Rare at the Herbert: “Tales From Twycross” Developer Panel with text transcription

by Lerako on Feb 27th, 2019

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James Thomas: Hello, my name is James – I’m a lead engineer at Rare. I’ve been there for about sixteen years now; started on Grabbed by the Ghoulies. I worked on Viva Pinata, Kinect Sports, and Sea of Thieves and Rare Replay. I had a big hand in the exhibition next door, and I will be your, ‘host’, I guess, for this shindig… Next to me…

Paul Machacek: Hi, I’m Paul Machacek, I’m the Test Manager at Rare. I’ve been there for thirty years… so yeah, it’s quite a long time. So I was an engineer for about fifteen years, and I worked on Battletoads, Banjo-Kazooie… Oh, bloody hell, everything.

[James Thomas laughs]

Paul Machacek: Ooh, I was not supposed to do that, was I? Then I was a Producer for about ten years as well, so, yeah…

Joe Neate: Cool. I’m Joe Neate, Executive Producer. I’ve been there about five and a half years, so, a ‘young pup’ compared to some of these guys in terms of the ‘Rare lineage’. I was there for the latter stages of Kinect Sports Rivals, and obviously I’ve been on Sea of Thieves since then.

Robin Beanland: Hi, I’m Robin Beanland – I’m the Music Director at Rare and I’ve been there since 1994. I’m trying to think, my first game was Killer Instinct [Arcade] and I worked on things like Conker, Jet Force Gemini, Sea of Thieves of course, and lots of other stuff…

Gregg Mayles: He can’t remember.

[Robin Beanland laughs]

Gregg Mayles: Hi everyone, my name’s Gregg Mayles – I joined Rare from school at eighteen in 1989. I spent a couple years in the Testing Department and then somehow talked my way into Design, and after doing a couple games you’ve probably never heard of, I was fortunate enough to work on the Donkey Kong Country games. Then after that I did the Banjo games, Pinata, Ghoulies, Kinect Sports and currently I’m the Creative Director on Sea of Thieves.

James Thomas: So the first question we’ve got is from Rare Gamer on Twitter, and it leads on to some of what we’ve been saying… “What was the first game you were involved in at Rare, and how has your job in the industry changed?” I mean, Paul, you’ve probably been through the most ‘butterfly cocoon’ changes through the entire thing…

Paul Machacek: Well I’m not sure it was an industry when I started, I mean we were carving things on stone tablets and it seemed to work… First game I did was Super Off-Road on the NES, which was a console that existed many moon ago.

James Thomas: It’s a great console.

Paul Machacek: It’s a great console, it was fabulous – you had 2K of RAM and we still got games into it. Although, it was almost not Super Off-Road, I nearly wrote a Chess game. Rare didn’t actually release a Chess game, but I was briefly attached to something called, “Chess Master 2000” and thankfully the legal thing fell through. And just after I got all the pieces moving around on the screen, I got this nice car game to do so…

James Thomas: And Robin, how’s music changed since you started?

Robin Beanland: Oh, drastically I suppose. The main thing is sort of memory, we started off with ‘blips’ and ‘blops’ and very small amounts of memory for music and now, if we want to, we can record symphony orchestras, and we have done. I suppose it’s just that kind of whole thing where you had to write pretty small, memorable tunes and now you can explore and sort of go down different avenues and things like that, and let the software drive that – it’s a lot more creative I suppose now.

Joe Neate: How many instruments do you reckon you’ve learnt during your time at Rare?

Robin Beanland: I don’t know… probably about twenty, I suppose, something like that.

Joe Neate: Twenty different instruments, which is pretty impressive.

Gregg Mayles: What was the hardest one?

Robin Beanland: I think the Hurdy was pretty hard.

Gregg Mayles: The Hurdy Gurdy.

Robin Beanland: The Hurdy Gurdy was pretty hard; the first time I played that it was cranking this wheel and it sounded like cats fighting in the back…

Gregg Mayles: It was quite fun listening to you trying to learn how to play it.

[Joe Neate laughs]

Robin Beanland: And it actually scared me the first time I played it, and I thought, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with this.” Then I just stuck with it, and managed to get something alright out of it, I suppose.

Paul Machacek: I think one really obvious difference that’s happened is that I was ‘Employee Seventeen’ at Rare, and when I turned up I was the eighth Engineer there, and that meant we had eight games in production. We have far more Engineers attached to our games these days – there’s quite a few – I don’t know how many we’ve got working Sea of Thieves now, but…

Joe Neate: Sea of Thieves? Probably about forty or fifty, I’d imagine.

Paul Machacek: Yeah, I mean the scale of the whole thing has just massively exploded over that time, and you had a lot of responsibility back then. You know, we’d have one Engineer per title, half of Artist and one-eighth of Dave Wise who did all of our music at the time.

Joe Neate: How does half an Artist work?

[Robin Beanland, Joe Neate, James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek [shrugging]: Mornings and Afternoons, I don’t know…

Joe Neate: Painful, yeah. See, I started in QA like a lot of us, I think, back at EA [Games] just after they’d bought Bullfrog [Productions], so like ‘Theme Park World’ kind of era in 1999, around then. I kind of worked my up through different roles in QA, became a QA manager and then moved across into the Production side of things. So, Sea of Thieves is actually the first game that I’ve been involved in from the very start alongside Gregg and a bunch of other people at the, ‘What do we want to do next, what’s the idea we want to come up with, and why?’ [stage]. So it’s been a really unique experience for me to be involved at that stage and have that ‘blank slate’, which is basically the hardest thing that there is, I think, which to be told, ‘Build what you want’ and then you’ve got to figure out why, and then you’ve got to convince people that this is the thing you want to do. But yeah, it’s been very, very rewarding to go through that kind of phase, right Gregg?

Gregg Mayles: Yeah, oh definitely. Having a blank piece of paper is pretty terrifying when you can actually do whatever you want, and then as Joe says, you’ve got to get everybody bought into the same vision that’s in your head. I always say it’s like getting something out of your head and into someone else’s head, and that’s really difficult, but if you can do it and get the whole team kind of sharing the same vision, you can create something really special.
And my story has been pretty much the same as all these other guy have said, like when I first started there was no such thing as a Games Designer in the industry; the role just did not exist. It would be either the Engineer or the Artist that was working on the game or a combination of both would actually do the design as well. So I guess I was right at the start of the industries role of having a Games Designer, and pretty much in those days, if you played a lot of games and you knew a bit about games you could become a Games Designer. Whereas now, we’re a lot more critical of the people that apply to us, I mean there’s some really talented people whether they’ve come from Universities or whether they’ve taught themselves using Unity themselves and they’ve built their own games; I mean, I just came from a background of drawing on bits of paper, which I haven’t kind of grown out of – I still draw on bits of paper.
I think the industry as a whole has diversified and specialized so much, that personally the thing I miss the most was back in the day anybody could have a go at drawing graphics if you wanted to, because the graphics in the games weren’t that great, so you didn’t have to be a particularly talented artist. Certainly in a couple of the games I first worked on, I actually did some of the graphics, and I think I did some sound effects in one game as well.

Robin Beanland: Yep.

