10 Questions with Tony Van, an ex-Sega employee who had worked on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Wirehead, Fahrenheit, Surgical Strike and a few others! ;)



1. Can you tell us Sega and Sega CD fans a little bit about your career in the video game industry up until now?
I’ve been in the video game industry since 1988 – the first company I worked for was Activitison. I worked at Sega from 1992-1995, and then returned to a re-structured SegaSoft in 1997-1998. I’ve also worked at Infocom, SSI, LucasFilm Games, EA, Ubisoft and currently Zygna.  I’ve worked on most video game platforms, and most video game genres.
 
2. How does someone break into the video game industry?
It’s much easier than it used to be. Now there are schools that specialize in teaching students the skills they need – programming, art, design, management. Many companies recruit directly from the graduating classes, and someone with that education stands out against someone without it. The classic way is to start in the industry is as a video game tester – this is a great way to work directly with the people who make the games. This creates a of “long term interview” for talented individuals – if you do well as a tester and show other aptitudes, promotion to game development is possible.
 
3.Did the Sega CD have a lot of positives & capability with the new hardware and media, or more limitations than you would have liked?
Both. At the time, Sega Genesis was in fierce competition with Super Nintendo, and Sega CD was supposed to be a major leap forward. It had 2 obvious advantages – it could store a LOT of data, and it could play video. However, because it was an add-on to the core Genesis unit, it had 2 major bottlenecks – the amount of memory a game could “load” into was not any larger (so the games could not “show” more), and the graphics hardware was still the same (everything had to be built on visual blocks of 8x8 pixels of only 16 colors from a palette of 256, and only 4 block palettes total.) In the end, having the ability for a massive amount of data had minimal impact on gameplay – it simply was not practical to create a massive amount of in game graphics or levels. So the CD part was mostly used for music and video – aka non-gameplay elements. And to this day, that is still pretty much true - you are not going to fill a Blu-Ray disk with purely in-game elements any time soon.
 
4. Besides the amazing President's award from Sega for busting out so many games in a short period what other cool perks had you received while working for Sega?
Sega had a number of company events. One was called “Rock the Rock” where we when to Alcatraz to premier the latest Sonic game, which was broadcast by MTV. When I was working on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Sega CD, I went to LA and met with the executives of the TV show. While researching new FMV partners, I watched the filming of a low-budget movie called Witchcraft 4. When producing some new firearm footage for an existing FMV game I got to shoot an M-16 and 9mm gun loaded with blanks. We always had Hollywood knocking at our door, asking if we are interested in licensing movies, so I got to read a lot of movie scripts before they were made – even some that were not made! I specifically remember reading Minority Report (then called Total Recall 2) – 10 years before it was made! Working at game companies gives you access to industry events, so while this perk was not specifically Sega, I consistently attended the Game Developers Conference and CES trade shows (and later E3), which were always a blast.
 
5. How big of a team does it take to make any of the Sega CD titles you had worked on?
That can vary a LOT. As you may know, there are 3 types of Sega CD titles – ones that look like they could have been on a cart with some minor “value adds” like music, ones that have a lot of “music/video” to support them (aka soundtracks and cut-scenes), and the Full Motion Video games. The first type would be done with teams of 15-30 people (which was on the large side for normal game development). The second type would still require all the people above, plus a team of people to make the cut-scenes – usually around 5-10 more. The FMV games usually required a smaller dev team (say, 10), but making the FMV is a major film production, so that would take at least 50 people, in some cases up to 100 (from actors to production crew to special effects crew to administration). However, when I did Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers Sega CD, I took TV show footage that already existed (hence, 0 people to make the footage for me), hired a very small and talented team to dev it (3 guys, 1 programmer, 1 artist, 1 music/sfx), and hired 1 video editor to work with me for 2 days to cut the footage for the game. So we did that game with 5 people, including me!
 
