An Interview with James "Purple" Hampton...The Producer of Alien Vs. Predator

This interview is from the June '94 issue of Video Games magazine.

Puple:
I came from Atari from LucasFilm, where I worked as a tester on Monkey Island I and II, the two Star Wars games for the NES and--among other things--a little-known game called Night Shift, which was developed by a company called Attention to Detail. I thought it was kind of amusing when I got here to discover that ATD also did CyberMorph, the first Jaguar game released!

When I arrived in October of '92, I was assigned to be the producer of the Alien Vs. Predator project, which at the time was a Lynx game. As you know, Activision had a Super NES game called Alien Vs. Predator, and Atari had aquired the rights to the AVP title through Activision. The Lynx people who had already started on the project (Images Software) had been told to follow the script of the Activision game, which was kind of a Final Fight clone, but I really didn't agree with that as a treatment of the characters. I was excited to be working with the Alien and Predator characters to begin with, and I wanted a chance to get closer to the motivations of the characters themselves.

As it happened, Images was happy with the idea of completely changing the script, so we both spent one week watching the Alien and Predator films, then started the month-long process of sending faxes back and forth with different ideas to try. Ultimately we came to the conclusion that the most interesting way of really representing the characters was to do it in the first person, with you being able to play as any of the three species: a Human, an Alien, or a Predator.

VG:
Around this time the Jaguar hardware was coming together. Did you then start to develope the Jaguar version without really knowing what you were capable of doing with it?

Purple:
No, the hardware had to be pretty much developed by the time I got there. Of course, no one really knew exactly what the Jaguar was and was not possible on the Jaguar. To this day we're still finding out things; every week we seem to be saying, "Wow, we can do this?"

What we did know regarding AvP was that the Jaguar could do the first person perspective with 3D rendering really, really well. We continued along with the Lynx version which we were trying to design around the ComLynx feature; the idea is to do it as a FaceBall type of game, where one person can play the Alien, one person can play as the Predator, one person can play the Marine, and they're all in the same maze hunting eachother. There have been ups and downs with the Lynx game, but it's currently planned to be released about six weeks after AvP comes out for the Jaguar in June.

VG:
I understand that both Images and Rebellion--the developer of the Jaguar version--are based in England. What is it like to work with an overseas developer?

Purple:
It wasn't until February of '93 that the AvP contract was assigned to Rebellion, and that's when the project really started kicking into gear. Before that, the Lynx game was leading the way in terms of the direction the project was going to take, but when Rebellion came in they really got involved in the overall feel of the game, working with the art and so on. At first, their people had to spend a few months just learning the system and what it could and couldn't do. During that time, we went through art changes back and forth...like, we originally started with 256 color DPaint art screens and went through three different steps to get the technique we are using now.

VG:
Which is?

Purple:
Essentially, Rebellion has created models of the different creatures and they're doing stop-motion animation frame by frame, for all the different animation cycles of each character involved. The wall "tiles" are also physically being created and photographed; infact, they're literally bathroom tiles with model parts and spray paint on them. Once they're converted into graphic data, they are essentially one-panel textures that are being applied to the game's 3D polygon world.

It's really kind of bizarre. It's exciting, but at the same time you keep telling yourselves, "we can do more." I mean why settle for 256 colors when you can have 65,000!

VG:
I've heard some interesting things about the data compression that AvP uses, and how the compression technology is one of the things that really sets the Jaguar apart from the 16-bit game systems. Can you elaborate this?

Purple:
In essence, the Jaguar--because of the five different processors in it--is hyperfast; it has enough processors to do different things while you're busy doing other things, such as decompressing huge files in game time, or real time. That, inturn, enables you to store a lot better-looking images in a smaller space. A file with 65,000 colors in it is normally huge; it would take either a long time to draw on the screen--or worse yet--it would takea huge amount of room to store on a cartridge. But in AvP, We've had no trouble storing these images and decrompressing them on the fly. We're using different compressino ratios depending on what the image is and what kind of clarity value it really needs to have; like some of the less-detailed wall panels in AvP are using a 10:1 or even 14:1 compression ratio. That's for a low-detail file, maybe a floor panel or one of the white MedLab walls. On the lower end, some of the more detailed characters use 3:1 or 4:1 compression, which is still a significant value considering how long it used to take to do that sort of thing. The size of the final cartrigde will be 16 megabits (Wes' note: The game was completed at 32 megs.), but we're estimating that there's at least 125 megabits of information compressed into the game; it's pretty sizable.

VG:
Are there any limitations in terms of how many Aliens you can have on the screen ot the same time?

Purple:
We haven't found any yet, it's exciting; we thought there might have been a problem, but it's cooking right along.

VG:
That's encouraging. Hey, I have to ask: where'd you get the nickname Purple?

Purple:
Well, when you start working at LucasFilm--in the "tester from hell" department--you have two seconds to assign yourselve a name, otherwise the guys will assign one for you. I was given the nickname Purple because I was wearing purple socks, I had a purple streak in my hair and I was driving a purple marbleized Saab with purple glasses on.

Interview Over Man!...Interview Over!