modex graphics, you know, a little higher level than what Michael Abrache had covered. And I I wrote like six articles in a row for them. I think like issues three through eight or four through nine or something like that. And it paid me I got paid like a thousand dollars an article or something. But she was Jesus. Yeah. I mean it was a lot of work.

But you know, as a side hustle sort of thing, it it was pretty good and it paid for my first laser printer later on and some and some stuff and because they paid like two hundred a page or something like that. And so five or six pages, you know, how it came out. and it was a bit of a process because we didn't really have the internet for submitting stuff, but it got me hooked into writing articles for them, the interest in games. And at that now at this time I had moved away from Michigan when I left college and I moved down to the Dallas Fort Worth area in Texas.

And by this time I was moving over to the the Dallas area, but and I hadn't given up on game jobs.

Jake Simpson (13:43)
Dallas was the place to be and those and you know

Matt Pritchard (13:45)
It it would become the place soon. There was id software in a apogee. Three D Realms hadn't come along yet. And I wasn't that far from them. I was actually eventually by was it ninety four or so my where I lived, where I just got married, I was four miles down the road, literally the road except the apartment complex I lived in, Turnwright go down four miles and there was Apogee's offices where they were sending selling out their shareware and all that. And I'd gone down and bugged for

Steve Blackburn, I think, was there, one of the guys working there, got to know him a little and you know, would come down there and buy the stuff from them directly, you know, without them shipping it. You know, and and and so flirting around with this. But where I actually went to interview the first time was at Origin Systems in Austin, because they had had the Ultima series and then they had just released Wing Commander. You know, that was kind of coming into Origin's heyday there of we build worlds. And they had been, you know, they were really growing as a game company, and they'd just been bought by

EA for it's like seventy million dollars. I somehow got a hold of them, I forget which how. I think I met via Bolton boards, one of the programmers who was working on crush he actually gone to work on Crusader, but I forget what he's working on the time. But I came down and I interviewed with them. And I had, I remember this, it was probably around ninety three, ninety-four, somewhere in there. I went down and interviewed. Warren Spector was in on my interview, small interest.

And I didn't do so good, which is probably good because they played the they paid the programmer shit back then, like twenty eight thousand a year. wow. Yeah, which was less than what I was making at the time. Because I was probably making close to forty thousand doing business programming. And now I'd gotten married and you know, we have to adjust the numbers for the times, but it would it would have been quite something to to do that, and there was some question about that. So so Warren Spector was one of the ones they kinda said, he's you know, not quite you know, not what we're looking for. Now I would get Warren back for that years later, which I'll get around to.

But the you know, the bug had been planted interviewing and I'd been on the Bolton boards FitoNet by that time. We hadn't quite gone full internet, but usnet newsgroups were carried and there was there was like a rec there was a couple of game developer newsgroups and I read on those, kept doing my job there. the income tax software company it was ninety two through ninety six or so. I forget exactly the order in which I'd have to go back and look, but the the thing I remember was around February nineteen ninety six.

Mark Toronto had posted on the FIDONET that this new game company was looking for programmers. And I responded and I told them, especially that, you know, hey, I kind of knew assembly language, I knew graphics, and I got back a thing, well, we probably won't need any assembly language, but come on in, interview. Now, I should say I pinged them in like February, but I didn't get the come back on in until like the end of May. There was a gap there. And what I didn't know is that this was Tony Goodman who had founded Ensemble Corporation.

was working a group of people starting to you know doing the embryonic genesis of what would become ensemble studios. He had had an employee from a Ensemble Corporation, which was a business consulting firm that had grown, you know, 100 people or something like that. You know, very successful with it. And he's very much the the consummate businessman. And then they had hired on Tim Dean as the first full-time programmer, and I think Brad Crow was an artist. And then we picked up a couple other people, you know, they were skunk working as this project. What I didn't know is him and Bruce Shelley

were shopping it around that spring in the meantime. They're looking for a publisher and for funding. So they, you know, they're getting okay, people responding to the ad and they're just, we'll keep you on file because obviously they they weren't in the position to know that they were going full bore. You know, I'm sure they were they were doing this. But they had shopped around the prototype of this game called Tribe, influenced by civilization and then later would be influenced by Warcraft. The Can I just

Jake Simpson (17:38)
Second, I

just so that explains a lot because I should add some some some context here of what I'm about to say, in that both myself and and Matt obviously were involved in the recent revamp of Age of Empires, the remastering of Age of Empires called Age of Empires definitive edition. And I remember looking through some of that original source code, and there is reference to tribes in there. Explains where it comes from. you learn something new every day.

Matt Pritchard (18:02)
Mm-hmm. Tried, yep.

Jake Simpson (18:07)
Keep going, man.

Matt Pritchard (18:08)
Mm-hmm.

Where they were going is that that during the spring they had three publishers that were interested, and Microsoft was one of I think Hasbro and of them Microsoft was the dark horse, the one unknown in games.

Jake Simpson (18:21)
So this was the first time that Microsoft really sort of Yeah, they stuck their oar in and put their hand in the water as it were. I remember.

Matt Pritchard (18:29)
Yeah,

keep that. And so ensemble almost went with a company that at the moment looked the best that would would be like within a year and a half would be gone from existence. But instead they went with Microsoft. And so I think around May that was when and Bruce Shelley with his previous work with Sid Meyer and Civilization was all part of, you know, lending credits and selling them like, hey, you know, we we kinda know what we're doing here, which they did. And so they got a contract and they got funding. And I was contacted around as a first round of hires that now the company had some funding to

expand up and fully vamp up. So they came in for an interview. I came in, I brought them a c my one Ziploc baggy copy of that game from nineteen eighty three to show you know I went through an early version of a coder interview, you know, showing some code. What does this do? What does that do? And they're trying to figure out and they came back and they made me an offer. And I joined said they needed a week and I joined in the middle of June nineteen ninety six. If I joined immediately I my employee number would have probably been six as it was my employee number is like twelve because you there are a bunch of people hiring on at once.

