Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/pinball/comments/1m9m81p/pinball_2000_development_lore_part_6/
These are my experiences as part of the Pinball 2000 team. Feel free to ask questions. I’ll gather up multiple answers into one comment like I did with the initial post. Now, without further ado…
Part 6 – Miscellaneous silly anecdotes
These are unconnected bits and they’re not in any particular order. I either thought the situation was funny (sometimes only after the fact) or they show what life is like when you’re involved in a project with so much passion and so much riding on the outcome.
SNACKS!
It was a lapsed tradition among the pinball programmers to go down to the lunch area in the afternoon, buy things from the vending machines and chit-chat just as a break from the grind. At some point in Pinball 2000 development we revived this, partly because someone left a hand bell up by our offices. Dwight would ring the bell and call out “Snacks! Snacks!” and we’d go. The bell was loud and obnoxious, but people tolerated the noise because most things were manic most of the time. I’d generally have a Diet Pepsi and a chocolate bar. I was averaging six bottles a day so my caffeine levels were high but not quite into heart palpitations territory. One day we were sat there talking and Tom looked over at me. He says “You’re eating around the letters?!” and he was right. I often got one of those Nestle Crunch bars. I would leave the letters until last so I could eat them one at a time and rearrange them into anagrams. Crunch became churn but I forget how it went from there.
PHONE TAG
The company phone system wasn’t sophisticated. If you called someone and they were already on a call you’d just get the busy signal. If you needed the person urgently you could call an extension and whatever you said would come out of speakers all over the building like an announcer at an event. You’d hear things like “John McCaffer, please call 123”. People who were more important would get paged like this and you could gauge how busy they were by how many pages they got. Anyway, one evening I was in the bathroom and I heard someone get paged. Then someone else, presumably the person being paged, called in and paged the original person. The first person paged again with “… and please hang up your phone”. The second person paged AGAIN with just “It’s hung!”. I didn’t recognise the names and I don’t think I ever met them.
RESTAURANT CRITICS
We had several places we went to eat on a regular basis, for lunch and for dinner. Some of them had nicknames. Sometimes the names registered a person’s dislike of the place, but not always. For example there was a Popeye’s nearby that people called “boneyards”. Apparently one of the videogame teams ate there regularly and were in the habit of throwing chicken bones over their shoulders into the potted plants, which I neither witnessed nor would condone.
There was a Mexican restaurant called ‘Taco Y Salsa’ that at one time had been a bar and Greg Freres had played a gig there when he was in a band. The staff had trouble with my British accent, but I liked the food. Larry came with us one lunchtime and was unimpressed. At some point after that we were deciding where to go and he called it “Tacos & Horsemeat”. I think we stopped eating there not long afterwards.
We used to get dinner at this diner called ‘Golden Nugget’. I think there were several in the area, but I’ve no idea if they still exist. I would usually get either a burger or breakfast food. Keith always ordered french toast with a side of sausage. One time Lyman decided to join us, having been skeptical about the place beforehand. I thought their milkshakes were really good so Lyman ordered a chocolate shake. When it arrived the metal cup had a tiny piece of banana on it (I expect from a banana shake being made at the same time). Lyman was very unhappy with this and refused to ever go back to “Dog Nugget” as he subsequently named it.
Bill got fed up with the usual selection of lunch places and pushed for us to try to somewhere new. It was called ‘Nantucket Fish House’ and it was close by. I know Nantucket is a real place but I have a dirty mind and so I kept thinking about what is usually rhymed with it in limericks. It was small and quiet and nondescript, but unfortunately the food was quite bad. I’m forgiving with most things but if you can’t get fish & chips right when one of the words is in the name of your restaurant, you don’t deserve repeat customers. We never went back and I think Bill went several months before resuming his quest to broaden our palates.
THE TAPESTRY
There was a Mexican restaurant down the block from where we worked called La Finca. The food was really good so it was a good place to take new people. There was also an ulterior motive, in the form of an initiation rite of sorts. There was a tapestry on the wall of a step pyramid, like the Aztecs built. One side was partly overgrown and the other was cleared of vegetation. We would ask new people to come up with an explanation why this might be the case, since the job involved creativity. It was fun to hear what people would come up with. Someone said it was because the blood from sacrifices ran down that side. My own answer had been that they were union workers so they were on a mandated break. Bill was hired before me so I wasn’t present for this, but he told me his answer had been “It’s a beach towel!”