Gregg Mayles: My one and only go at doing sound effects…

Paul Machacek: I think most of the Engineers did that as well, we used to have a lot of ‘Engineer Art’ which would quickly get replaced if we had the opportunity.

James Thomas: I think we still do that now though – it’s almost an incentive for the Artist to actually step up and put what you need in there, to boot Programmer Art.

[Joe Neate and Paul Machacek laugh]

James Thomas: I think with a lot of the Grabbed by the Ghoulies placeholder Chapter Cards, I think we did that with very rough screenshots to chivvy along the Artist.
Following along from what you were saying there Gregg, from Jeph Perez on Twitter, “What games inspired you to get into the industry?” You said you started straight out of school, were there games around at the time that made you think, ‘This is exactly what I want to do as a career?’

Gregg Mayles: I guess you’re all expecting me to say that at school I wanted to be a Games Designer, but I didn’t.

[Robin Beanland and Joe Neate laugh]

Gregg Mayles: It was almost completely by accident – I had no intention whatsoever of getting into the industry. I used to play games as a teenager but being as I didn’t like the technical side of it, I didn’t want to go into that role, so I never did computers at school.
So when it came to leaving school, I almost went down the traditional route of getting what you’d consider a sensible job, and it was only at the very last minute that my parents saw this tiny, little advert in the local paper saying ‘Games Tester wanted at Rare’, and I’d grown up playing all of Ultimate’s games, so I just thought, ‘Hmm… I’ll go do that for a year and then when it doesn’t work out I’ll go and get a sensible job.’ So that’s where it all started from.

Joe Neate: It’s really funny actually – that’s almost the same as mine except my mum actually applied for my first ever job in the games industry…

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek and Gregg Mayles laugh]

Joe Neate: … and then told me afterwards, so I was like, ‘Eh, I’ll go along…’

James Thomas: She just wanted you out of the house at this point.

Joe Neate: Yeah, but then as soon as, literally the first day in the games industry that I had just even testing a game that was broken and buggy and everything, I knew I was working with the type of people that I wanted to work with and a place that I could make a career. Like, you just knew instantly it was the right atmosphere, the right vibe – just the right kind of passion of everyone to doing something really cool that they were working on, right?

Robin Beanland: Yeah!

Gregg Mayles: I think it was very, extremely non-conformist in those days; the people you were working with were… I don’t know how to phrase this without insulting them…

[Robin Beanland, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh – Paul Machacek shrugs candidly]

Gregg Mayles: Not ordinary.

[Paul Machacek cracks up]

Joe Neate: I don’t think you nailed it, Gregg.

Gregg Mayles: No, I don’t think I did – I think it was very much a hobbyist thing in those days; there was no such thing as a University course to go into the industry, so it tended to be people that had grown up almost playing games in their bedroom or coding, or drawing stuff in their bedroom. So, I mean a lot of the people maybe weren’t the best, socially.
I always think to work in games, or in the creative side of games, you have to have that slight edge to people – and when Designers apply to Rare I’m looking for that slight quirk or that edge ‘cos I think that’s where the really cool ideas come from.
And although it’s gotten a lot more mainstream nowadays, I still think to work in the industry I’m still looking for that kind of character and the same kind of personality that we want in people that actually goes into our games.

Joe Neate: Our most recent Design hire didn’t have any direct games industry experience…

Gregg Mayles: That’s right – none whatsoever.

Joe Neate: But he came from designing Escape Rooms, which was really interesting when we saw that on his CV, right? ‘Cos you’ve got to go through the same thought process around designing things and learning, watching people try and figure these puzzles out and stuff, and then get through. So that guy came in and it’s just a coincidence that he looks a little like a young version of you, doesn’t he?

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek and Gregg Mayles laugh]

Gregg Mayles: You’re not the first person to say that – that’s actually my retirement plan; we’ve hired someone that looks a little bit like me and gradually I’m going to teach him all I know and then I’m just going to disappear.

James Thomas: And how about for you, Robin? Because obviously with composing you could [do] film, TV – why did you choose games?

Robin Beanland: Well, I worked in TV but the first thing I did was I wanted to be a Rock Star in a band, which…

James Thomas: We’ve seen the pictures.

Joe Neate: You had some glorious hair back in the day as well Robin, didn’t you? Everyone check that out on Twitter.

[Paul Machacek laughs]

Robin Beanland: We had a Radio 1 session on the Tommy Vance Show – ‘Tommy Vance and his leather pants’, and then I started doing sort of TV music. I think it was my brother who had an Amiga 500 and he was playing a lot of the Bitmap Brothers games, and that was the first time I thought, ‘This is actually starting to sound like music’ and I started to explore. I got an Amiga 500, borrowed one, and did a demo on it and sent discs out to various companies. I got a really nice letter back from Martin Brown at Team17 saying, ‘This music is fantastic, really, really like it – however, you’re very unlikely to get a few 100K to write music in a game. You really need to know the machine inside and out.’
And it was just kind of that sort of process and I did some TV stuff, and again, Rare were looking for a composer and I sent a tape off, and got an interview and I’ve been there ever since.
But I think it was the Bitmap Brothers stuff that was the first thing I thought, ‘Oh, this is actually starting to sound less like the ‘plink plink’ phase and more like music.’

James Thomas: And did you start bedroom coding, was it?…

Paul Machacek: Yeah – when you look at all the Engineers that originally started at Rare, Chris Stamper dropped out of Loughborough Uni, none of the rest of us went to Uni – we were all self taught from our bedrooms at home, except Chris Sutherland, I think he went [and] actually had an education, the rest of us were thickos…

[Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek: But yeah, I taught myself to write games, actually, and I was playing a few games and learned to program, which is actually the thing I wanted to do. So I thought I’d write some games, and did that on ZX Spectrums and those sorts of computers at that time.
By the time I did my A Levels, I’d had about three or four games that actually released – I was approaching publishers back then, and I worked freelance for a couple of years after that.
The last game I did was published by Codemasters and by complete, random accident a friend of mine knew the Stamper Brothers at Rare and I ended up getting an invite to come up – I showed them a game and we spoke about sheep for half an hour, and thirty years later I’m embarrassing myself telling this story.

[Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek: So I’d already written and published a bunch of games by the time I’d joined Rare. When I interview people, I don’t care what their education is – if people can string words together better than I’m doing right now, and show me stuff that they’ve actually done, and talk about it, critique it and don’t sound like a complete muppet than I might carry on talking to them.

[Robin Beanland, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek: Was that good?

Joe Neate: Well encapsulated.

James Thomas: Because I think being in the – although it’s been sixteen years – I guess, the ‘newer wave’ of Engineers…

Paul Machacek: No, the GoldenEye team was the newer wave.

James Thomas: The new wave, the eras of Rare at this point.

[Paul Machacek laughs]

James Thomas: I had a traditional University education on that, but I was fixated on games throughout it. I think at the time my Lecturers were quite surprised that someone wanted to do something other than web design or banking software at this point. So I spent my entire last year trying to make a 3D engine for my dissertation. I mean… it worked – it ran at three frames a second, and I think you were being chased by a white triangle around a cube… But I wrote it all myself and I think that combined with the fact I did art A Levels had piqued the interest of Chris Sutherland and [other] people got me in. But nowadays, I think as long as you can program, as long as you’ve got an interest outside of just ‘pure programming’ – we want people who have personalities, who like doing games, who like doing things off their own back as well – we’ve got a whole mix nowadays.