But we were part of the original crew and we were working on this tribe for Microsoft and it would and it was being renamed at that time to Age of Empires. And so from the summer of nineteen ninety-six to when we finished it in around October of ninety-seven was my first real game. And that was an interesting it was an interesting and memorable experience. We'd never forget it because we tend to forget that that our development tools were modern but a lot more primitive back then. My development machine was a top of the line.

One hundred sixty six megahertz Pentium MmX with I think it had sixteen megabytes of RAM and you know maybe a five hundred megabyte hard drive that's spinning and

Jake Simpson (20:09)
Yes, those are the extensions, weren't they? They were

Matt Pritchard (20:11)
Yeah, they were the very first SIMD extensions. Yeah. They were integer, which we didn't, you know, which were just kind of brand new. The Pentium was the brand new hotness and it wasn't cheap. You know, that was our development machine, and we tend to forget that at the time, like we would rebuild the game, which you know, the machine would be locked up for ten, fifteen minutes straight while it was working on it. There's nothing else you could do.

Jake Simpson (20:32)
Have you built Unreal recently? I mean

Matt Pritchard (20:35)
The

more things change, the more they stay the same. But but by comparison, f with back sports, so when we went to go do the definitive edition, I pulled out the source code that originally took over fifteen minutes to rebuild for the game and it

Jake Simpson (20:50)
You've been keeping that source code of course because it wasn't yours and there's no way you would have stuck.

Matt Pritchard (20:55)
I mean we w we no, we were already s we were already set up to go on that. And

Jake Simpson (20:59)
trying to save you from just trying to save you from legal i legal legal reproductions.

Matt Pritchard (21:04)
no, no. We i we we got we got hooked up with Microsoft. This was after we had the contract and the word go to do the prototype. They they wanted us to do a feasibility study. So we said, Hey, we need to what you got from your archives and whatnot. And but anyway, but we pulled up the same old source code and it was about on a modern SSD, you know, with the old compiler which only ran which didn't run multi-core or thread or anything like that. You know, it was about twenty, twenty four seconds to rebuild everything that and and the you know just

the the functional difference we tend to forget over the period of time there's a difference between not having enough time to go grab a drink from the counter versus you know enough time to go make a couple phone calls and wander out front and come back. Yeah the the the tools I mean we were doing the best we could with the tools at the time. You know, people ask, you know games get bigger and all that. Well we're we're able to be more efficient and that's a good example of how y you know, well it's there's still Windows games but well no the if you with the efficiency has been going up and up and up and of course we're finding ways to utilize that efficiency to

Jake Simpson (21:41)
We'll have a cigar and come back.

Matt Pritchard (22:00)
To fill up all the all the capacity we have.

Jake Simpson (22:03)
So question for you, he says ruthlessly interrupting, were there any other names entertained besides I mean, originally it was called Tribes and then it was renamed to Age of Empires. Was there any other names?

Matt Pritchard (22:12)
None that I remember, none that really came out, 'cause internally it was already tribe and there was and it may have been tribes, but then there was a game, there was a multiplayer game that would come out like around the ninety seven that was a early multiplayer FPS type shooter called Tribes. Yeah, remember that. So there was definitely Tribes Nicks, but Microsoft, I think, was gung ho on the age of empires. You know, when they were working with the team, the marketing and they come up with the artwork style that was going on in parallel, which is

If you notice all the age of empires have the similar style, the three leaders that are on the front of the box, you know, the spaces the three faces. You know, as a programmer, I was just working on features, graphics, and performance. and we had so much to do. The last six months before we were done was around the clock crunch. I was there till I'd be there all didn't all night till nearly sunrise. I'd go home around sunrise and I'd come back in shortly after lunch. And

Jake Simpson (23:07)
Did you guys know what you had? Did you know that the success was do you were you could you look at it and go critically, Yes, we knew that was gonna be a massive hit when it came out. Did you did you know that or was it still

Matt Pritchard (23:17)
We

felt near the end the way things came together. And I'll say this so more than a year out, the originally so I'm gonna back up a little bit. So originally we were shooting to have the game done in the fall of ninety six, and we've massively underestimated what that. But what we had in the fall of ninety six at first glance looked a lot like what actually shipped. But under the hood there was still so much missing, so much refinement, so much what else. But we s but Microsoft actually agreed.

And they with originally Age of Empires was slated for ninety-six, but we kind of were coming down to it like this isn't really pulling together and this really isn't all the way there and fun and whatnot. Microsoft agreed and they had faith in what we were doing and they gave it another year. They said, okay, we're gonna stretch out the schedule another year. And of course, back then, schedules had hard points because of the lead time to manufacturing CD-ROMs, printed manuals, boxes, distribution to get into store.

Nowadays we just go click, okay, I just published a Steam God bumble bundle, whatever, you know, or we made a mistake. Okay. all right, I fixed it. Let's just republish it out there. Yeah. We need to recall all the product off of store shelves at Best Buy and everything. You know, the the ramifications were so different then. So, you know, there was this the the there was a level of planning over the release dates and run up to the release dates that

that existed then that don't don't quite exist in the industry the same way.

Jake Simpson (24:43)
It's I mean, particularly in terms of marketing as well. Marketing's a big thing because you had to pay for end caps and shelf space at the larger companies. And that required that was usually a six month lead in and you paid for it. You paid like a million dollars or something like that to get end caps for your products. And if you didn't hit your date, tough shit, mate, somebody else got it and you didn't get another one. You'd already spent that million dollars and that was it. So so yeah, I remember those days of you know, you the pressure to hit your to your your due date was massive. Yeah.

Matt Pritchard (25:12)
Yeah, so we got we got that extra year and it turned out to be everything because I'll say everybody, pretty much everybody on the team, you know, things really pulled together and started gelling. And we started feeling the in the middle ninety seven that the product that was coming together was coming along good. There was an area I was particularly responsible for, and there was a moment with it that I both take credit for, but I recognize was also nerves on my shoulders, where I think it really helped the sensation that, and that was in the game's performance.

