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TVTranscript
00:01From the start, Ted Price seemed destined for something big.
00:05I remember asking my dad to buy me an Apple IIe.
00:08I said, Dad, if you buy me this, I'm going to make a video game and make a million dollars.
00:11And I was 10 at the time.
00:13And convinced two brothers to join his fledgling venture.
00:17The odds were definitely against us.
00:19Yeah, we were only three guys and we had no experience. We didn't know what we were doing.
00:22Some days were tough.
00:24There were times where we really thought we were not going to be around for another week.
00:28And their name was symbolic.
00:30We were all insomniacs at that point. We weren't sleeping at all.
00:33An early disappointment almost doomed the young company.
00:37Critics called it the Dark Horse of that year.
00:39Or the best game that nobody ever heard of.
00:41But a little dragon would save the day.
00:44They said that the first Spyro, I think, is the number five PlayStation game of all time.
00:50Insomniac would shock fans with an unexpected choice.
00:54It was really hard to leave Spyro behind.
00:56He's kind of our little baby.
00:59As they move on to create a new universe filled with captivating creatures.
01:06This is the remarkable story of Insomniac Games.
01:27It all began with a simple request.
01:30I remember asking my dad to buy me an Apple IIe.
01:33Back when they had the monochrome monitors, I said, Dad, if you buy me this, I'm going to make a
01:36video game and make a million dollars.
01:37And I was ten at the time.
01:39And figuring out what he didn't want to do.
01:41I was controller for my uncle's medical company.
01:45I realized that my long-term answers did not lie in the medical field.
01:48And I wanted to do something that was a little bit more artistic.
01:52I loved games and had always been into computers and into computer games.
01:59And in 1994, with his Princeton degree, his savings, and a dream, he makes the move.
02:05And I thought, hey, why not?
02:06It's got to be easy, right?
02:07Making video games.
02:08And man, I didn't know how off I was on that.
02:12And I was very, very fortunate to run into the Hastings Brothers.
02:15He's only six degrees of separation from meeting his partner.
02:19My mom was talking to one of her friends.
02:20At a party in Virginia.
02:22Who happened to have a son at Princeton.
02:25Her friend's son was roommates with Al Hastings.
02:27Through them, word got to Ted that I was a programmer looking for a job.
02:32And so I called Al up and talked about what I wanted to do with the company.
02:36He was really into it, except that Al is one of the quietest guys I've ever met.
02:41I guess I was thinking, I hope he likes me.
02:43Al probably uttered a few words.
02:46Oh, gosh.
02:47But by the end of the conversation, he had agreed to come out to California.
02:50Boy, I sure don't know much about making games.
02:54Of course, neither did he.
02:55Which to me was pretty amazing, because he was taking this huge chance on a guy who had never done
02:59a game before.
03:00The odds were definitely against us, so we got lucky, really.
03:05And the lucky streak continues for Alex and his brother.
03:09I was a math and literature double major, but I've been programming since I was 12.
03:14I talked Brian into quitting his real job and coming to make a go of it.
03:20I was working at a pacemaker company, and I had a really good job.
03:23My dad definitely didn't want me leaving that.
03:25But Brian has an idea and a mind of his own.
03:28And when we brought Al's brother on board, Brian, then that kind of completed the circle.
03:35And naming the brand new Southern California company will prove to be an obstacle.
03:39There were some great ones.
03:40There was Ragnarok, let's see, Black Sun Software.
03:44I was just putting random words together, thinking, what two things go together?
03:48And I just thought, Moon and Turtle.
03:50And I thought, well, this is going to be great, everyone's going to love it.
03:53And no, nobody loved it.
03:56I wanted to name it The Resistance Incorporated.
03:59And we ended up with Insomniac just on a whim.
04:03It was just something that suddenly made sense.
04:05We were all Insomniacs at that point.
04:07We weren't sleeping at all.