The next question we’ve got on our list is musical related…

Robin Beanland: Oh, is it?

James Thomas: So I’m going to look directly at Robin for this one… “Is there anything new in the works for Sea of Thieves music similar to the ‘We Shall Sail Together’ tune?”

Robin Beanland: Um… Yes!

James Thomas: Splendid – next question!

[Gregg Mayles, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

James Thomas: Tick.

Robin Beanland: We’ve just released the trailer for ‘Forsaken Shores’, and I wrote a little shanty for that. Jon McMurtrie gave me some lyrics and he actually sang them to ‘Grogg Mayles’, but I said, ‘I think we should do a new melody for that.’ So, we wrote that for the trailer – but there seems to be quite a lot of positive response to that tune, so I’m thinking that may be along the same lines as ‘Becalmed’ and ‘We Shall Sail’, yeah.

James Thomas: So have you got a lot of shanties in the back pocket, shall we say?

Robin Beanland: There’s quite – there’s a few, yeah – a few waiting to go…

Gregg Mayles: Don’t forget the one I did…

Robin Beanland: Yep – is that one the ‘Rubbish Sailor?’ or the ‘Rubbish Pirate?’

Gregg Mayles: When you’re really desperate.

James Thomas: Is it broadcastable?

Gregg Mayles: It is! Yeah, it’s just not of the quality that Robin normally expects.

[Paul Machacek, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

James Thomas: So… possibly one for Joe now… we’ve got a question from Daniel on Twitter. “Will you add the feature where we can change our Pirate in Sea of Thieves?”

Joe Neate: I think requests like that definitely fits for Sea of Thieves [where] there’s ‘Things we would love to do and makes sense’ and ‘Things that kind of… don’t’ – and that obviously fits into the ‘Things we would love to do and makes sense’, it’s just a question of when it comes on our road map, right. We know why people want that, at the moment our focus is on adding new things in and new things to the world; new ways to play; new goals; new rewards; new stuff to enrich the journey… But we will get back, and we will allow that in future, officially.

James Thomas: Yeah, ‘cos there’s enough threads internally as well about all the suggestions and…

Joe Neate: Oh, absolutely!

James Thomas: Yes – one of the most ridiculous threads we’ve got on our internal forums is one called ‘Quick Fun’. I think it started as quick fun suggestions for little tweaks that we could do to the boats, and that soon just spun off to having things like, “Can we have a Sky Kraken?”

[Joe Neate laughs]

James Thomas: Just a giant beast that goes through the sky and plucks your ship and hurls it so… yeah, there’s plenty of ideas in the works for that.
One from Doctor Marcus Brody on Twitter…

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek and Joe Neate laugh]

James Thomas: For those of you who don’t know, that’s my wife.

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek and Joe Neate laugh]

James Thomas: “What Easter Eggs have you managed to sneak in the game?” In any of the games that you’ve done, have you managed to get in any little nuggets that have got past, or been signed off by production?

[Shifty glances and nervous laughs are exchanged]

James Thomas: Is it that these ones you’re not willing to admit?

Joe Neate: I’ve got an appropriate one, before you guys go in… So it was back before I joined Rare, I was at Sumo Digital and I worked on ‘Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed’ and one of the weapons that you could send was these swarms of bees, which would land on the track in front of you and they would attack you. It was like a First Place leader attack.
So the announcer would say, “Bees!” whenever you pick up that weapon – they’d tell you whatever weapon you’ve got. And there was someone called James Drew who worked at the Studio that was an Artist, and he was terrified of bees or wasps – he’d call them ‘Sky Tigers’, right? He would literally run screaming from wherever you were, if you were outside having lunch or having a beer at the Pub, he’d be running off screaming, ‘Sky Tigers!’. So we got the announcer to record ‘Sky Tigers!’ instead of ‘Bees’, and so literally the night before submission of the build, I was like, ‘Did that get in?’ and Cheaves, who was an Engineer was like, ‘No, no, haven’t got that in yet.’ and I said, ‘Just get it in, it’s low risk.’ and this was like, two in the morning or something – you can imagine…

James Thomas: Before you shipped the build?!

Joe Neate: Yeah, before we submitted the game.

James Thomas: I’m sweating thinking of it.

Joe Neate: And we made that change at about two in the morning, so it’s like once every ten times you pick up that weapon, the announcer will just go, ‘Sky Tigers!’ – we put it in just because it was funny – and the game didn’t break, so, therefore it was fine…

James Thomas: I did try to get Easter Eggs in once, on Viva Pinata 2. I was in charge of making sure the build was packaged up and sent to Test properly so there were times where I was stopping there late at night, and there’s only so long you can just watch a progress bar before you get bored. And this was the time we had a lot of Rock Band instruments around the office – so I made it my mission to try and make it so you could garden using a Guitar Hero Controller. You could just wander around the garden with the Whammy Bar, and then to water flowers you just… [James pantomimes dipping the guitar neck down]

[Robin Beanland and Joe Neate laugh]

James Thomas: …Tip the neck. Dave Wong, our Tester, freaked out when I told him about this. Something about ‘Test Matrix’ and ‘Two weeks to go to shipping’, so unfortunately it never quite made it.

Paul Machacek: We’ve done lots of things that we shouldn’t have done for ‘two weeks to go to shipping…’

James Thomas: The next question we’ve got is from DS on Twitter and it’s for Gregg. “Will you guys ever make a ‘Grabbed by the Ghoulies 2’ and if you did, what sort of ideas would you like to put in it?

Gregg Mayles: I think the simple answer is probably no. I don’t think it was something you might consider our ‘Most Successful Game’, even though it was a great laugh to work on and the team had a lot of fun making it. I think Grabbed by the Ghoulies was a bit of a casualty when we swapped from Nintendo to Microsoft, because it originally a GameCube game and it was designed very much with a Nintendo audience in mind – and then we swapped kind of halfway through to try and make it work for an Xbox audience. It just didn’t really fit – that kind of very simple almost cartoon-esque kind of fun, throwaway game didn’t really sit on this kind of higher powered console where everything else was brown and gray shooting games…

[Joe Neate laughs]

Gregg Mayles: So it didn’t quite fit and we didn’t have enough time to change the tone of it, or age it up a bit, which is what I would have done. So I think if I was to do another one – we always start thinking about, ‘If we were to do another game, what would we do?’ so in the case of Ghoulies I was going to make it more… actually, it was a bit before its time – it was going to be a bit more open-world. So rather than going into individual rooms, I was going to make it a bit more open so you could kind of wander around a haunted village, but the lack of sales sort of scuppered all of that…

Joe Neate: I’m genuinely impressed that you managed to get any Xbox marketing team to sign off on the name though, ‘Grabbed by the Ghoulies’…

Gregg Mayles: I think that was in the early days of when they bought Rare and it was kind of, ‘We bought you guys to do things differently and be a bit out there, and a bit provacative’ so in the early days, we had that. We had a Gameboy game that me and Paul worked on, ‘It’s Mr. Pants’ – I don’t think we’d get that one past Phil Spencer these days, but back in the day that was fine.