I was charged with the graphics engine. there was an original graphics engine on there, and the game ran on my Pentium machine at the base resolution, and it was running like six to ten frames a second. And it could be variable and things could could could pull it down. Now I had been since I'm the only one who had done anything in assembly language and you know, I made studying the optimization, like I read Abra Ash's book on the Zen of optimization and things like that.

That sort of fell onto me, like, what can you do on that? And I undertook a mission. I went and pitched something to the whole company at the time. I remember we were in our tiny little kitchen where the big whiteboard was. I pitched to management and the other programmers, how about I rewrite the graphics engine and a big chunk of it in assembly? And here's what I'm gonna do, and here's like what we're gonna do with the art, here's what we're gonna do, you know, the different parts of the pipeline and stuff. And they supported me in it. They said, Okay, we're gonna assume you know what we're doing. We don't know how to any better. And this

Project took me, I forget, but I want to say seven months, eight months. And I wrote about 10,000 lines of 8086, 386 assembly language, handwriting the parallelism with the Pentium U and V pipes, all the all the hotness of the time. Now, during this time, I was actually able to meet Michael Abrach, who was working over it in software down the road from us. And we would have lunch and talk about our respective efforts, what Abrach was doing on Quake and what I was doing with Age of Empires.

And Abrush actually clued me into something that actually I wound up taking to heart performance-wise, which had to do with the frequency of accessing memory versus keeping stuff in registers. And and you know, he did that famous thing he did in Quake where you you were getting the prospective calculations for free and so on. And I did some of that where I was processing our pixels four at a time and applying effects and not having to not having to put so much strain on the memory.

But I'll make a long story short. we're coming up in the summer. We're getting down to about three months to go on the project. And this thing is still running eight to sixteen, eight to twelve, eight to ten, you know, frames a second. People had a now a couple of the artists, lead artists had Pentium Pro machines. My lead had a Pentium Pro machine. And you know, they could maybe get up to 20, but it was it was janky and it it was and it was boggy now. And and I kept working and working on this as a as a flat out engine replacement. And there was one night there, I remember this well. You it's

You could maybe say I've been at career peaked early, but the the the the all the wiring kind of came in and finally came the time to hook it up and plug it in and see what's Matt's little what's how how does Matt's how does it come together? So immediately the the game FPS and this is in the late night, I was there with my lead Angelo Loud and we shared an office. We did the big switchover, and immediately the frame rate jumped to 30 frames a second.

Jake Simpson (28:12)
Projects go come together, yeah.

Matt Pritchard (28:27)
And then I'd looked on on his Pentium Pro. And he's okay, 30 frames a second, solid 30 frames a second. This is good. And Angela, like, wait a second here. He had artificially limited in the Windows loop, the main Windows present loop to 30 frames a second. So he said, Hang on. And we unlimited up. So on my machine, it jumped up to fifty five to sixty frames a second. wow. And then he went over to run it on his Pentium Pro and we got a problem here. I can fix this.

And the problem was is he didn't account for more than two digits on the frame rate counter.

Jake Simpson (28:58)
How a terrible, terrible problem.

Matt Pritchard (29:02)
And and there was still there was one unfinished part of it, which was the scrolling, which I figured out a way to do parallel sort of hardware, use the blitter that was available on the two D two D graphic cards, not three D, but to use the blitter to do some heavy lifting, because we had this newfangled Direct X interface that let us get at it and a query to see if it was busy. And like if the AI was running, it wasn't busy, we'd you know, have it like move chunks of the screen because you some cards couldn't handle overlapping scrolls and you know drivers being flaky, whatever.

But to make a long story short, going back to it, that day worked up the state late at night, and then we put the new build out on the network for everybody. And when everybody came in, they left they left that night before, and you know, they're they're playing at 10 frames a second. They came in the next day, they're playing at 60 frames a second. And the animation was done, I forget, at 10 or 15 frames a second, but when you get to twice the animation rate, there's a harmonic there, and then everything just looks smoother, plays smoother. And

Other people's stuff was doing the same sort of thing. Mine happened to be visual, but at that time the way things were coming together, people would come in the next day and like, wow, this feels better. You know, wow, hey, you know, these things are coming online. And and and the really was a sense of the game was coming together. you know, you're asking me, did we think that we had something? And so, you know, the frame rate came together. In fact, we were able to up the default resolution out of the box from six forty by four eighty to eight hundred by six hundred because it had, you know, was now running that well. and another, you know, and a thing was identified that is people who had

didn't have gaming machines at the time, but just had average machines, you know, we would be able to play this. Right, yeah.

Jake Simpson (30:32)
Yeah, your market pack market's suddenly got a lot wider in terms of the the things you could do again.

Matt Pritchard (30:37)
Yeah,

Jake Simpson (30:39)
I just wanted to to interrupt it. There's a there's a great story that I wanted to add to this that Ernest Jim, who's the executive producer and has been the executive producer at Microsoft for quite some time on the Age of Empires product, was telling a story about when Age of Empires One was released, the head of Microsoft in China, because this was remember a multinational product that came out. I mean, I don't even remember how many languages you did, but it was quite a lot. It was released in China.

And the head of Microsoft in China was actually arrested over this product and was in jail for a week because the product recognized Taiwan. there was actually that Taiwan was recognized in the game. I'm not sure that there was a Taiwanese civilization, I don't think there was, but there was certainly reference to Taiwan, particularly in the map section or the rest of it. And China was extremely upset about it. And so they actually went away and they arrested the head of Microsoft.

China and he actually spent a week in jail over this before Microsoft could get him out. So, you know, feel good about yourself. You've got someone in another country arrested, man.

