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After a very, very long day of gaming, exploration and incredible heat, I rounded out my BitSummit with a talk with Chris Kohler from Digital Eclipse. Chris is a long time veteran of the gaming world, with a storied career on both sides of the table in terms of gaming, creation, art, critique and enjoyment. Chris had come with Digital Eclipse to support DreCom’s booth for the recently released Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Chris was an absolute character who came alive in the biggest way when it came to speaking about games. Full of thoughts and insight, I can honestly say it was one of the most dynamic talks I’ve ever had with someone about video games, and I count late night arguments with friends in college over the Sega Dreamcast. With me, he shared so much insight into the Digital Eclipse creation process, the importance of the different projects he’s worked with and, in general, what makes the preservation of gaming so important as we continue to move forward into a digital age.
Would you mind introducing yourself for those who are unfamiliar with you?
I’m Chris Kohler, and I’m currently the editorial director at Digital Eclipse. That title means a lot of things, but it primarily means I’m heavily involved in our interactive documentaries, like Atari 50, Karateka and Llamasoft. The editorial team is at the core of these, as it’s not just game selection for the projects but also to decide the narrative. We don’t want to just make some retro collection, “Here’s some games, here’s some bonus content, go have fun.” We really want to tell the history of these games in an interactive way. I have nearly twenty five years of experience in the industry before coming to Digital Eclipse, so I bring all that love into the projects: telling the story, interviewing the developers, and remembering that games were created by humans, and there are so many things these humans made and left behind over the course of development.
For example, to go in a totally other direction to a game we definitely did NOT work on, we’re here in Kyoto. When you think of a game like Star Fox, you wouldn’t think it was influenced, in any way, by real life. But if you go to Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto and you see all of the Torii gates and the fox statues, which are all just south of where Nintendo is based, you now understand the connection. When you have that information about who made this, where were they when they made it, how it influences the creation, when it was made and WHY that makes it a product of the time, it becomes more than just pixels.
When you see the Llamasoft collection, there’s a game called Bomb Buenos Aires because England was going to war over the Falkland Islands. Jeff Minter makes this sardonic statement about the political climate through this game. But if you just download a rom and see airplanes dropping explosives on buildings with the Argentinian flag, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s our job to take these games and then give you all the content, the context and the important and fascinating information. I want to take all the learning that can be done about these games and apply it in the game space, making it still exciting while being educational.
This photo still inspires a sense of wonder, like “What the hell was he taking?”
We’re huge fans of your interactive documentaries. How do you decide the approach to framing all of this information?
Before I joined Digital Eclipse, the team was already working on these kinds of projects, like the SNK Collections. With each new release, they were getting closer and more attuned to figuring out how to interweave the documentation and historical information, and figuring out “Okay, how can we take all this and both integrate and expand upon them more?”
When I joined, I was put on the Karateka project, which only had one other person at the time. Frank Cofaldi (head of the Video Game History Foundation) had been working on it but left. As a result, one lone engineer was keeping the flame going for this project that was more of a “when we have the time” thing; it was entirely self funded and we didn’t have a lot of money. What was fascinating was Jordan Mechner saved absolutely everything, from design documents to floppy disks. Even wilder, he kept a daily journal for every single day he worked on that game, which, I mean, who the hell does that?
The journal was our centerpiece. We could use the specific dates in the journal to match up to those design documents, and then match those to the contents of the floppy disks, which lead to prototypes of older games and even early sprites that didn’t end up getting implemented. Thanks to the journal, we had the ability to show all of this chronologically, so we thought “why not show it chronologically?”
It was while we were in the middle of bringing that together that Atari came knocking (because they ended up owning us). Atari wanted something “different” to celebrate the 50th anniversary that wasn’t just a collection of games. So we showed them this early concept where we had the games, the interviews and the various content on the same level of importance. Instead of selling you just games, we’re selling you the story, and it’s told as a game, not as just some movie you watch on Netflix. Our in house engine, the Eclipse Engine, is perfect for that, so we just need to get all the special content to feed into it.
This ability to talk to the living legends themselves is so important for chronicling the history.
I’ve only been on the design side of games for four years, so I’m sort of a baby in that aspect. But I’m sitting down with these people who have decades of experience, and they can tell me “this is what works from the player’s perspective,” artists telling me “this is what we can fit on the screen,” and by all of us working together we can develop the idea of the interactive time lines. Atari 50 was the first one to use this approach with the games, audio, video, photographs, etc.
From the editorial position, me and Dan Amrich (who you might know as Dan Elektro from Game Pro), our job is to figure out “what’s the story?” Because reality is often messy, you can interview five people on the same game and get five totally different quotes, so now you need to figure out how to use them to discover the conflict that makes the story exciting and not just facts. Like with Karateka, Jordan Mechner was a teenager who wanted to be success in gaming by copying successful ideas but ends up failing, multiple times, in the attempts.At 16, he knew how to make really great games based on what was already on the market, but he was always behind the curve, so they never landed. It’s only when he breaks free and does his own original idea that he gets it right. That’s what we’re trying to tell.