6. Are newer games you have worked on harder to work on then the older titles or vice versa, and why.
I constantly tell my wife “this is the hardest game I have ever worked on!” This is due to the fact that the bar is constantly raised, but time and money are always tight. If you are doing something new, you have a ton of new experiences you have to learn, including if a new idea is actually any good, what is the best process to produce it, and hitting brick walls sometimes. If you are doing something similar to what you did before, it needs to be done faster then what you did before, and still look/play better. Tools improve, but never fast enough to make the entire job significantly easier. Tech is funny in this way – we had a LOT more constraints on what we could do in the past, but today we have a LOT more ways to make mistakes. Like, your game could be perfect in every way, except for the 3D camera, and that blows the whole game experience. Finally, the data & throughput expands with the time, but at the same rate, which gives no real net value – for example, in the Sega days, it would take about 2 hours to download a 400MB game build and 45 min burning it into a 650 MB CD. Today, it takes about the same time to do this with a 2GB Xbox game onto a 4GB DVD.
 
7. Did you happen to put any fun or goofy little easter eggs into your games?
In BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks’ Revenge, for one lance of ‘Mechs, I named the pilots after famous horror directors, and the programmer put in a used the names of players from the UNLV basketball team. In Shadowrun, I used the month and day of my birthday as the starting point of the game (in 2050!) Power Rangers Sega CD had a ton of secret moves during the FMV “power-up” sequences to give you extra health.
 
8. Which was your favorite Sega CD title you had worked on and why?
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers was my favorite for 2 reasons: a) it was the only Sega CD game I got to do from beginning to end and b) I evolved the “Dragon’s Lair” design mechanics radically. The design pattern of every other “DL” game is in 30 seconds of video, you were asked to do 4-6 moves about a ½ second apart, and failure to do any of them correctly would be a loss of life. In MMPR, I set up video combat sequences of about 2-3 minutes, and you were asked to do over 200 moves every ¼ second or more, and if you failed, it just buzzed your life bar. Also, I had 3 levels of difficulty, which slowed down or sped up the rate of the inputs. This design for a linear media game was unheard of when I did it in ’96 – and if it sounds familiar now, it’s because this is the standard design pattern for all Dance Dance and Guitar Hero/Rock Band games – a stream of linear inputs in rapid succession (scaled by difficulty), and if you miss one, your life bar goes down. I honestly do not think my design inspired these games, but I DID do it first! J
 
9. Did you enjoy the FMV format for games or would you consider it a failure. I personally always had fun with em ;) 
I helped create the FMV genre, and I was really excited about it: before I got to Sega I created the design for Star Wars: Rebel Assault in early ’92 (that game took 3 years to come out, and became the highest selling FMV game of all time). The problem with FMV is that game developers never really tried play with it, to evolve it. They were mostly “Dragon’s Lair” clones (do a few simple inputs correctly or die), or a “Night Trap” clones (switch between linear play tracks to find sometime to actually do something), or “Tomcat Alley” clones (shoot a few things while switching back and forth between video clips.) So I think it was a failure of the industry to be more inventive. In the FMV games I created (Rebel Assault and MMPR), I really challenged those ideas and added new things (for RA, I made the entire screen tilt and shift when you moved your Xwing back and forth to give a better sensation of flight, and created branches to change up the standard “on-a-rail” game experience). I think if more people had tried to do more, the genre would have lived longer. But with today’s tech, you can pretty much do most of that stuff in real-time 3D (minus the reality of real actors), and as I stated earlier, some of the design patterns from FMV have moved into other game genres.
 
10. Which systems do you have/had that you play now and used to play if any?
I have all the current gen systems: 360, Wii, PS3, DS and PC. I dig them all, they each have something special to bring to the table for gaming. I also love all the “virtual console” games you can download, it lets the entire world play some awesome classic games (including a few of my own).
 
10. 1/2  - Is there anything else you'd like to add or mention? The more information the better =) 
The gaming world is still evolving – there are many games yet to build, and new ideas to play. It’s so exciting!  And if any of your readers would like to read more about my history in the video game world, head over to my website: http://www.goodspear.com/games/games.htm
 
Thank you so much for taking time out to do this quick question bombardment for Sega CD Universe.
Best of luck to you, and please keep in touch! =)