Matt Pritchard (31:40)
And I think I heard about that that also you had to issue a public apology. It was about the it was about the what was in the ancient history books. Their version is being disagreed with. So like, no, no, we these you know, the other ancient a Southeast Asian countries didn't do yeah what what is depicted here. Yeah. I'll s I'll say going going back, I was thinking of Stuart Mulder actually, who was a executive producer on Age originally, when we were shipping and coming up to our launch party, you know, it was going off to production and everything.

Jake Simpson (31:47)
Right.

Matt Pritchard (32:09)
I remember went out to lunch with him and we are talking about the the sales numbers and I do remember the numbers. So originally in the way things have gone out, we were our break even for sales to make money was around three hundred, three hundred fifty thousand copies, which would have been good. And Stuart went out and he said, I'm going out on a limb. We are gonna sell five hundred and fifty thousand copies of age one. And of course, he was off by a factor of ten, which we didn't know.

at the time. but but you know, we felt good about it. And and that's that's very typical that like, hey, we're going from breaking to like, hey, this is actually gonna sell and and be in the black and you know, and they and they were upping their optimism for it. Pi the age of empires internal to Microsoft was available on internal servers and we were getting blamed. People would say, yeah, I'm walking down the halls here in Redmond at Microsoft and I hear clank, clank, clank of the the s you know, the the legionnaires you know whacking on buildings or whatever, you know, playing the game.

And apparently we were a common scapegoat of if anything was running behind. which I think was all maybe a little tongue in cheek, I'm not sure. but certainly it it generated some enthusiasm. It also generated some, you know, leaks of pre release product apparently as well too. back then.

Jake Simpson (33:20)
move ahead to to so Age of Empires One is done, now you're into Age of Empires two and Age three. You know, I mean obviously more of the same, well I mean I say more of the same and it sounds very dismissive because Age of Empires two was generally regarded as the premier RTS of the time. I I and I don't think that's any kind of hyperbole to say something like

Matt Pritchard (33:40)
It it it age we like to say that Age of Empires One was a good game. Age of Empires two is a great game. We the team that was able to have continuity, to in other words, to keep going after we've done one, we take everything we learned, the things we wanted to do, and they we kept forge we kept forging ahead without a big rerouting of direction. You know, the difficulty like the age three, there was moving it to three D and s there were some things there that threw some wrinkles, but I think age one to two was just this linear progression and and generally it's acknowledged, went from good to great. Mm-hmm.

Jake Simpson (34:08)
And then H three and then we've and that as you said, you were working on a three D engine for that.

Matt Pritchard (34:14)
Now I left before H three was completed. I left Ensemble Studios in two thousand and four. Microsoft bought the company in two thousand one. There was growth, there was culture change, there were there were a lot of reasons, but myself and and several other people wound up it not being the best place for us to be. You know, we wound up moving on and I did a stint doing some independent contracting, did some for Gearbox and I would later come over to Gearbox for

Jake Simpson (34:38)
What products did you work there?

Matt Pritchard (34:40)
I worked on the Xbox version as a couple of the the Brothers in Arms games helping out with that. And then we worked on a a small thing that that didn't make it. got killed. It was on the the handhelds, the Nintendo D S and the Sony P S P and it was kind of a an advanced wars tactics style game that they worked on. cool. and during that time I got to see the other another team because they just Gearbox just inked a deal with Epic Games to use the Unreal Engine for ten games and they did a few things. They were obviously they were doing the Brothers at Arms

games which Unreal Engine three ran into some delays and then you know the market for World War II shooters just sort of evaporated at that time. You know, they were really popular in the mid 2000s. And then they kind of went away. But they had another team working on this mutatable weapons, this looter shooter thing that would eventually become Borderlands. Right. And where you know the one tailed off another went on. And I I got to meet that see that in the embryonic form. But I worked on the you know some of the handheld stuff. They were they were always you know looking at Angles and I think they were they were viable ones.

I went through a period of some personal difficulties at that time that just made things tough on me. This was leading to, you know, I I wound up getting divorced. It was just a very there was a very dark period in my life there for a few years and people who knew me then say, you know, Matt was really not in my not in my best game.

Jake Simpson (35:56)
War g war years then.

Matt Pritchard (35:58)
Yeah, I was not on my best game at the time. And part of that is I moved to Austin and went to work for Midway. as part of the, you know, separation that I went through at the time. And then we ran into a thing called the Great Recession in two thousand eight. Lo and behold, I just finished up work on Black Site Area 51. And I was on the road up to after we shipped to go see my family in Michigan when nine AM in the morning I went to log on to get my email and it was

I actually got on about eight forty five, I got the email, but then at nine o'clock the server connection was refused and the rumors were true the company was shutting down and going out of business. And that was the the black the Black Friday sort of, you know, everybody getting their pink slip day that occurred while I was actually away from the office. But for people who might remember, you know, two thousand eight was a rough time, you know, Midway long established, which I know you were at much earlier. Yeah. Company, you know, why would wind up filing for bankruptcy. I was in the midway Austin studio.

Jake Simpson (36:56)
Interesting

about that is is you know the guy that presided over the the end of Midway, Matt Booty. And it's not any fault, I'm gonna make this point right now, that at no point do I point fingers at Matt over the ending of of Midway because realistically it was actually the guy before him who had driven Midway into the ground with bad decisions and he'd he realised what was coming, did a runner. Matt kind of got stuck with, you know, shutting the to making sure the lights are turned off and shutting the door as it were. Matt was stuck in an awkward situation.

But Matt, of course, now is the number three man at you know Microsoft in terms of Xbox and Orosphere. He reports directly to Phil Spencer and he's well wildly in charge of everything, as it were. And I actually ran into him when we were working on Age of Empires too. I actually ran into him at Studio D. And that was a a a sort of a weird moment of saying, Hey, you know, r last time I saw you, you were a sound engineer, and now you're, you know, seriously high up at at Microsoft. And it does not surprise me in the slightest, since Matt is

possibly one of the best managers I have ever seen. his ability to cajole and get people to do things in a nice way without being a dick about it is is astonishing. And I've very rarely come across people.