04:08This ambitious trio with a name, but no game, uses a legacy as an influence.
04:14Doom was the inspiration for our first game, Disruptor.
04:17It was a first-person shooter.
04:20And then there were four.
04:22Once I got done here and got working on the project, I realized that Disruptor wasn't just a Doom clone.
04:27Graphically, we were doing some beautiful stuff.
04:31Any hesitations I had disappeared very, very quickly.
04:35You know, from the get-go, we didn't have a lot of ideas about what we were going to do.
04:38Only that it wasn't going to be a Doom clone and on 3DOs.
04:41The talented troops sets its sights and future on a doomed game platform.
04:47We'd actually gone to Sony and talked to them a little bit about the PlayStation,
04:50but the dev stations at that point were priced way out of our reach.
04:54Well, there was quite a bit of little cult following to it in the developer circle.
05:01And 3DO seemed like the first one out there.
05:05So, we have to create this big, you know, Doom-like universe.
05:11Well, we didn't have any 3D tools to do that.
05:14And so, what we did is we made this, we read everything out of an excellent spreadsheet.
05:19Well, Ted and I had put together a demo that took us about a month.
05:23Really, we were just showing that, okay, we can put together the nuts and bolts of the game.
05:27So, every single polygon, about, you know, thousands of polygons here,
05:31would have to be handed by Ted in this spreadsheet and converted over.
05:33It wasn't that much to look at, but it was a start.
05:38It was sort of a functional, first-person little engine and environment.
05:43And along comes Mark Cerny, a universal video game executive.
05:46Mark was impressed with the fact that we did this in a month, knowing nothing to start with.
05:53Mission complete.
05:55And the young exec signs the baby company to a development deal.
05:58We were really happy to have a 3-game contract where we knew we could stay in business for us.
06:03That was two, three years.
06:06And in a twist of fate, it is decided that Insomniac's first game
06:11will also be Universal's first title for the PlayStation.
06:16We were able to switch over to the PlayStation fairly easily
06:20because Al had already developed such a robust engine on the 3DO.
06:24First of all, it went from about 10 hertz to a solid 30 hertz.
06:29So, it got three times faster.
06:31The PlayStation 1 was much, much more powerful than the 3DO.
06:35Disruptor may have been a dark title, but some humor unintentionally works its way into the game.
06:41Think fast, shoot fast, and kick you.
06:47Here we were working with Universal Studios, and we were at the young technology start-up, and what better chance
06:53to have video games and movies come together?
06:57The story was supposed to be serious.
06:59Are you ready for your first training mission, Private?
07:01Sir, yes, sir!
07:02Even though the movie sequences we recorded were funny because they were so cheesy.
07:06Your job is simple.
07:08Run the gauntlet.
07:09You're horrible.
07:10Get your butt out alive.
07:12Disruptor is released in December 1996 to very high hopes.
07:17Unfortunately, there were a few magazine ads, there weren't any TV ads.
07:21We had a little PR where we had some editors come by the office, but that was it.
07:24So, most of the sales were through word of mouth.
07:26Maybe it's time you tried it out.
07:28It was definitely a critical success.
07:30It just wasn't a financial success.
07:32But what really made us happy was that critics called it the dark horse of that year, or the best
07:37game that nobody ever heard of.
07:39They could sort of become a cult classic at this point.
07:41It's well-remembered.
07:43Insomniac will eventually say goodbye to first-person shooters.
07:47And hello to a charismatic baby dragon.
08:01By 1997, Insomniac Games had released Disruptor, a first-person shooter inspired by the world of Doom.
08:07It received rave reviews, but had very disappointing sales.
08:12Yeah, I think we were very encouraged that we did it.
08:14We made a game, and it was out there on the shelves.
08:17That's nothing too shocking.
08:18There were times where we really thought we were not going to be around for another week.
08:22I want you to get through the chem factory alive.
08:25I think they passed it universal enough that they weren't going to let us go.
