posted by Jord9622 on Sep 23, 2017:
pato said:
There are quite a few legends over the Max Payne DC port, some people say that there was not even a Katana devkit, others say that there was one devkit, then there is this one from the DC Junkyard where a developer said that he has never saw DC code on it, but I think there was a fourth one that it didn't get past a test stage as the developers were focused on finishing the PC version first.
Scott MIller might know the answer to this one. Scott was integral in making Max Payne a reality. 3D Realms published Remedy's first game, Death Rally, and he helped them with both "Bullet Time" and naming Max Payne. Not only that, he negotiated the IP's sale to Rockstar/Take Two! I'll have to ask him. Its worth noting that "Bullet Time" was implemented before "The Matrix" during 1998. Will have to also reach out to the Kingsley brothers at Rebellion re: Aliens Vs. Predator, they may have answers there too.
pato said:
System Shock 2 was cancelled after roughly a year of development, Vatical last news about this port was in 2001, so it was indeeed because of the DC death thanks to the PS2, I'll go back into the leaked stuff later, but at least for what I did back at the time( I was the one who uploaded the first gameplays), there was only two .exes from august to november with no noticeable change from it's rough tech state.
System Shock 2 on DC would have been incredible! This one really hurts, as does Commandos 2 and Outcast, well really they all hurt
pato said:
About Bernie Stolar, it's a controversial thing, Victor Ireland from Working Designs had a clash with him since the early days of the US Playstation because he had a hate for 2D Games, and IIRC, the reason that Rayearth for the Saturn took so long to translate was also because of Stolar bringing such ideal to Sega.
See, this is where all the confusion gets started...Victor might be the one running around saying Bernie hates 2D games and RPGs, I don't know if he is or not, regardless, this rumor simply isn't true. This has more to do with personality clashes and less to do with the games themselves. Bernie is a very direct person and straight shooter, he does not play mind games (no pun intended), and he is a very loyalty based guy. I cold-called him when I was 16 and he actually took my call and let me meet with him at his office in San Francisco...he didn't have to do any of that.
I've never met Victor, however, if he is spreading rumors, well, in my opinion, that's not a great personal quality to have...
pato said:
He was hired by sega in July 1996, that would give him time to fix the issues regarding the lack of proper documentation for the west developers and the whole bad situation in sales, unless it was something that it was not on his care, as SoJ had been clashing with SoA in regards of the Sonic X-Treme, he gave the green light to STI to use the Nights engine that created the big mess as the original programmer, Yuji Naka, threatned to quit Sonic Team if they continued developing with the engine.
Yes, Hayao Nakayama hired him and believed in him, I've had the pleasure of meeting Nakayama-San and he is another great guy. The problem between SOJ and SOA, I believe had more to do with Okawa. From what I understand, Tom Kalinske ran into a lot of the same issues which Bernie had to deal with. I believe Kalinske almost got the Saturn to essentially be the N64 architecture, he's the one who pushed the Silicon Graphics hardware to SOJ and they kept turning it down, saying it wasn't good enough. I think Tom is the one who suggested SG go to Nintendo right after that, and obviously that turned out really well. With regards to getting more Saturn documentation for developers, personally, I don't believe that would have helped much in the States. The problem was much deeper than that and frankly it was too late. Bernie and I did an interview with
Arcade Attack earlier this year, where he goes far more in-depth about this.
pato said:
His work with the Dreamcast was wonderful, but having been outside of the west market for more than a year made it a big bad impression, had they supported Saturn until the DC release, things could have been way different.
They really couldn't afford to though. All the funds they had, needed to go to Dreamcast, or they would have went bankrupt. Bernie goes into the numbers in the aforementioned interview. The turnaround that he, Peter Moore, Chris Gilbert, and team pulled off was nothing short of extraordinary!