Matt Pritchard (38:05)
I came into contact with him at Midway and had nothing but respect for him there. Right. Yeah. I mean he was he was sharp and you know, he came across as like he's he's actually got everyone's interest at heart here. You know, again have nothing nothing but good things to say about him. Right. But you know, an interesting time in my life in in two thousand eight with the recession, it hit the Texas game industry hard. Ensemble studios have been shut down, a number of other studios went out of business.

Yeah, and there were a few I I the names sort of escaped me, but there were a lot of people looking for employment in Texas, and it was really hard. So I had to, and again complicated with my personal situation, I had to look around nation nationwide. And interesting enough, this is where I wound up interviewing at several companies around the the country, and one of them was Valve out here in the Bellevue, Washington. Valve extended an offer to me. It was a good offer.

And I came out here, moved up away from Texas, moved to the Seattle area and went to work at Valve and I got to work on a number of the orange box titles. Valve

Jake Simpson (39:11)
That's really what put the on

the map though, isn't it? Besides Half Life, Half Life Two, it kickstarted Steam, it did you know did a the orange box echoes throughout the game industry.

Matt Pritchard (39:22)
Portal,

Team Fortress Two, Left For Dead. Yeah. Yeah, I worked on got to work on Left 4 Dead 2. I learned a lot there. I was there at Val for about three years. I wasn't combination of factors, it wasn't quite the right place for me to be at that time. And we parted ways. And I have to say it was the in my all my years, it was the best parting of ways with a company that ever. We both kind of said, Hey, yeah, this isn't quite working, you know, identified the local factors. We were kind of in agreement with that. And we parted and I've stayed friends with people there.

Jake Simpson (39:25)
Yeah.

Matt Pritchard (39:49)
you know, and still periodically check in and and and even visit with. when I moved on, they they made sure that I would transition well. And I actually wound up going down the street to Hidden Path Entertainment and continued working on Valve games, specifically Counter-Strike Global Offensive. And that worked out just fine. One of the early fake people from Ensemble Studios, Mark Torano, who had left before Ensemble before I did, had moved out here to go to work at Microsoft and then later was part of the found founder at Hidden Path.

You I came there, worked there for a while. During all of this time while I was at Valve or whatnot, I had periodically been making inquiries over at Microsoft about the two D Age of Empires games, Age of Empires one and age specifically Age of Empires two, and said, Hey, why don't you guys release a digital edition? Because Age of Empires two continued to sell all through the two thousands. And even as late as like twenty eleven, you could actually find it on store shelves at places like Fry's Electronics.

Jake Simpson (40:44)
It was a little tiny D V D sized box and it had all the the expansion packs built into it as well. I rem I I actually bought it, so there you go.

Matt Pritchard (40:51)
Yeah, so so it you know, it had some legs and what got me was weird at Valve. How many people who worked at Valve came up to me and said, You worked on Age of Empires too. And you I'd hear stories I still play this, I'd play it with my wife, you know, together against AIs or or this or that and and the love for that game and I'm I'm but I'm like, you you're telling me how much you love that and yet, you know, you you know, you were a big force on the Half Life Two and and this and that and you know, like, you know, wow, that's coming from people who, you know, have worked on iconic games.

And so I started making queries over at Microsoft to say, like, hey, you guys got any interest in putting this on a digital version? Because we actually had made a sort of a digital version before for Dell specifically, where H2 shipped with a number of Dell machines. It wasn't a it was a digital, but it was a non-CD version. And I said, you know, I remember we did that. Like it wouldn't be much to put it up on the Steam platform or do whatever. And so I knocked on doors for a couple of years and people would

It was really a hard thing to find who at Microsoft was actually in a position to be interested in it. Because I their game internal game efforts, you know, were all shifted to Xbox and then went through some iteration at that time. But while I was at Hidden Path, there was a new person over at Microsoft. And I I asked them if they were interested, and they replied, yes. That was a very interesting conversation. I remember going over to Mark Toronto's house after that and s then said, you know, I got something for you here. Microsoft is interested in

doing a digital online version of Age of Empires too. I don't have the facilities, you know, to just start a company right now to do all of this. I mean, I suppose I could, but what if I brought it to Hidden Path? And so we started up that conversation. the people at Hidden Path, the the other founders, kind of took over on the talking with Microsoft in the negotiations and worked out a deal where I was the engineering lead on that. And they, you know, they worked out

you know, all the well to supply a company and logistics and all that. It wound up being about a six, seven man project for nine months to to make what would become Age of Empires H D edition, Age of Empires II HD edition. And I was in the midst of that. Now there is a unfortunate little incident right about as it was nearly complete that I'll I'll just go ahead and and kinda say this I was trying in valve mode and it got came out of me that in trying to deal with some people to deal with the the existing

community, which was still very, very active. There were age unofficial Age of Empires II tournaments that had cash prizes in excess of ten thousand dollars going on and stuff. Wow. And there was a mod scene, there were people who had patched Age of Empires II way beyond what you're used to. They fixed all sorts of problems and were extensions. And I wanted all that stuff to come into H D and

Jake Simpson (43:37)
Let's talk a little about that. Let's talk a little bit about that because this was an individual, this is one person, wasn't it, who did this. And they patched the assembly version of the game, not you know, the actual executable, isn't that right?

Matt Pritchard (43:50)
This is a person known as Scriptor, yes. And this the identity of Scriptor has never been revealed, although the couple factors we know about what part of the country this person is in. We're not sure even of Scriptor's gender. And there has been some speculation that scriptor works for a government agency, perhaps even a three initial an initial agency. But I talked with scriptor scriptor was supplying me with like fixes to bugs that in all our years at ensemble we never solved. Like, okay, there's another bug that, you I know we shipped with well here.

It's actually this and this. My God, how did you figure this out without the source code? And scriptor was helpful, but the people who had made Forgotten Empires as a this giant mod that was taking over the community and where all the scene was, I was saying I needed to be able to support that. So I needed to know what they did. And in the process of dealing with I was dealing with a young folk a young person, he just kept badgering me. And so I basically let it slip that there was a a there was a remake in the process, and I should and that was my fatal mistake.