Paul Machacek: I’ll tell you what, we even went too far on that – there was one animation icon for the ‘Save Game Slot’ and when Gregg saw it he basically went, ‘You are not putting that in the game.’ I don’t know if you recall it, but it was ‘highly suggestive’… I’ll leave it there. Anyway…

Gregg Mayles: No but, I don’t think there’s many games I’ve worked on that I wouldn’t like to do again, but it’s just a case of I’d always prefer to do something new over something old…

James Thomas: Possibly leading on from that, we’ve got a question from Manuel Garcia from Twitter. “How has Rare maintained their distinctive art and musical style over the years as staff has come and gone, and has there ever been any serious discussion about changing direction?”

Gregg Mayles: I think just creatively you could probably lump all of the disciplines together whether it’s kind of art or design – all of the creative direction. It’s almost kind of in the DNA originally of the company, but it gets passed to the people, and even though people change over the years, that kind of DNA gets passed down. New people come in and they add a bit to it, but at the core of it, people still think – and I think still in the same way, certainly I did when I joined in the late 80’s – that [it] came directly from the Stampers. That was their way of thinking, and that’s how they wanted to entertain people. And they just basically infused that in all of their employees at the time and as the company has grown and expanded, and as people have come and gone, their kind of thinking in how they approach games has remained. I think it’s typically British – if there is such a thing – I think Rare is quite unashamedly a British company and always has been. You can see it in the sense of humor, the charm, the quirkiness – we don’t do things conventionally, we always look out for a unique way to do things. Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong, but I think that’s what makes Rare what it is – it’s very unique in a very crowded industry.

Paul Machacek: I agree with that – when I joined in 1988, I didn’t know about the handful of NES titles that Rare had done up until that point, because they weren’t really visible in this Country. All we knew about was what Ultimate had done, and you accidentally get a gig at your heroes. And then you think, ‘Oh no – I’ve got to write an Ultimate game’, basically. And some of them went better than others, but then other people that were joining at the time were saying the same thing – so there was this ethos of, ‘Oh God, we’ve all joined Ultimate accidentally and what do we do now? We’d better work our socks off and create some really cool stuff…’ And then more people come in and they see what you’re building and it just feeds on itself.
After thirty years there’s a lot of passion in the studio, there’s a lot of people coming in – faces have changed but you know, there’s a huge diversity in what we’re doing and without wanting to constantly come back to Sea of Thieves, which is obviously ‘current’, you can see it in what we’re doing today. It’s very different from what we’ve done before, but there’s passion there and people want to make the best of it.

James Thomas: But the difference is partly what attracted me as well – I looked back at all the NES games, SNES games, and N64 games I’ve played before starting and it was the variety that attracted me to the company as well. I think that’s part of the DNA – the fact that we don’t try and stick to one thing for too long. We might try two or three things, but then everyone wants to try something new because there’s so many other different genres, different things we want to try. I think to Gregg’s point about this, ‘there’s always something new, something exciting that we can try and move onto.’

Paul Machacek: It’s incredibly hard to be successful with something, and as Gregg says, you start from nothing and it’s like, ‘Well how do you turn that into something that people actually want to play?’ And you know what – for every game that you can think of that we’ve done that did alright, there were plenty of others… that didn’t…

James Thomas: Are you bagging on Grabbed by the Ghoulies again here?

[Joe Neate laughs]

Paul Machacek: I’m thinking about Beetlejuice actually.

[Paul Machacek and James Thomas laugh]

James Thomas: Robin, how do you think the music style is…

Robin Beanland: I think with the music it’s that thing of trying to do something different with it again, whether it be when we were on the N64 and we’d do things with the channel fades – when you moved to certain areas, certain other instruments would fade up and join with the music. And I suppose it’s still that kind of thing of, ‘What can we do with the music?’ and ‘What can we do that’s seen as funny?’ [If] somebody comes to you and says, ‘I’ve got a giant boss made of feces and I want him to sing an Opera – can you write a tune for that?’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, okay.’ So there’s that one, and then I suppose with Sea of Thieves the obvious one with that is you can get drunk, and play a shanty drunk. And we’re still trying to think of those funny…

Paul Machacek: But we’re not advocating that… Drink Aware…

Joe Neate: Exactly. [Joe lifts water glass] And this is definitely water.

[Paul Machacek laughs]

Gregg Mayles: Well Robin, you spent a lot of time at the start of Sea of Thieves – we knew we were going to have shanties, but it’d been so easy just to write a traditional shanty – I remember you spending ages and we had some chats about, ‘How can we bring something new to something obviously very obvious and traditional?’

Robin Beanland: Yeah, and we looked at traditional shanties, and they all just felt a little bit too dry and a little bit too serious and we want it to sound like a load of Pirates who have got no idea how to play instruments. It’s all a bit rough around the edges but they’re just, you know, a gang of Pirates just singing and having a good laugh.
And things like, ‘What if they drink a load of grog and start playing the instruments?’ It’s just having that thing of it being a bit quirky and I suppose it gets us back to that sort of British thing again – it’s got a sort of British sound to it, I think.

Joe Neate: Even the instruments you bought, right, for Sea of Thieves – because you went to music shops looking for really rare instruments like the Hurdy Gurdy and stuff – but I remember you telling me about how they’d bring out a bunch of them and there’s a nice, new one and you’re like, ‘No, no, no – not that one – I want the one that’s a bit broken and the sounds a bit rubbish.’ Because that’s what Pirates musical instruments that’s been carried around on a boat, and dropped overboard and stuff [would sound like], right?

Robin Beanland: Yeah, like the Concertina – there was a cabinet full of these different Concertinas, and we tried each one out – I don’t play the Concertina so I would just play a few notes on it but it all sounded kind of very clean with a very nice sound; and then there was this one at the back which was a student one, so it was quite hard to play because the buttons are smaller and closer together, but it just had all these creaks, and the buttons were really clicky and stuff – it just sounded very piratey, like it had been on a boat and had been kicked around the place. There’s a big rip in the bellow, so it wheezes quite a lot as well.

Gregg Mayles: I’m hoping you got a discount…

Robin Beanland: After all that it was pretty expensive still.

[Joe Neate laughs]

Gregg Mayles: You could have pointed out all of these broken things.

Robin Beanland: He [The shop owner] said, ‘Yeah I know – that’s the special part of it.’

James Thomas: But it even goes to the piano you’ve got in the Music Room as well, because I go up and play the drums in the Music Room and for ages…

Gregg Mayles: Oh was it you?

[Paul Machacek, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

James Thomas: And all of the sudden, one day this big piano appeared and I know you’d been looking for one for a while, but still continued, yourself and Jamie [Hughes]. They waited until they found one that was water damaged – I think it was an insurance write-off job, or something like that…

Robin Beanland: Well they said, ‘We don’t want to sell you this because we’ve had a flood.’ And we were like…

James Thomas: ‘That sounds perfect!’

Robin Beanland: Yeah, ‘That sounds like the perfect piano!’

