The John Edelson Interview

[HalStep 855]

we have another great interview from Ross Sillifant a.k.a Chryssalid,so please enjoy:

 

 GOG Presents The John Edelson

 

 

'Following on from my recent informal chat over email with Nick
Speaksman, i was lucky enough to put a few words to Mr John Edelson ,
regarding his time at 3DO, where i wondered what his thoughts were on
the hardware itself, how rival platforms like Atari's Jaguar compared
and IF it was seen as any real threat etc......

We then moved onto John's role at Argonaut, with Jez San etc.I was
interested to hear what shape the company was in when John arrived,
which projects he oversaw, along with which platforms Argonaut saw fit
to support and why.

Also John seemed worthy of asking for yet more confirmation on why
Jaguar CD Creature Shock never got beyond experimental coding...

Hope you enjoy'

 

The early days of the 3DO Company were an incredibly exciting time  since
we were launching a whole new generation in home entertainment and video
games. I was invited to interview to 3DO by some SGI engineers who had
moved there. When I joined, we were still in stealth mode and were called
SMSG (San Mateo Software Group).  If I remember correctly we had employee
numbers in order of joining and I was number 13.  Our initial investor
group was Electronic Arts, Kleiner Perkins, Universal Pictures, AT&T, and
Panasonic.  Our key innovations were integrated high performance 2D/3D
hardware, a CD drive for rich media, and a 32 bit processor.

There were two of us who were the original team working with developers.
Between the two of us, we contacted a few hundred developers, got them
under NDAs, got them to attend our development conference, and then to buy
development equipment.  Developers were really excited about the new
generation of hardware and the "level playing field" for developers that
The 3DO Company promised.

The truth about the 3DO technology and hardware was that it was rushed to
market by a team using old fashioned development techniques (the Atari
team) and there were some serious technical flaws.  For instance, the
chipset design had some powerful 3D capabilities but it was architected in
such a way that it couldn't really be used due to a flaw in the bus
architecture design. It was a big disappointment that was kept private.

There was also the problem of the high cost of the CD drive and RAM prices
which were very high at the time the 3DO was launched.

When the Playstation came out a few years later, it was a superior design
built around two sophisticated systems on chips. Their chipset had been
developed using the most advance technology for integrated system on chip
design. In contrast, the 3DO hardware had lots of little chips on the
mother board plus a daughter board.  An even worse design was the Sega
hardware which had even more parts and which had a fragmented memory model
which was hard to program for.  The system on chip design of the
Playstation provided faster performance, more reliability, and made it much
cheaper and easier to manufacture.

We all felt that the Atari Jaguar was a bit of a joke in that they were the
previous generation of technology (a pair of processors) which while
it was well done, was basically not a step forward.

My role was initially to cover half the world in terms of working with
developers, then to run the developer program, and then to do the marketing
for the European rollout.

I was let go by 3DO as part of their downsizing in light of the competition
from Playstation in January of 1996. I was in London at the time. I joined
Argonaut as General Manager just a few weeks later.

Argonaut was an amazing company and collection of talent when I joined but
it was totally messed up by a combination of too many projects, not enough
management, enormous ambitions,  a perpetual shortage of cash, weak
infrastructure, and a frustrated staff.

I ran Argonaut from Jan 1996 through July 1998 and managed the transition
of the company from a family firm to two corporations each with a distinct
growth strategy, management team, and solid financing. Also, I was deeply
involved in the development of Croc which was the first big hit in several
years out of Argonaut.

 I was pretty aggressive in the first weeks at Argonaut about cutting
costs, clearing out some people who had a terrible attitude, killing some
development projects that didn't make much sense, and focusing on enabling
projects to be successful, not just for short-term cash flow.

The platforms that I remember Argonaut developing for when I was there was
Playstation, Sega, PC CD, Nintendo 64, and Philips CDI. There were also
some Intel Pentium technology projects that we developed for. The first
game that shipped with me as GM was FX Fighter Turbo, the first networked
PC 3D fight game.

The big project that I got the most deeply involved with Croc, Legend of
the Gobbos.  It was the first 3D free roaming game on the Playstation.  The
team worked incredibly hard on it for years and the success of Croc was a
huge boon for Argonaut since it was the first hit in several years.

As to your question of the Atari Jaguar, we certainly didn't have any
active projects when I was there. There might have been some exploratory
work or even active projects prior to my time there, I wouldn't know. It's
unlikely Jez would have embraced the Jaguar because he was such a technical
visionary, I would have trouble seeing him embrace it.  He was always
realistic about the 3DO saying that it was a huge step forward in
architecture but he thought it had too many tech problems from the start.
Plus, he really didn't like the Mac development platform.  The Mac
development platform was popular really only in the Siilcon Valley area,
everyone else and particularly in Europe and Japan thought the Mac was a
poor choice for development.

John Edelson,