And I told this person, you just have to keep this under wraps, keep this under wraps, keep this under wraps, because we want to support this. Because right now, this is where all the big players are. This is where the the people literally streaming the stuff, you know, pre before we had the current streaming platforms and everything, where all the attention was. I didn't want the HD to come out and have the problem that hey you had with Counter-Strike. And this is a very much I've been working at Val for a few years mentality, you know, is to engage the community, you know, and not have a schism like between Counter-Strike Source and Counter-Strike 1.6 where they could decide.

eventually they sort it out, but for a long while there, you know, it kinda split the community in half. And my concern about that, but unfortunately, because I was not authorized, this person committed a a basically an NDA breach, which was my fault, this NDA and I yeah, and I and it and it didn't I didn't come out and write tell them, but it just got badger. Like, why are you wanting to know all the details to support, you know, all this stuff. And this and to understand this mod, this mod was 10 years in the making.

And by letting that out, I'm kinda like, Yeah, okay, yeah, we're doing something like that. We're doing you know, just don't, you know, keep it under and then they blabbed. And so I had to walk away from the project at that point in time just before it was released. And you know, that I I was shown the door. And the thing of it was it was absolutely necessary because I put hidden path in the most awkward situation. Later, the people at Microsoft would come back and say, man, we're really sorry about that because when the ever when the dust cleared, of course, they said, Wait a second, and they went to the hidden path the Forgotten Empire skies.

And that suddenly turned into all the DLC and everything else that made Microsoft a whole ton more of money and and put it on. You know, they realized after the fact that that was the right thing to do was to capture the community around it. Right. But because I didn't do it through official channels, which I tried to which I did try to raise. Can we talk about this? And official channels like, no, you that's not your job. You don't do anything like that. But I felt such ownership over the game that I, you know, and I got kind of badgered. Now later they would come back and apologize, like I didn't understand that the person I was dealing with is only like twenty-two years old.

And really in foreign he really slipped up on that. But this was before people like R Shep, who you and I know you know, even got involved with all of that. You know, in the end it came out what was right for the age of impairs community, but it cost me that that there because I I had to remember the difference between a valve and a Microsoft. A valve where I, you know, would have been reach out and talk to the to to to the mod makers of the community. Well, how do you think, you portal came about? How do you think, you know

Jake Simpson (47:05)
You know it was called Carbuncle, wasn't It was it was a project or something.

Matt Pritchard (47:10)
Dead, you know, with Turtle Rock and whatnot. You know, and they're they're like, you know, you go out there and you g you g you go out there and you make the best product possible. The thing with Microsoft is they're so procedure bound. Like only the authorized people can possibly do this. And if you can't get to those authorized people, they'll never even know. And you know, and I'm just here going, Well from I just need to know from a technical thing, how can I support their add ons? You know, I needed to get that technical information out of them. It was, you know, in retrospect what I

I both, if I could do it all over again, I both would do it differently and I wouldn't, if that makes any sense, because the result was a game to be proud of that would go on and then be a bestseller on Steam for, you know, sell pre in Italy very, very well, you know, and have a community and tournaments around it. And obviously it sold well enough that a few years later, Microsoft would come around and and come back with the ideas of definitive editions, which is nearing the point where you and I, although actually, people listening to this, I had met Jake before this. Jake coming up visiting people in the Seattle area.

And met him through, you know, game developer get togethers and actually I think he'd come over to my house at the time we were running and I think and like needed a ride somewhere. I'm like, Yeah, come on and just you know, from we hung out in some of the same forums because you know, very similar people. We go, you know, our our origin stories are very similar. We all have these battle stories, companies we've been through. Lots of shared experiences

Jake Simpson (48:25)
Experiences.

I mean there's a funny thing, I can tell a story about something that happened and and Matt will automatically come up with something almost the same from a different point of view in a different a different company, but almost the same kind of thing. There's a lot of shared experience between us, isn't there?

Matt Pritchard (48:39)
Yeah. So what actually happened is after that shipped I got with the guys from the Forgotten Empires and said around twenty fourteen said, Hey, you know, they did H Age of Empires two H D edition. What about an Age of Empires one H D edition, you know, from the back catalog is missing? And so with the help of Brian Shepherd, you know, we kind of pitched that for a couple of years.

Jake Simpson (48:59)
Should hold on just so I just wanted to interrupt you for a second because we should should give Ryan some of the credit here because Ryan again is a he's a modder, he's somebody who's been involved in the in the the community of Age of Empires for many, many years, and he's the organizing principle that's be behind the company called Forgotten Empires. And Forgotten Empires is basically a conglomeration of modders who are absolutely gargo over Age of Empires. And it might be Age of Empires three or it might be Age of Empires mythology. It's you know, these these are modders who just love Age of Empires and they

Are the people who actually create the new content that goes into Age of Empires to, you know, when you you see a new when you see a new DLC or a new civilization or a new set of maps or whatever, that's who they come from. And he's basically shepherding a bunch of models, which, you know, sometimes is a bit like herding cats, and they are spread out throughout the world. And this isn't even his full time job. That's the thing that blows my mind. But he's he's the guy that that sort of like does negotiating with Microsoft for money and all that stuff. He's he's

A an all round great individual, no doubt.

Matt Pritchard (50:00)
Yes, very much so. Yeah. So the funny thing is that we pitched it to Microsoft. And and the thing at Microsoft is that the people the person who was there that that was was receptive to the pitch for age two HD had moved on. And things were constantly you know, every year or two there'd be a reorganization, things would change. It was tough. And so we actually beginning of twenty sixteen, you know, we'd pinged them several times at different times the interest. We actually just said, Okay, we're giving up on it. Of course as soon as we gave up a couple months later

Microsoft reached back out and and expressed interest. And now what we didn't know behind the scenes was that there was this I think was Microsoft was gearing up for Age of Empires four and they were setting up a strategy and they said they wanted to. And they came back and said, Well, not just an HD edition, and they they came back with the ideas of the definitive edition. I had actually had moved on when I left Hidden Path, I went tried to get out of the game industry. And so I went to work at Disney Interactive doing embedded hardware development for their toys.