[Paul Machacek, Gregg Mayles, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Robin Beanland: Because we didn’t want to use it as a piano – I’ve got loads of nice piano samples and things like that – we just wanted to hit it with stuff…

[Gregg Mayles, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

James Thomas: You didn’t tell the shop this, did you?

Robin Beanland: Yeah I think we did – they said, ‘Aren’t you going to come and try it?’ and we said, ‘No, no – just deliver it, that’s fine.’ And we just wanted to take the lid off of it and scrape the strings, hit it… then put other things on it and rattle, bang the keys and stamp the pedals. And I suppose that’s the thing for me at Rare to have a massive opportunity to go and explore and do this stuff, instead of like, ‘We need a tune, get a tune written.’ It’s very much like, ‘Yeah, just go and create.’
And having a session of doing all that sort of stuff; banging about, scraping the strings – that basically ended up being the foundation of the Skelly Fort music. That whole kind of rhythm and stuff is all that piano – but it’s not being played as a piano.

James Thomas: We’ll take one more question from the piece of paper in front of me, and then we’ll open it up to you folks in the audience. It’s probably going to be a quick one because it’s along the same lines as earlier. This is from Hood News Media on Twitter, “Will Ships sections or Ships ever become destructible?”

Joe Neate: So right, basically, ‘Will we enhance destruction on Ships in the future?’

James Thomas: Yup.

Joe Neate: That definitely sounds like something in the ‘We-Would-Love-To-Do-That’ Bucket, for sure. And we’ve prototyped some of that stuff early on – we prototyped masts coming down, and additional damage and things – and so we know it’s cool. We know that that’s a real visceral kind of thing as well when you see it from a distance, and you see it kind of toppling. So, we definitely want to do that in the future for Sea of Thieves, like keep growing and adding to the kind of strategy and tactics, and just the emergence of Ship Battles and everything else, right?

James Thomas: It’s not in the ‘Quick Fun’ section though, is it?

Joe Neate: That’s not in the ‘Quick Fun’ section.

Gregg Mayles: Sadly not.

Joe Neate: But it’s in the ‘Fun’ section, for sure.

James Thomas: Grand! Okay, so we’ll start taking questions from the audience – we do not have a microphone that we can pass around, but if you please put your hand up we will select…

[The first hand is shot into the air]

Joe Neate: That was quick.

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek, Gregg Mayles, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Audience Member #1: What was the inspiration for the Banjo-Kazooie series?

James Thomas: “What was the inspiration behind the Banjo-Kazooie series”, as we all turn to Gregg…

[Robin Beanland and Joe Neate laugh]

Gregg Mayles: By asking that question you probably know the history of a little bit of Banjo – how we started off as Dream.
So for the benefit of people that don’t, once we had finished doing Donkey Kong Country, we took the graphics technology and thought, ‘What else could we do with this instead of a platform game?’ So we’re all massive fans of Zelda so we thought, ‘Could we apply that same kind of graphics technology to an adventure game?’
So we spent the next couple of months kind of messing around with the graphics to see whether we could do it, and by that point we got this lead character that was like a young boy with a wooden sword, so obviously a bit inspired by Link, but it was almost kind of inspired by my childhood growing up – as a kid I’d make things out of wood; I’d make my own armor, and swords and shields and then batter my brother and our friends.
So I wanted this kind of feeling that he wasn’t like a hero, he didn’t have a proper sword – it felt like something he’d made.
And Dream progressed for a while, and we struggled with the technology and we realized it wasn’t going anywhere. We’d had this game with this young boy in it for so long that we got pretty much fed up with looking at him. So we thought, ‘Right, let’s change it to something else, we’re fed up with this boy.’ So we thought, ‘Let’s make it an animal instead’ – I don’t know why, but we did.
And we tried a rabbit to start with – I think it lasted two days because it looked absolutely terrible, and the next thing we tried was a bear, and that bear was Banjo.
It was uncanny how similar that bear that we first drew in Dream, in an adventure game, actually became Banjo in the game. Like, the fact he wears a backpack has got nothing to do with Kazooie whatsoever – the fact he wears a backpack is ‘cos it was an adventure game, and the idea was you go around collecting all this stuff and he’d store it in his backpack and then fetch it out when it was needed, so Kazooie wasn’t even in it at that point.
And then, we were fortunate enough to see a really, really version of [Super] Mario 64, way before anyone else had seen it – it was a very simple demo of Mario running around on these really simple 3D blocks and we thought, ‘What we’re doing is going to be so outdated.’ So we basically scrapped everything we did that we were doing with Banjo at that point and basically rebuilt it, wrote our own 3D engine. We took everything out of the old Dream, apart from Banjo, because we liked the bear character. We thought, ‘Well let’s take that character, put it in a game that’s a bit like Mario, put our twist on it.’ And that’s the game that eventually became Banjo-Kazooie.
So, slightly convoluted, but most games are if you track the history of a game back far enough – how they came about, how they started or things that happened before a game started.
I mean like Sea of Thieves was no grand plan when we intended to make this game – we did Kinect Sports Rivals, it didn’t do very well, and basically we had to change tack.
If Kinect Sports had continued to do well, we wouldn’t be working on Sea of Thieves now, so it’s the fact that those games came to a halt and we were just told, ‘Make a Rare game for todays audience.’ That was pretty much the only guidance we followed. So there’s a lot of games like that when you track them back – like GoldenEye, probably one of Rare’s most famous games was a movie license that we didn’t really want to do, to be honest. We did it as a favor for Nintendo, because they’d entered into this contractual obligation to do it and they didn’t have a studio to do it. We said, ‘Yeah, okay we’ll do that.’ Well, obviously to try and gain some favor at a later date, and it was a game that many people in the studio didn’t want to work on, to be honest – so we gave it to a bunch of new employees, most of whom had never made a game before and they started off. I think to start with it was very similar to Time Crisis, you know the game where you press the pedal and the guy hides behind boxes. So it was very much an on-rails shooter, so it wasn’t even the GoldenEye that everybody got to love, and I’m sure there was a couple of points where the game was actually, officially canceled, but we never actually told the team…

[Joe Neate laughs]

Gregg Mayles: So they were still working on this game, and I think there had been some legal falling out so the game was actually on hold for a couple of times, but we never told the team it was like, ‘Yeah, just carry on and I’m sure it’ll sort itself out.’ And it did!
Initially, GoldenEye wasn’t a success – we all went to E3 in that year and the stand was absolutely empty, there was no-one playing it and we thought, ‘Oh God’, it’s like ‘Thank God that’s out of the way, we can get back to doing our own games, our own IP.’ And then gradually the sales started mounting up, and it was like, ‘Hmm… this is doing okay actually’ and then in the end it became a massive success. So I think you’re never really sure how a games going to do, and where it’s going to come from and how it’s going to end up – all you can really do is try your best, and then a lot of it in the ‘Hands of the Gods’ as to how it does and what you can be doing next.

James Thomas: Thank you very much for the question. Ah… [James finds the next hand] yes.

Audience Member #2: This is a question to Paul. In your time at Rare, what challenge have you found to be the most difficult? And also which challenges have been the most rewarding?

James Thomas: So the question is, “During our time at Rare, what challenges have we found most difficult and what have we found the most rewarding?” Do you want to start, Paul?

