Big Ape Productions was a small studio started by programmer Dean Sharpe and designer Mike Ebert to work with Lucasarts on a game called Herc’s Adventures. Mike had previously worked on successful games like Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Metal Warriors. I met Mike through a friend, I showed Mike some of the 3d artwork I was working on as a hobby, and in mid-1997 he offered me an entry-level job to work on their next Lucasarts game as a 3d modeler. The plan was to make an original story with some no-name heroes in an action-heavy game based in the Star Wars universe.
Well, as it happens, right around that time, the poohbahs at Lucasfilm realized that they didn’t have a team working on any licensed tie-in game for the upcoming Episode 1 film. As such, Big Ape was tasked to shift gears and create a game that followed the story of the movie.
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Game -
Big Ape had a grand total of 6 employees when I started, and in truth I believe we made the game with a dev team of 12 or so people. I learned a lot, including getting my hands dirty doing some of the friendly AI design work in addition to doing all of the 3d modeling and animating in the game. We adapted character tools made for Jedi Knight, and I learned quickly enough that I could churn out multiple characters per day. We shipped with over 300 models created with animation sets. (P.S. I could build models, but I wasn’t an animator - I learned on the job just to give them anims to work with, and eventually we just kept going towards the finish line.)
The project was slated to be PC-only, but maybe six months before we shipped, Lucasarts informed Big Ape that they wanted to push for a Playstation version. While we didn’t have the manpower in-house, Lucasarts offered some of their top console programmers to help. Eventually the Playstation version was delayed, and it required Mike Ebert and one or two of our other designers to be on-site at Lucasarts for several months - which is when Big Ape needed the time to find the next project, leaving Dean to be the main contact person to land one since Mike was busy. (That decision probably was the most crucial event that caused the company to fold a few years later.)
While the PC version of TPM came out on time, it didn’t hit the notes that people would expect from a Star Wars game. Character movement was slow and clunky, the visuals weren’t up to par, and some of our levels included escort missions that turned into a chore. And, y’know, the animation wasn’t great. I would like to think that the reviewers took out their frustrations with the movie on us, but we certainly deserved our low review scores. I do occasionally hear from fans of the game who appreciated how much gameplay there was to do in the game. (Images have links!)
We had spent the previous 2 years working on a toolset that could pretty robustly handle some large playable spaces with lots of NPCs and a ton of minigames, so clearly our next game should be a ringed combat game, right? Well, Dean decided to grab the first offer that would pay the bills, and that came from Fox Interactive in the form of a wrestling game for Springfield’s finest citizens.
Simpsons Wrestling - It was a pretty fast project (15 months) that we had to build a new rendering engine from scratch, and in truth none of us had much experience making any kind of fighting game. We looked at Power Stone for ideas of how to handle the combat gameplay, and we were pushing Fox to allow us to change the core idea to be more of a sandbox combat title that allowed you to interact with the environment, but they insisted on using wrestling as the core theme - so everything had to be contained within the ring, and the gameplay would rely on selling character powers, which we didn’t do well at all.
It was fun to come up with dialogue lines that would get recorded by the voice actors from the Simpsons (some that are VERY inappropriate by today’s standards), but apart from that, the project was pretty forgettable.
MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch - The game that wasn’t forgettable - mostly for all the wrong reasons - was this follow-up low-budget project funded by Gotham Games. It was bad in many ways, with terrible AI, lackluster star power, and no clear design vision - particularly since Mike Ebert left shortly after the project began. Big Ape was trying to develop a project with Midway at the same time as Celebrity Deathmatch, which allowed us to staff up significantly, but after several management snafus and an ideological standoff with Midway’s top honcho (he demanded our Hitman-like character was to have a mission where he would use a sniper rifle to kill the Pope), the project was canned, most of the staff was let go, and Mike had had enough of the drama. Morale was low, we lost several more people, and Celebrity Deathmatch limped across the finish line, followed closely by Dean being forced to shut the doors.
All that said, I probably learned more from working on CDM than either of the two games before it. Attrition at the company meant that I took on more responsibility - I started the project mainly as a modeler/rigger, I finished with the title ‘Technical Art Director’, which either means ‘director of technical art’ or ‘technically, he’s the art director.’
I was particularly pleased with designing the lipsync and gesture system for the hosts, it took the sound files and sampled them down to phoneme data that triggered different static mesh mouth shapes. We came up with a UI-driven method to create data tables that would at runtime trigger gesture anims at defined points of the dialogue line as well. In short, we were able to process all of Nick and Johnny’s lines into game-ready performances within a week after the VO was delivered.
I also designed a pretty effective (and economical) damage system that standardized each character limb UVs to a specified area of their 512x512 texture so we could ‘swap out’ regions of that texture in memory as a limb took damage - or even trade out the alpha channel to make it disappear when it was amputated. Our producer was convinced it wouldn’t work. (He still owes me a dollar.)
There was also a create-a-celebrity mode I designed that I felt we needed - it came together pretty quickly. It’s primary reason for existence was to annoy my brother when I told him that one of the wearable shirts was the logo for my team (his rival) in our Fantasy Football league. Go Battlelords!