08:29We were just very fortunate and appreciative to be alive.
08:36Mark Cerny, one of the fledgling company's earliest supporters, puts in his two cents for their next endeavor.
08:42He was looking ahead to the next couple of years of the PlayStation and realized that the demographics were quickly
08:47moving downward.
08:49And the video game troupe changes their direction.
08:53I wanted to do a game that my mother would be able to play, and she didn't like Disruptor very
08:57much.
08:58I think we all wanted to do something that had a more mass market appeal.
09:01Yeah, Craig initially threw out the idea of a dragon.
09:06So instead of flying all the time, he's more of a young dragon who walks and glides.
09:10We kind of messed around with that. We did some sketches.
09:14Once the idea was suggested, it kind of clicked with all of us individually that it wouldn't just suit us
09:21better.
09:21We don't have to try to be better than the next guy. We could just be kind of whimsical.
09:28And a young star begins to hatch.
09:31I think we felt really confident right from the first character drawing.
09:34At that point, we thought, okay, this looks like a mascot character. This looks like something that could be big.
09:39His name is Spyro.
09:42And his world is unlike any other.
09:46Well, it's vaguely medieval, but more fantastic.
09:52It was one of the first games that really had distant views, where we were able to create these very
09:56wide open environments.
09:57And that was a result of our engine being able to create multiple levels of detail for the environment.
10:02The game that is supposed to be fun is having some serious labor pains.
10:07I have to say that there were points in the production cycle where we were in crunch mode, just like
10:11every other development team, and things looked fairly bleak.
10:16Never fear. Spyro, the cute little purple dragon, meets the deadlines.
10:21His mission on the PlayStation is to rescue his dragon friends from imprisonment.
10:25Thank you for releasing me.
10:27All while searching through vast environments and hidden chambers for clues.
10:31But the 3D platform game doesn't receive the reviews Insomniac was hoping for.
10:36The previews and the reviews in general talked about Spyro being a kiddie game.
10:41To see it called a kiddie game implied that it was a very simple, novice-oriented game that wouldn't satisfy
10:46the hardcore players.
10:48Following promising previews at E3, Spyro makes his debut in the fall of 1998.
10:52And, well, he doesn't exactly fly off the shelves.
10:56In Europe, it took off pretty much from the get-go. But in the US, it definitely was slow.
11:01It didn't catch on right away.
11:06But then after Christmas, just based on word of mouth, we kept on having solid weeks, you know, bigger than
11:11the launch week.
11:12And it just didn't taper off, you know, through January, February, March, we just kept on selling.
11:17Audiences, like, from young kids to their mothers who had never played games before, were attracted to this.
11:24By the time we released Spyro 2, I think we'd had almost 2 million in sales just in the US.
11:30And Spyro becomes a sleeper hit.
11:33I was at the DICE conference, and they said that the first Spyro, I think, is the number 5 PlayStation
11:38game of all time.
11:39It was some really high number. And I was very surprised by that.
11:43But the celebration is short, and the pressure is on.
11:47The team that has grown to 13 people is asked to create the sequel by the next Christmas selling season.
11:52We were under the double pressure of having a truncated development cycle and trying to come up with something that
11:58would make this game feel like more than a sequel.
12:00Something that was a little bit more revolutionary than evolutionary.
12:03And jumping on board this time is Peter, another Hastings brother.
12:08When my older brother came on, they were starting to be concerned, you know, that it's 2 out of 3
12:13lost to the dark side.
12:15And when my younger brother joined, it's, you know, it was all over.
12:20The future is closing in for the folks at Insomniac. Where's the new game?
12:24We scrambled, threw out a lot of ideas, and finally settled on the minigames in Spyro 2, which really set
12:31it apart from the first game.
12:33The sequel, Spyro Ripto's Rage, finds the cute purple dragon caught up in another unlikely adventure.
12:39This time, freeing a kingdom from the ill-tempered tyrant Ripto.