Paul Machacek: Well I came in as an Engineer, and telling a computer what to do is very easy. Becoming a producer and telling people what to do…

[Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek: But you learn, and it gets easier over time. Sorry, what was the second part of the question?

Joe Neate: What was the most rewarding.

Paul Machacek: Most rewarding.

Joe Neate: Telling people what to do?

[Robin Beanland, Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek: No, no, no. But certain projects for different reasons; the last Nintendo game I worked on was Viva Pinata: Pocket Paradise and apart from the fact that I really like the end product – it worked really, really well on that system – the team was just rocking and rolling, it was just an incredibly smooth development. We really didn’t have any problems, and so that was fun.
Going into the office one day, and having Tim Stamper come up to myself and Kev Bayliss who was Art Director at the time and saying, ‘Could you pick up this project that’s not going very well somewhere else?’ and then me saying, ‘Well what’s the deadline?’ – and by the way, this had been going on for nine months – and the response I got was, ‘Saturday.’

[Joe Neate and James Thomas laugh]

Paul Machacek: And then him saying, ‘Well, you know what – if you can do it three months we can stall the publisher for that long.’ And so we beavered away, ballistic hours Kev and I for three months knocking it out – and it went out! A game called WWF SuperStars, it did very well, so that was lucky.

James Thomas: Joe?

Joe Neate: The most challenging thing for me actually, was when I joined it was in the latter stages of Kinect Sports Rivals and I’d never worked on a Kinect game before. And as a producer I’ve always been a kind of ‘gameplay orientated’ producer, so working closely with design, with engineering but really like playing, giving feedback, helping push the gameplay forward to try and create a really polished, balanced, satisfying experience. And so, you know how things work with a controller because you’ve grown up playing with that all the time – but then you come in and try to use your instincts to make design decisions, or push decisions through using a completely different control system that just doesn’t work in the way you’d expect. And having to learn all the nuances of how it recognizes different parts of the body, and if you put your hand in front, or if you’re wearing reflective clothing than it won’t work, and all of this crazy stuff.
It was actually really tough on your morale as a person, as a human being because I was like, ‘$@*%!’ – I think probably before that, nine out of ten times your decision or gut [instinct] would be right when it comes to a kind of gameplay feel or thing, or gameplay mechanic – and it suddenly shifted to like 50/50 at best with Kinect.
So that learning curve, that challenge – but coming into a team that had already gone through two Kinect games and a lot of people had experience – but still super hard.
For me that was so challenging to adapt to that – it really was – it was actually a really tough period in my career, to be honest because all of that experience and knowledge that I’d built up over time was kind of thrown out the window as I was working with a completely different mechanic – that was really hard, actually.
But then switching that, the most rewarding for me was in the early stages of Sea of Thieves – or ‘Athena’ as it was known then, before we’d even picked a name – working with Gregg, working with our prototype team like Andy and Shelly [Preston], the Engineers, like a really small team. For that first six months, figuring out the idea, putting together a pitch for it – so literally a set of slides talking about ‘Why we want to make this game.’ Players creating stories together was the phrase that we kind of used and the kind of vision we had, and then layering Pirates on and building this prototype out. And then we had Phil Spencer who came over [with] Kudo Tsunoda who was part of his leadership team at the time, Phil Harrison, who was head of Europe and some of the other Xbox leadership team and they had no idea what we were doing at Rare – we’d sort of kept it secret or purpose, and we were like, ‘You can come over to the studio, and we’ll tell you.’
We took them through the pitch, and they were all, ‘Well this sounds cool!’ and we went, ‘Alright, well now you’re going to play it.’ Because we had been building this prototype up that was… not pretty, but it had been done in Unity – it was all about proving the game experience and I think that was a really brave decision for us to get a bunch of executives playing something so early when normally you get something really polished, really sexy and really try to ‘wow’ them and blow them away with explosions and visuals. But we had felt so good that the gameplay experience that we’d crafted in that time, that we wanted to put that in front of players – and we actually videoed them too, and we didn’t tell them we were videoing them playing the game, so we had our camera on the top of each of their monitors. We actually edited a video together and sent it to them a week later saying, ‘Hey it’s the first story from Sea of Thieves, the first player created story together.’
But it was that moment I think, when they came back from the play session – they were all laughing, they were all chatting, they were all sharing their stories – they were doing exactly what we expected. We had very craftily put the business part of pitch at the end of the day after they had played the game, after we had gone through it – and they’d sign anything at that stage…

[James Thomas laughs]

Joe Neate: But I think when that had wrapped up, and there was myself, there was Gregg, there was Ryan [Stevenson], the Art Director, there was Mike [Chapman], our Design Director and a bunch of others. We were all just kind of gathered together and we were like, ‘I think we’re going to f@#king make this game!’ because having that idea, putting that together and then going through that moment – that was when I knew, anyway, that we had something incredibly special and we were going to get the chance to go on that journey together and make it. Yeah, so that for me was the most satisfying moment of my time at Rare, for sure.

Robin Beanland: I think for me the most challenging was probably when I first arrived at Rare, and I think it was just getting into that headspace of coming from writing music for TV and not having any concept of, ‘You’ve got to fit it into a small amount of memory’ My first game, Killer Instinct [Arcade] was four megabytes of memory to fit all the music, all the sound effects. When you think about a minute of audio is 10 meg – it’s sort of all bandwidth it’s like, ‘Well, how are we going to do this?’ And it was that coupled with getting to that Rare headspace of making music for video games and creating sound effects as well – I’d signed up as a composer but at the interview it was like, ‘Well, we want you to do Sound Design as well.’ – so that was completely new to me as well. And you know, the game was coming out in six months, so you have to get on it pretty quick – so that was pretty challenging.
I think in terms of the most rewarding thing, it’s not one experience, I don’t think. It’s that thing of when you’re working on a game, you’re kind of in this eye of the storm almost; you don’t have any idea of what it’s going to be like, or how it’s going to be received. I think it’s just when people really enjoy the game and you get that feedback from them and it’s just amazing. There’s some fantastic stories of the community who have been playing Sea of Thieves, and people who are not ‘social’ online and you’ve really brought them out of their shell and stuff like that. It’s usually just the feedback from people, and when people do covers of your music like, ‘I’ve done a version of this song that you wrote.’ That is an amazing sort of feeling, really – you feel quite privileged that somebody would take the time to go and do that. So, not one thing – but lots of different things.