Playmation line of toys. And so I spent a couple of two and a half years there. It was a great time, you know, working on creating, you know, end consumer products. It's similar, but it it's a similar sort of skill set that allowed me to transfer over laterally. At the beginning of 2016, the Playmation had launched that Christmas. So it was very, very well received, but it was

Kind of somewhat similar in the toys to the Disney Infinity, which at that point in time Disney decided to get out of that business. Remember and they canceled all of Disney Infinity. Yeah, I remember and the Playmation was just summarily shut down. It's almost collateral damage. I took my remaining time, like they paid us for another couple of months on the payroll or whatever. I took that time to take all of my Disney employee benefits and take my family to Disney World. So I can produce all my super discounts, which which basically saved me over fifty percent of the whole bill.

I had it I had a great opportunity in there, I to say. I was able to take my parents who would spend the winters in Florida and they did not know they were going to Disney World and I took them there for their fiftieth anniversary. And so they celebrated their fiftieth anniversary from the I want to say it was either Canadian or French restaurant overlooking the the big pond in the middle of Epcot, watching the fireworks, having dinner there. you know, and they had never been before. They didn't know where we were going until we were on the road to get there. so my time at Disney came to an end.

Then I'm thinking, well, I'm still out of the game industry and I got an interviewing and I wound up getting an offer at HBO Code Labs where they do HBO Go and HBO Now and I thought, well, okay, this is out of the game industry and this this is a more web based, content based, but this will be an opportunity to learn. I I would learn all right, and we'll get to that here in a second. But while that w af that job was going on, Microsoft reached out to Forgotten Empires.

Because they had they, you know, H four is now underway and they were like, well, for a lead up, we want to release an H one, an H two, you know, H three definitive editions, you know, we wanna, you know, we're reinvigorating the franchise. And of course, originally they were figuring that they'd have H4, you know, released before, you know, tw in twenty nineteen or so even before the pandemic and all that, very optimistically. But they wanted to know if we could do a age one, and we were given an opportunity to that summer to like, well, can you do a proof of concept?

And so I was working at HBO and then coming home and working late into the night on you know revigorate re reinvigorating an age one proof of concept. Can we get can we show enough that it could be brought to, you know, because it was the oldest. They took a look at the source code and they're like, you know, is this from this is from 20 years prior? And they're seeing assembly language and and stuff in there, and they're just kind of it just kind of spooked them. Now, since I wrote a good chunk of it, I still sort of remembered it, and surprisingly,

One of my things in the closet was all my pages of notes, development notes from the original development, even including our internal newsletter, which Rick Goodman put together, which is kind of a fun read. anyway, we we put together we put together a proof of concept enough that that fall they said, Okay, we're gonna go ahead and give you a contract for that in September. And of course the contract in September didn't actually materialize until December.

Jake Simpson (53:54)
It's the way that contracts go, yes.

Matt Pritchard (53:57)
but we we geared up people and then it put me on the hot seat to sort of head up the engineering effort, people like Alex who had head up the art effort, Ryan kind of keeping things together, and assemble a team to do that. And during that point in time then I needed somebody who was really strong in networking and who just had some all around great chops and I knew this Jake guy. I remember at one point reaching out to him.

Jake Simpson (54:20)
What you did was you put a post on a forum and you said I'm looking for an engineer to help me fix bugs, somebody like Jake Simpson and I responded and went, I'm somewhat like Jake Simpson. That's really how came back. Let's not talk about me though. This is not about me, this is about you in your job.

Matt Pritchard (54:35)
But

but at this is the point where the the past sort of sort of reconvened and the work and and there were several people there. There was Mike, there was Barry, there were there were core of engineers there that I've gotten to work with most of them, you know, later on that came together on this project. And so one thing about this project where the original ensemble where we're all in one office, this was truly distributed, people around the world and and and doing the remote working and and virtual. And I will say that the couple year project from to get the age of age of empires one definitive edition done.

was incredibly demanding. It sort of burned me out at the end of it. It was a bit of a rough ride at the end. There were changes that were needed. There were there were late changes from Microsoft that were never accounted for in the spec. We had those we had the Darth Vader, I've altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further moments where we have additional deliverables but no additional time or budget to do so was given. We're just committed though to getting the game done and we did what we had to do to ship that out. but I was done

being the lead on that where I was both doing the maybe the managing engineer as well as doing a lot of the heavy lifting of the down in the trenches engineering and I mean obviously I left the job at HBO as soon as we got the word go on the contract. So I meant

Jake Simpson (55:45)
I

remember you you telling me that, you know, you this was all JavaScript you were writing at at HBO and it made me get up and put a gun to your head 'cause it was just so

Matt Pritchard (55:51)
Do you want to?

I understood why. So they used JavaScript so it could work on just the widest range of platforms. Anything that could run a run a web browser. Right, you know, that could run that. But the JavaScript they had, homegrown frameworks, it just didn't fit with the kind my background and upbringing and and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. And so by the time I was getting ready to go there, I just dreaded getting up in the morning and having to face that. So it was a relief to get away from something and and to that I that

that was a good thing to do. it was great to get back to to revisit something and and and do it for the fans, but it was definitely very demanding to have to wear two different two different company hats at the same time and and anybody who can do that, it's it's literal hats off to them because it's it's very tough and very demanding. At the end of it, I was fried. And I also at that time, suffering the ravages of old age in the fact that my had a knee and my knees were wearing out and I was needing a surgical full knee replacement was in the cards.

even I remember when I was going downtown Seattle to HBO or even before that to Disney, the knee was starting to become problematic and had it looked at and there was you know the doctors telling me it's just a matter of time. You've got an entire football career's worth of injuries, except you never played a minute in your life.