12:43I hate dragons!
12:47Doing so requires collecting items from the game's 20-plus levels of explorable 3D worlds.
12:53The story, I think, was a little bit more mature, and I think we had a lot more cinematics that
12:58showed off what the animators could do.
13:01And what about the name?
13:03It's funny, because the Japanese version of Spyro, if you look at the title, it looks like it says Ripto
13:08in kind of funny tangled letters.
13:10It debuts in the fall of 99.
13:13Definitely nervous. What if the first one was a fluke?
13:16And the answer is no. Reviewers tout the more adult game, and it sells. Big time.
13:23We had grandmothers writing us that they had stolen the game from their grandkids because they liked it better, so
13:29they wanted to play it.
13:31Sony wants a third Spyro game for the 2000 holiday season. No one at the company named Insomniac will be
13:37sleeping anytime soon.
13:39In Spyro 3, we had four new characters, and they had their own little home worlds, and so you could
13:44experience their home worlds from their perspective, and then they all tied into the story.
13:48We were able to take the focus off Spyro somewhat and put it onto these other characters with their own
13:52moves, their own levels. It really breathed a breath of fresh air into the franchise.
13:58The third game, Spyro Year of the Dragon, is released in time for Christmas 2000 and revolves around stolen dragon
14:04eggs.
14:05Find the eggs and bring them back, Spyro.
14:08You got it.
14:10Spyro has acquired some new tools. A skateboard, tanks, submarines, and even a speedboat.
14:17You can play different characters. A kangaroo, a yeti, a flying penguin, and others. And guess what? It's another hit.
14:27All three titles win industry awards in many categories, and all three become part of Sony's greatest hits collection. The
14:34combined sales of the three Spyro titles is well over 8 million units.
14:39We were really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with new ideas for Spyro 3.
14:43Well, at that point, we were really starting to think about, you know, what comes next.
14:47So, we decided that it was better for us to start with a new franchise, try to come up with
14:52a new character, than to try to just push Spyro again.
14:56It was definitely a little bit sad knowing that this was the end. You know, reading all the fan mail
14:59and knowing, okay, we have to say goodbye. But it was the right choice in the end.
15:03We just wanted to shake hands and part ways to the universal and then propose something new directly to Sony.
15:10Although fans of the franchise can look forward to future adventures with the dragon, it will be produced by another
15:16company.
15:17Insomniac had to say goodbye to their quirky little dragon.
15:22It was really hard to leave Spyro behind. He's, you know, he's kind of our little baby.
15:40After releasing Spyro Year of the Dragon, Insomniac has grown to over 30 people.
15:45The three original founders are still surprised by the incredible international success of the Spyro franchise.
15:52There's a perpetual feeling that, you know, you're not as good as you can be.
15:57And if you don't keep improving, you'll be left behind.
16:02Insomniac shocks the gaming world when it announces it's leaving Spyro behind for a new game and character.
16:09So I'm thinking, what if we made that code right there and put it smaller?
16:13Personally, a lot more nervous releasing the first one of a brand new set of characters or a brand new
16:19whatever we're doing.
16:20Maybe if these guys animated less. How about that? Okay, you can do that.
16:24Alex leads the push to create the new game franchise on the bigger and better PlayStation 2.
16:30He's got better low level problem solving skills than anyone else I've ever met.
16:35And that's what you need for the PS2.
16:36I don't think there are very many other people who could really tackle the PS2 the way he has.
16:41It definitely was a quantum step to move from PlayStation 1 to PlayStation 2.
16:45It was very, very challenging, but I think that was the exciting part of it.
16:48It was kind of mysterious because no one really knew what the PlayStation 2 could do quite yet.
16:52It's funny how things work because I think now we could probably create a Spyro level in about two days
16:57before it took about four weeks.
16:59The Spyro franchise began with the birth of a cute little character and so will the new game.