Gregg Mayles: I think you can kind of split it up into mental and physical stuff. I think I’d agree with Joe that Kinect was probably, mentally the hardest, most demanding thing I’ve faced as a Designer. Likewise, you just have to throw everything you knew about Games Design mostly out of the window because you haven’t got a controller and it’s a very different type of game, but at the same time the fact we actually managed to release a game was incredibly rewarding. When we first got – I think it was table tennis – working in a really simple form, it was a really special moment. So I think, that was probably mentally the hardest challenge, I think physically would be any of the early games where we just all worked crazy hours to get things finished because we had a passion. The teams were very small and you didn’t rely on anybody else to get your job done – if you put the hours in you could pretty much create what you wanted to, and lots of people embraced that and basically just went for it.
Certainly we knew what opportunity we had when we did Donkey Kong Country in the early 90’s so the team basically almost killed themselves to get it done. But at the time, you look back on it and no-one was telling us to do it – we just absolutely wanted to make the best game we possibly could. But physically there’s certainly no way I could do that these days; I was in my early twenties so I could manage it back then, but now you just couldn’t do that, and it’s just not self-sustaining – I don’t think I’d want to do it even if I could.
In terms of rewarding, I’d certainly agree with Joe that when we first got the Sea of Thieves prototype up and running and we actually played it – that was one of the special moments that I’ve come across at Rare. But there’s been others, I think going to visit NCL in Japan and getting to chat with basically all of your heroes at Nintendo was a really cool moment and I’ll certainly always remember that – particularly trying to explain to Mr. Miyamoto how the game of Cricket works…

[Robin Beanland and Joe Neate laugh]

Gregg Mayles: … was a particular highlight because he just couldn’t understand that there’s eleven people, I think… eleven people in a team?

Joe Neate: Yeah, eleven. Yep.

Gregg Mayles: But when ten people are ‘out’, the eleventh person is out as well – and he goes, ‘Oh, so he doesn’t get a go?’ and it’s like, ‘No, no. He has to go as well.’ Just couldn’t understand it. It’s just sometimes the little things that you pick up along the way, but generally finishing any game is rewarding, whether you absolutely hated working on it or whether it was the best game in the world. Whether it did really successful or didn’t, just working with a bunch of people creating something from scratch and then actually releasing it is an incredibly rewarding experience.

James Thomas: Thank you very much for the question, anyone else? Let us go… [James finds the next hand] right at the back!

Audience Member #3: Have you guys ever gotten in trouble for your sense of humor with a publisher, particularly with Nintendo? And I have to ask, will we ever see another Banjo platformer?

James Thomas: So, “Have we got into trouble for our sense of humor with our platformers?”

Joe Neate: Yes.

Robin Beanland: Yes.

Gregg Mayles: Yes. Many… many, many times.

James Thomas: Are there any that we can reveal here?

Gregg Mayles: Umm…

Joe Neate: Be careful!

Gregg Mayles: Oh we’ll be careful…

[Joe Neate laughs]

[James notices Gregg adjusting something in his pocket]

James Thomas: I thought he was just about to pull out a list…

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek, Gregg Mayles and Joe Neate laugh]

Gregg Mayles: No, no. Yeah, certainly Rare’s games are always kind of E rated, or kind of like younger audience, but we were all massive fans of The Simpsons, and The Simpsons is a really good example of multi-layered humor where there’s things in there for kids and then there’s stuff that’s aimed at a slightly older audience. And we all loved The Simpsons, so we started trying to think along the same lines, it’s like, ‘Okay this games got an E rating, but what could we squeeze in there?’ Then it became almost a game between us trying to fit things in and legal departments and publishers trying to spot them and take them out. I don’t think any of it was malicious – we just wanted our games to have that edge, to have that humor, for older players to see things in the game or read things and appreciate it. So we didn’t do it because we were just being idiots – we were just trying to kind of have some fun and… yeah, sometimes we probably overstepped the line and fortunately they were spotted and we took them out, and we’re all a little bit more mature these days.
So, even though we still put Easter Eggs…

Joe Neate: To scale.

Gregg Mayles: To scale? Yeah, well… to scale. We did actually have a Skeleton as our Twitter handle for a while, so I don’t think that kind of sense of humor is going to go away any time soon. But, I think there’s still room to try and put things in, like if you read through the dialogue in Sea of Thieves there’s definitely some… double meaning in there, there’s definitely nods to future games – there’s nods to all sorts of things.
But I think maybe whereas in the past it was very much ‘in your face’, it’s a lot more subtle these days – so you have to work a lot harder to find it.

[James finds the next hand]

James Thomas: At the back!

Audience Member #4: You mentioned that you built Sea of Thieves in Unity and then switched over to Unreal [Engine]. So my first question is, what was the reason to switching to Unreal and also, are there any Easter Eggs in Sea of Thieves that nobody has found yet?

James Thomas: So the question was, for our Podcasting recording equipment, “We started in Unity and moved to Unreal for Sea of Thieves, why did we do that?” The main reason is that Unreal was far more, I guess, expandable for the type of game that we wanted to build. Unity was great for us to put it together, in fact, it spawned out of a Game Jam right at the beginning, and our main engine during that was Unity ‘cos so many people in the studio knew how to do it. We also got people to come in and give tutorials so that the Artists [could] jump in as well. So, so much of the early work was done because of that knowledge that everyone had towards it.
But we did big assessments, we pretty much just did like, ‘What is the pros and cons of having Unity over Unreal?’ and at the end of the day Unreal won out and so we started transferring across.

Audience Member #4: Yeah, I use Unreal myself for my projects.

Joe Neate: Yeah. I think when we were doing the assessment and even at the early stage of when we were deciding what engine to use for the prototype, we knew the most likely engine we’d end up with – if we went with an external one – was going to be Unreal. So there were some conversations going, ‘Should we prototype in that so we can start getting used to it?’ and stuff, and I remember the conversations and it was like, ‘No we should pick the best tool for prototyping and proving out the vision and the idea as soon as possible.’
For speed, for iteration and everything, and especially because we weren’t relying on anything super pretty, so just about speed of iteration and getting Designers and Engineers to fly through gameplay feel and stuff – Unity was absolutely the right kind of reason and decision.

James Thomas: And for the long term as well, I think it was great that we had the split because for that very essence of speed, like some of that code is nasty.

[Gregg Mayles and Joe Neate laugh]

James Thomas: Like dirty, dirty code deep down that we do not want anywhere near our production code. So it was nice also having that ability to take a breath, look what we want to bring over and then bring it over nicely as well. So, keep a nice, pretty codebase that works and then a ‘Hackathon’ on one side.

[James finds the next hand]

James Thomas: Question, yes!

Audience Member #5: Question for all – what is your favorite Rare or Ultimate title that you did not work on?

James Thomas: “What was our favorite Rare or Ultimate title we didn’t work on?” Do we have to have been there when it was worked on?

Audience Member #5: No, no no – just weren’t involved.

James Thomas: Okay – so, Solar Jetman. Always Solar Jetman.

[Joe Neate laughs]

James Thomas: But I honestly really wish I’d worked on Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts ‘cos I was doing Viva Pinata [Trouble in Paradise] at the time when that was going on in the other barn. And I remember coming over every Friday or something and you [Gregg] had bizarre race challenges – so I walked in one afternoon and they were racing ‘the alphabet’; they were just making cars out of letters and seeing which one would go fastest around the track. So, just that level of insanity, I wish I’d been a part of it…

Paul Machacek: Well I was a big fan of Ultimate games, obviously, I have some here. I remember walking into my sixth form study when I was at school one day, and my mate who I shared the study with was playing a game – we had a Spectrum in there. I took one look at it and I just said to him, ‘Is that the new Ultimate game?’ because it couldn’t have possibly been anything else, and that was Knight Lore. Which I went back to recently… very hard and unforgiving. But it just set things in stone for me. And actually the last game that I wrote, which Codemasters published, was a 3D isometric puzzle style game along those lines, so it had quite an influence on me.