It’s incredibly successful and I think fans appreciate it. Like with Atari, there have been many releases that were little more than roms packaged together, and Atari 50th was so much greater in experience.
Right! Because we know players can get roms. Piracy exists, and it’s our goal to beat piracy. We can do this by adding more exclusive content that isn’t just readily available on the Internet. But we also make something that wasn’t there before. Putting all this information next to the games and the interviews gives players something new and different. We know that we can make a better product, a better experience, that you can’t just get from grabbing roms.
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Remembering Atari went beyond just this one console is key to appreciating their full catalog.
Yet we also need to make sure to educate people about it. People will take one look and say “What, I’m supposed to pay you for ROMS?” And first of all…yeah, you are. But also no, because we’re asking you to pay for this experience that’s totally new and different even if you’ve played all the games back to front. Also, especially with Llamasoft, for Jeff Minter’s games, they were across all these different platforms (and many Jeff made available on his own website). If you get a rom for a ZX-86, trying to get the roms working is ROUGH. It’s sometimes a lot of work to get these titles working, and I actually took over an hour trying to get one title working and couldn’t because the emulators aren’t as widely known. So there are some titles here that, even with availability, weren’t really playable for most people until they were in the collection. You aren’t just loading up a rom with Llamasoft, you’re actually dropping into a save state that comes after all the behind-the-scenes work has been done by us, and it’s seamless.
With these older computer games, it becomes really DIY to make it all come together, and we can make that happen for people.
Speaking of the older games, we’ve seen the remaster of Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord. It’s such a masterful creation that preserves the original game while still enjoying the new QOL creation. How did DE end up wanting to work with the Wizardry titles?
Disclaimer: I’ve only worked on the project a tiny bit. An amazing team helped bring Wizardry back to life in this new release. As you might know, there’s a lot of passion behind the games, and Justin Bailey (head of publishing at Digital Eclipse) in particular really wanted to make this happen. The first five Wizardry games are held by SirTech, and the IP is held by DreCom, who is here (at BitSummit) showing Wizardry. For a long time, the first five games were unavailable due to the holding of the copyright. Justin made it his mission to bring all the parties to the table to work this out. At first, when we announced this, people were incredulous that we were setting out because it was known how spread out the rights were around this IP. But we were successful in getting everyone to come to the table, and our crack team at DE was ready to jump right into it.
Unlike my campaign, DE was successful in dealing with this many characters at once.
The Wizardry team started by taking the original source code, written in Pascal, and porting it to Unreal Engine 5. That’s actually why you see the mini screen of the original game: that’s not a trick, that’s the first Wizardry running at the same time within Unreal. The team then took that as a base and started adding to it. That window wasn’t supposed to be there, but when we were testing it out there was such a positive reaction to how cool it looked to see the original maps, so we just decided to leave it in.
What is it that makes Digital Eclipse lock in on a project?
I think that answer differs depending on who you talk to. In my case, my approach is “is it a great story?” That’s really how I look at everything. It would be really hard to sell an interactive documentary that’s exclusively about games that weren’t well received. But, with something like Atari 50, I was enthusiastic about insisting we have Club Drive in there. And people responded with shock because it was reviewed very poorly when it dropped. That wasn’t the point: Club Drive was one of the first fully polygonal titles to drop. It comes back into the question of the story, the creation, who was behind it and how it came to be. You aren’t always loading up a title with the idea of “I’m going to play a really fun racing game.” Instead, it’s “let me explore this interesting historical novelty, let me see what works and what doesn’t.” I’m definitely not telling players to take this game and beat it. If you play it for five minutes and come away having learned something, or at least acknowledged that it was interesting, then we’ve done our job. So I’m most focused on telling an amazing story, and, in addition, here are some games to play and at least some of them will be fun.
So if you’re studying the history of video games, these tools become incredible to use. We’ve had professors reach out and ask us “I want to teach video game history, I want to use Karateka in my class.” Not only are our projects informative, but because they’re games unto themselves, it’s a really great way to learn more about what went into the creation of a game. I really hope more teachers reach out and ask us, because I think these are excellent ways to learn.
With decades of video games behind us and many more to come, is there one series or IP in particular you’d like to bring into the spotlight through Digital Eclipse?
Short answer: yes. It’s difficult to speculate about what the future might hold. The nice part is that we’re getting to the point where, since I’ve been involved with Digital Eclipse for so long, more people know what I’m doing there and what we create, and hopefully we’ll see more come forward as a result. As much as I love Jeff Minter and Jordan Mechner, those are both projects that were put on my plate, I didn’t go out looking for them. Hopefully, maybe in a few years or so, we can talk again and I can point at something and say “This. I made this happen.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was such a mainstay for many of WayTooManyGames’ members’ childhoods. What was it like working with these incredible games and bringing them into the modern era?