Jake Simpson (57:08)
officially a bionic man now, aren't you? Because it's been replaced and you you make alarms go off when you walk through airport security.

Matt Pritchard (57:15)
I can't take the fast lane through pre-check or anything anymore. No, they got they they gotta they gotta scan my knees. After H one, I needed to step down in that role. The age two definitive edition project came around and you stepped up in that role and took over

Jake Simpson (57:32)
He had a bit he had an asshole boss, yeah, it's no doubt. And I think you do still do. I mean he's you know, the guy you work for is such a dick. you know, I can't stand the die. So

Matt Pritchard (57:35)
Point me on yeah.

The hard part is it i is it's almost like he knows me where I've come from. It's like I really can't bullshit the guy. He calls me out.

Jake Simpson (57:48)
No

it's I I yeah, he he annoys the crap out of me a lot of the time, that's for sure. Yeah.

Matt Pritchard (57:53)
but but but he does have good taste in science fiction. I gotta for that.

Jake Simpson (57:58)
Well he likes his Daleks, that's for sure.

Matt Pritchard (57:59)
Thanks, Alex. And and and catches the it catches the references on things and all that. And and for the people listening, you know, the the the professional association continuing on, Shake did a just an absolute bang up job for Age of Empires II definitive edition, gets should get a lot of credit for that. One of the things that kind of gets me about these definitive editions and the companies that, you know, from the HD edition on, because there was a company after I left that from Hidden Path that took over, Success has a thousand fathers.

And people sure do love to claim that I'm the reason for success for that. And there were things. That company in Canada, I remember watching the live stream when it when it was released, there this Chris guy took a point to slag the original Microsoft the original ensemble team and basically call them a bunch of wankers that didn't know what they were doing. And I took great offense at that because

Yeah, we may have to edit this part out. I don't know. The but you know but when there's a great sickly successful game, everybody hangs their hat and maybe inflates some importance on it. But you know, for the record, in terms of bringing the teams together and even the in the technical trenches, I felt like what I contributed there on H D and then age one and then you what you contributed on age age two should not be understated. You took on a really, really, really tough role. There's a lot of fans out there, you know, that we've been able to please that's part of what motivates us.

I know I'm kind of speaking for the both of us 'cause it'cause I feel like the thread's kind of coming together there, but it it's it's more boring. It's not as interesting as the stuff way back in the day, thirty thirty five thousand.

Jake Simpson (59:26)
So so we should I should tell this little story. So we got some d some shirts from Microsoft, some Age of Empires developer you know, developer shirts and some particular ones that have Age of Empires developer, you know, whatever it is. And when I'm wearing that, if I go out, you know, I can I can be literally going through TSA pre check or something like that, and somebody will stop me and go, god, Age of Empires, I love that game. I used to play that so much when I was you always hear these stories about how much Age of Empires meant to people and it

It's a privilege to be able to work on that. I mean, even more so for you because you you worked on the original one and I just worked on, you know, sort of trod where people have already trod, as it were, whereas you were part of the original trail place, isn't it?

Matt Pritchard (1:00:04)
Absolutely. And it gets me after all these years, because I'm still active a little bit on Reddit. The Reddit community knows that I was involved and and has you know involved with the the resurrection of the games because you know, I cared to figure out the the two D games. I got one just recently and again somebody's saying, you know, my dad played this and introduced me to this or something like that, and I rem you know, now he's gone or done like that. And like, man, what do you do? It just chokes you up and you know, you know, people they occasionally you get things like that, and I I have done that with the stuff that I wear.

I try not to rest on my laurels, so to speak, you know, and be the guy al you know, always talking about his glory days because th they do move on, but at the same time it it's more it's worth acknowledging, you know, hey, you know, we went to the Super Bowl that year, you know.

Jake Simpson (1:00:39)
But that was

It's been an hour and seven minutes now, so we're gonna have to wrap this up. But I just wanted to say thank you immensely for spending your time with me and talking about your your career and and where you've been and what you're doing. It's it's absolutely fascinating. I mean, i obviously your story is very different and very personal to you and that kind of access and entry into the games industry is no longer viable, really. I mean, although perhaps it is, I don't know. Maybe we could there's an argument to be made that with the cost of entry these days, you know.

Matt Pritchard (1:01:11)
Unic's free. It's it's not the same. And I have to circle back for thirty seconds on something much earlier said. It the way I got in was very much knocking on doors in a way that you yeah, you kind of don't do that at all today. I commented that Warren Spector turned me down at Origin. that's fine. Yeah, so from Ensemble Studios had a really famous hiring process where the whole company would get involved and kind of vet the person and you we had this various spree de corps.

GDC, the Game Developer Conference, there was an Austin Game Developer Conference in the late nineties that they'd have a GDC Austin. And I was moderating our panel discussion on hiring practices in the industry. And this was after Age of Empires was released, which had brought, you know, the spotlight on us and the company and everything, like, ooh, you know, you're currently, hey, you guys are currently very successful at all that. And Warren Spector was in the audience and brought some and I call I would talk about the practices and I say, and you don't do what? And I kinda called Warren out on the spot.

And Warren took it gracefully. And I'll and he'd zing me back on that too. But but he never forgot me, you know, and actually when he was doing junction point, he's like, Hey man, you want to come to work in junction point? Whatever, I won't vote won't put you through the ringer quite so much this time. And I was like, Well, well truthfully back when I did, I didn't know what I was doing the first time around. I got better at the you know, as the interviewing goes on. But I did get him back in a in a in a conference setting in front of a bunch of a bunch of other people.

being able to say like, you know, in my early experience, like I don't think that you you want to run it like this, like it happened when I was at Origin there. And anyway, you know, and and the people over the years, lots of great stories like that. But yeah, we're running out of time. Yeah. I'm gonna close it up.

Jake Simpson (1:02:47)
No problem. Thanks very much, Matt.