Joe Neate: I’m going to cheat a little bit, and go with Rare Replay because I didn’t work directly on that even though I was there at the time and obviously James was Lead Engineer…

James Thomas: You were pointing cannons at us outside!

Joe Neate: I was pointing cannons at your barn while you were working on it, yeah, but for a couple of reasons… For one, because it gave me a way to discover loads of Rare games that I hadn’t played, and to see why everyone was such fans of Rare and of all these games back in the day and stuff. And to see them brought in this one place where it was easy to play them – you didn’t have to go and run an emulator or anything else – and so that was super cool to just discover all of these games that I hadn’t played in the past, right? I grew up with the Commodore 64, with the Amiga and skipped a little bit to PlayStation, so I didn’t really get to see all of the Rare games. The other thing though was that the passion of the team that worked on that compilation, like there’s been loads of compilations over the years that have been just a bunch of games shoved in a box and thrown out to try and generate some cash, as so many different publishers have done. But you had a team there that were all Rare fans, that all had their passion about what game they wanted to push in it, you know, Knight Lore was in it, like, Jetpac…

James Thomas: Solar JetMAN – Jet. Man.

Joe Neate: Yeah, Solar Jetman, sorry.

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek and Gregg Mayles laugh]

Joe Neate: But to see everybody pushing for the ones they wanted, and then to push to get a progression system in, and to get all these rewards – like the stuff that Karn [Bianco] did with the Battletoads making it endlessly replayable. All of those things were just borne out of a team that had so much passion for what they were doing. And the song at the start, like all of that – genuinely incredible. And so to see that come together while we were working on something else, and then to be able to play it – that for me is my favorite Rare game, for all of those reasons. But I just love to play a game that shows the passion of the team that’s working on it – and it was coming out of every pore of Rare Replay, and I saw how hard they worked to deliver that in the time they had as well, so yeah – that’s definitely my favorite one.

Paul Machacek: Sorry, could I just say actually at one point early on in that project, there was a big white board in one of the barns – I think you [James] were in charge of it, I can’t remember. And there was a little card up for every single game that could possibly be a candidate to be in this, and they had to be whittled down to thirty games. And I remember being dragged up there one day with a couple of other people – some of the old-timers – and we were being asked what we thought, you know, ‘Which ones should be included’ and I remember standing there and going ‘No, not those two – they’re $@*%’

[James Thomas laughs]

Paul Machacek: And it was just everybody fighting for their favorite – obviously Knight Lore was going to be in there, but there were others that you were just going, ‘No, no, no – just, don’t bring that back. Nobody wants to see that.’

James Thomas: We had the best stack of Top Trumps cards really, and the end of it.

[Paul Machacek laughs]

James Thomas: We had laminated cards and everyone was making their own ‘perfect lineup’ for it. Robin?

Robin Beanland: I’m trying to think, I mean there’s quite a few that I haven’t worked on that I really… I think Viva Pinata’s pretty much up there, I think that’s fantastic – just the whole kind of visual. I think it was really just quite an original idea as well. But there’s loads really, Perfect Dark’s another one that I’d really like to have worked on, and the remake of Jetpac I think. I’ll go for three.

Gregg Mayles: I’d choose Killer Instinct actually, I was a huge Street Fighter II player back in the day – I’m absolutely rubbish now and I haven’t played a fighting game for years – but back in the day we had a Street Fighter II cabinet at Rare so we played most lunchtimes and after five. When we were doing a fighting game it’s like, ‘Aw, I wish I could have worked on that.’ I think I was doing Donkey Kong [Country] at the time, so I couldn’t work on it. But it was just, one, I was a fan of fighting games, and two, that kind of level of mechanics with the touchy-feely kind of intricate gameplay of how all the moves worked together – that would have been heaven for me because I’ve always had that kind of focus on the core player experience.
And for me, a fighting game cannot hide behind any kind of fancy backgrounds or anything else; if the mechanics of the two characters, or the characters on screen aren’t right then the game will fail.
So I just love the purity of it, and I think even now, given a chance, I’d still like a go at trying to do a fighting game – and trying to bring maybe a different slant to a genre which hasn’t really moved on for many, many years.

James Thomas: We are overrunning at this point in time, so we’ll take one more question. I’m going to offer it up to my mum at the back… nothing?

[Robin Beanland, Paul Machacek and Joe Neate laugh]

James Thomas: Okay. [James finds the next hand] Yes.

Audience Member #6: How and why did Banjo-Threeie transform from a straight sequel into Nuts & Bolts?

James Thomas: “How and why did Banjo-Threeie transform from a straight sequel into Nuts & Bolts?”

Gregg Mayles: Yeah, pretty much because I’d got bored doing the previous formula. We’d done, obviously, the first game and then the second game was more of the same but kind of bigger and cleverer – I just didn’t feel I’d had anywhere left to go by doing a third one that was exactly the same. So we started exploring, ‘What could we do differently for a third game that maybe would take people by surprise to kind of shake the genre up a bit?’
The first idea was to actually do a remake of Banjo one, but then change the gameplay – so when you started the game it made it look like it was exactly the same game with better graphics but then the more you played we’d actually changed things that happened in the levels. So in the first level with Mumbo’s Mountain, the mountain was going to break open and there was going to be this massive termite that came out the top, so players that would have played it before it was like, ‘It’s the same game, but it’s different.’
But I think, ultimately, we were concerned that it would just be seen as a remake, even if it was clever. So then we started dabbling with an idea where it was like a more traditional Banjo game but the player played it at the same time as Grunty – and Grunty was AI, and she’d be running around the levels trying to collect the Jigsaw at the same time. So it was almost a battle between you playing Banjo and then Grunty is AI playing a traditional Banjo game. But we kind of turned that one down because of the problems with AI – we didn’t think we could make AI that good enough to warrant the game. So third time lucky was kind of looking at all platform games – like when you get to do the puzzles, and the fun bits as I call them, they’re really cool – but the bits in between were quite boring – there’s like lots of walking around on levels; I think I called it, ‘The Traveling’.
So I looked for a way to try and make ‘the traveling’ fun and kind of hit upon the idea that rather than the character walking, what about if he rode to try and make the traveling fun?
But then [we] wanted players to decide how they were going to travel, hence the creation of vehicles – so that’s where it kind of came from.
I still love the game, I know it didn’t do that well, and I know there’s a lot of ‘Banjo Purists’ out there where it probably wasn’t their first choice, but I think it was a very ambitious project and the editor we wrote to put the vehicles together was probably one of the best pieces of software I’ve ever seen written at Rare. And I think the game is still fun – I think when Rocket League came out a few years ago I thought, ‘Hmm, that’s actually Banjo[-Kazooie]: Nuts & Bolts.’
We were kind of ahead of our time, but maybe didn’t quite package it right.

James Thomas: Right, well with that thank you very much for coming to see us today – I’ve seen a few LB’s and things hanging around so I think we can stay for a short while to do signatures and stuff if people want to. But other than that, thank you very much for coming, thank you very much to The Herbert for hosting, and yes – have a good rest of the day!

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