17:05Well, the initial kernel of the concept came from Brian Hastings. He said, you know, how about we do a
17:09space adventure with some gadgets?
17:11That idea was a science fiction theme because that's about as far from Spyro as you can get.
17:16The new game called Ratchet and Clank features a lead character who is, well, a little atypical.
17:21Ratchet is a Lombax. Now, you've probably never heard of a Lombax and neither had we until we started this
17:25project. We basically made it up.
17:27If you pull him apart and dissect him, he's got kind of a lion's tail. He's got a somewhat humanoid
17:32kind of body. He's got big cat ears. He's got kind of a doggish face.
17:37Ratchet's kind of like this, you know, underdog character that lives on this backwater planet and he just dreams about,
17:42you know, seeing these fantastic worlds.
17:45And his cohort in this adventure?
17:48Am I cool now?
17:50Yeah, you the man, Clank.
17:52A tiny robot who spends much of the game riding on Ratchet's back.
17:56Clank tried to create the exact opposite of that, where he's very book smart.
18:00You run on standard XP-18 sister boards, version 7.66.
18:05But has no world knowledge at all.
18:06I myself am not a robot guy, per se.
18:11Nerd. I like him.
18:12But he's good at heart. So the two of them have that in common, but their everyday struggles kind of
18:18are at odds with each other.
18:20One thing that most people don't know is that Clank is a playable character.
18:23Clank has his own challenges in the game where he gets to use his special abilities that Ratchet doesn't have.
18:29Once you kind of play the game a little bit, you just fall in love with the characters.
18:32And how's this different from their first beloved franchise?
18:36Ratchet and Clank draws from some similar elements of Spyro, but we've pushed it in a whole different direction.
18:43We have a lot of different elements. There are shooter elements, RPG elements.
18:49For the people who have really not been into the Spyro games, as you get just a few levels into
18:54this game, the complexity of the things that you have available to you really ramps up.
19:00And it's a beautiful collection of fantastic worlds.
19:03It's a different galaxy where spaceships and robots and high-tech gadgets are the norm. So there's technology everywhere you
19:11look.
19:11There's some really amazingly incredible detailed worlds. People are just going to be astounded by the visuals. Every different vantage
19:19point can really have some outstanding views.
19:24And all of the characters, both big and small, have multi-faceted personalities.
19:30Some of the characters are angry.
19:34We try very hard with all of our characters to make sure they're not playing vanilla.
19:38Every time you encounter a character in Ratchet and Clank, they're going to have a very strong personality.
19:42The two of you make me sick!
19:45And what about the weapons? Sweet!
19:48We really didn't want parents to be upset when their kids played this game.
19:53There's no blood. Sure, you are blowing things up.
19:56We couldn't get around it. That's the gameplay. That's what happens.
19:59But you don't blow something into 50 pieces and see blood splatter lying on the ground.
20:04You have an arson of more than 30 gadgets and tools and weapons at your disposal.
20:10Real men can swing without silly toys like that!
20:14And this is a game for everybody.
20:18I think it's very accessible. You don't need to know a whole lot about video games.
20:22The first and foremost core of the gameplay is action.
20:27But there are some puzzles that are fairly cerebral.
20:31For people who do play video games, this offers something different for the genre of games.
20:36There's just so much stuff to do.
20:39Compared to Spyro, there's ten times as many moves you can do, ten times as much stuff you can blow
20:45up.
20:48And what can we expect from Insomniac tomorrow?
20:51I think the sky's the limit, really, with Insomniac. That's why I love it here so much, is that everyone's
20:55just working so hard to make the best thing they can.
20:59I think as long as we're loving what we're doing, hopefully people love playing it.
21:03That's our real hope, that we can get a good response from the public.
21:06People saying, that was really fun.
21:13We'll be right back, that's why we can get a good phrase out to see someone who thinks they can
21:17get a better job.
21:18It's you at the center of all companies.
21:30We'll be right back there.
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