STEALTH
I worked very late hours most days. I would arrive around 11:30am, do the things I needed to start the day and then go to lunch with the others. I would usually stay until 2am or even later. It was good to have time when I was on my own because I could avoid being distracted. I only lived five miles away so my evening commute was really easy. One night it was really foggy and there was almost no-one else on the road. I was tired and nearly home when someone on a bicycle came riding through the intersection towards me, on the wrong side of the road. He was a black guy with no lights on his bike, wearing dark clothing. I think the bike was dark grey or black as well. I don’t think he could have been less visible than he was. It was lucky for both of us that I saw him at all.
REMODELING
As we got closer to putting the first game into production the factory got involved. They needed one of their engineers to help make sure the games could be built easily. There were often mechanical things that needed to be tweaked. One afternoon I came back from a trip to the vending machine (I drank a LOT of Diet Pepsi) and noticed a new hole in the drywall outside the office of one of the mechanical engineers. The thing is, this hole was at head height. It turned out that the manufacturing engineer had unilaterally decided that the slide rails under the playfield were unnecessary and didn’t want to do anything with them. One of our people had been angry at this and punched a hole in the wall beside this person’s head. The slide rails were added back to the production process.
This was not the only time tempers flared strongly enough to lead to damage. The building manager tolerated a certain amount of destruction, but would make sure people knew when they were over the line. He’d worked for the company since before I was born and was a good guy. He dealt with a lot of bullshit from over-indulged creative people. He had two workers who would fix damage like this along with making layout changes. One was short and plump and the other was taller and thinner. We nicknamed them the Super Mario Brothers. They would be tasked to reconfigure things all the time. There was an open area with a bunch of chairs and they had to put walls around it. I don’t know who wanted that and none of us pinball people thought it was helpful. I had no problem with them. They were just doing what they were told, but it was sometimes strange to find a door where there hadn’t been one or a corridor that had been extended.
EXPLETIVES
I liked my office to be as dark as possible so that the only light game from my PC monitor or the game. I kept the lights off and my door ajar. At one point I had a board with a bunch of flashlamps laid out in two rows, with covers in all different colours. I wrote a little bit of code that would flash them randomly and put them inside my game so that it was like having a mini rave in my office. It must’ve looked odd to people passing my door. The lady who had the office next to mine worked in the drawing office keeping track of blueprints and so on. Her name was Nina and people called her the “purple dragon lady” because she loved purple clothes and didn’t indulge people’s foolishness. I had my little rave running one day and was really fired up working on something. When my code crashed my game I said, loudly, “Goddamn motherfucking piece of shit!”. Nina immediately called out “Coral!” (actually my deadname, but I won’t use that here) in that tone everyone knows as Mom Voice. I popped into her office and apologised, but she was smirking. She told me not to worry because she “had raised two boys”. She was one of my favourite people so I did still watch my language a little more during normal work hours.
ALL-NIGHTERS
Some of us would work through the night and into a second day without going home to sleep. This usually only happened when we had a really important thing happening that second day, like a demo for the CEO. One night there were five or six of us and we got hungry, so we drove to the supermarket nearby. Picture a gaggle of slap-happy overtired programmers pushing a cart through the aisles and tossing random junk food into it. There were cookies, marshmallows and so on. I was in the aisle where the refrigerated shelves held baked goods. I noticed a slab of chocolate cake, and signaled Lyman, who happened to be with me. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said while pointing at the cake. He agreed and we decided to split it 50/50. It was at least 2lbs of cake. I said we should call it “Megacake”. We put it in the cart, I paid for it and when we got back to the office we cut it in half. I ate all of my half of Megacake that night and I think Lyman did the same.
COMPATIBILITY
Keith was working on game 4. One day he came by my office to tell me a character in one of the fonts looked wrong. I asked him to draw just that character and scale it up so I could see whether it was the font itself or some problem with the graphics code. He did this and we could both see that one pixel was clearly one position off from where it should be. I’m a decent programmer, but I’m a better debugger. I found the problem, which was in one of the tools that processed art data to go into game ROM. It only happened when the source art, which was saved in a compressed format, happened to trigger a specific part of the decompression code in the tool in certain circumstances. This was why we hadn’t seen the problem before. It was a simple fix, Keith and I verified the problem was solved and I got back to whatever I was working on before. A week or two later Tom came by my office because he’d tried to build a previous version of Star Wars Episode 1 and couldn’t get the checksums from the build to match the ROM image we’d used before. That meant the ROM image was different in some way and that was concerning. Suddenly I remembered that bug fix I’d made and we reverted it locally. Sure enough, now the checksums matched! There was a character in one of that game’s fonts that had the same problem but it was one we’d never actually used (probably a tilde or some other punctuation). I fixed my fix by adding an option to the tool so that you could disable the bug fix and modified the build script for Episode 1 so that it used that option. To this day I’ve never had to write another run-time conditional bug fix.
Recent Comments