It was incredibly fun. It was one of the first projects that I worked on from conception to finish. I had just joined Digital Eclipse when i got told “Okay, Turtles is greenlit, this is happening.” I played the living hell out of so many of those titles, Turtles: the Arcade Game, Turtles in Time, the Gameboy games…they were a big part of my childhood. So, looking at these titles, they’re all Konami games, right? When we were checking them all out, we confirmed they all have the Konami code within, and we knew we wanted to communicate that to players somehow. You should be able to use the code, so how do we tell players? Well, we all found that out (in our childhoods) through strategy guides. Let’s do a digital magazine. Let’s have the screenshots be clickable so you can see the strategy happen, like magic, when you click on them. And the reaction from the team was “well, that’s a lot of work.” But I managed to convince them that this needed to happen.
That’s how we added in the historical information, like the release dates and such, because that’s where you’d find that information in the past. I had such a fun time writing it because I wrote the whole thing, and I was inserting different 90s humor and dumb jokes throughout, but it also made me nervous. I knew Konami was going to look at this, Konami Japan, Nickelodeon, and I was concerned I was going to have to yank stuff out as a result. I was writing quips in the voices of the Turtles themselves, and I was actively worrying “is this okay?” And…it was all fine. No notes, no corrections, nothing. So that was so fun being able to write as Michaelangelo.
I really hope that enhanced everyone’s experience, and I felt like I had a great perspective for it as well. With things like Jeff Minter’s work, that’s a foreign country and a different time, and I had to analyze it like an anthropologist to figure out “how did this society play this game?” But with Turtles, I know how these games worked. I bought a copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly that tricked me into thinking I could be Simon Belmont in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II and I wasted so much of my time trying to punch in that code. But kids today don’t know all those ins and outs, so the challenge was figuring out how to give it to them in a new way.
Another great thing was Konami apparently does a phenomenal job preserving their old design documents. When we contacted them and asked for any of their old creative process material for Turtles, they had thousands of pages in binders ready to go. When they asked us what we wanted, we said “absolutely everything.” That lead to one of my coolest days of my life when I got an email from Konami with an attached zip file, and being one of the first people in years outside of Konami to look upon these beautiful, sprawling pages of the behind the scenes for Turtles. I knew that I had a lot of work ahead of me if I wanted to put these into the game. First of all, we had to organize everything, which was a huge undertaking by itself. Second of all, they’re all handwritten in Japanese.
This level of detail made the collection so worth playing.
So I told my producer what we’re going to do. We take the design document, put it in Google sheets, and just start adding the Japanese in there. I will take all the text boxes, put it into another spreadsheet and get it all localized into many a language Then I told an engineer about my idea to have floating windows over each of the documents. Each floating window will be a string of localized text, and it’ll float at a given coordinate on the document so that, as you zoom in, the text will stay in the right place. It can be turned on and off so you can see the original Japanese and the translation at a whim. As a result, everyone – Konami, the art team, the engineering team – had to be involved with this to make it happen.
It was honestly about a month of my life where I woke up each day, sat down at the computer and started placing the textboxes, because each needed to be placed by hand, by a human, and that human was me. But once I saw it, I felt the magic, and I knew that the magic came not from some special machine, but from one person – me – doing a lot of tedious work.
So, in my job, I have days like this where I get to attend these fantastic events like BitSummit and sit down and talk with people like you about my life. Then, for another 80% or so, it’s me, sitting in front of spreadsheets, realizing I’ve been clicking the wrong thing and need to start again. So these days really help with those days, but it also helps me appreciate the path I chose. I could have just said “this is too much work, let’s just do a couple design documents and call it a day.”
But no, this was a treasure trove of information that needed to be shared, and this could have been our one golden chance with Konami. Once we finished with Turtles, the documents go back in the Konami vault until the next Turtles collection, which might be in ten years or never. I knew “the people must see all of this.” So how do we convince Konami that we show everything? By making it like this. When a new collection of these classic games comes out and it’s somewhere in the five, six gigabyte range, people always ask “Why are these old games coming at such a big file size?” And it’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’ve put in all this bonus content, I’ve gotten it all in 4K, but this is our chance to do it, and we must do it.
How many BitSummits have you attended?
This is my first! Yes, I used to Tokyo Game Show every year, but this is my first BitSummit. When I worked at Wired, we had a travel budget, so if you went to DiCE, if you went to E3, and then Tokyo Game Show, that was pretty much it for the year. Now, BitSummit is pretty big, but it was much smaller back when I was there. So it’s harder to justify because, as you know, if you write an article about an awesome indie game and it gets like a hundred page views, there you go. So I’m really glad to have a reason to be here because it’s incredible to be here. I did the absolute bare minimum work on Wizardry, but now that I’m here I’m taking photos of the booth, sending back some of our rarer sampler CDs back to the team, things like that.
At this point we were asked, politely, to leave the interview area because the time was up.
Chris continues to work at Digital Eclipse, and I encourage everyone to continue keeping an eye on their upcoming releases to see exactly where he will leave his mark next.
Check these out!
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