It is…
Before Apple Arcade there was a small games store buried in iTunes and a variety of arcade classics along with new original titles. These games could be purchased and played on your video iPod.
I did…
I created various 2D and 3D assets for our original content and marketing materials for the iTunes Store. In addition, I directed blue screen video shoots for in game characters and eventually processed all that data to prep for ingestion. Finally, I mentored college interns that we eventually hired as employees at Apple.
Deliverables
Tons of 2D assets from either Maya, 3DS MAX, Photoshop, Illustrator or Shake (Final Cut).
Results
The details
I was lured to Apple in 2005 by a former colleague from EA. We worked on various titles and platforms at EA and when I realized he was working at EA on a secret project, of course I was intrigued. Who wouldn’t be, a secret project at Apple!
Now back in the mid 2000’s, the iPhone was still a few years out and the device that was brining in all the revenue at Apple was of course the iPod. While music and podcasts were still the main media type for consumption, with the introduction of the video iPods television shows and movies started making it into the vernacular of the millennials. Downloading individual episodes or entire seasons for consumption at your convenience was something novel, especially since YouTube was not even a year old at the time and streaming services were non-existent.
While the video iPods growth could certainly be fueled by these two media types alone, Apple knew there could be room for more. This is where my gaming background comes in.
Games already existed on flip phones at this time. Sun Microsystems’ Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) and Qualcomm’s Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) emerged in the last half of 2001 as the leading development environments for mobile gaming. By 2005 these were fairly entrenched but things were about to change.
Our team was tasked to make original game titles for the video iPod and derivative devices. In addition, we served as the liaison for 3rd party game developers to get their games working on the video iPod. Finally, we partnered with the iTunes Store team at the time to create the assets and content ready for selling.
We of course had the classics including Bejeweled, Cubis, Tetris, Zuma, Pac-Man and Mahjong. But our involvement with these was more support. Most importantly was guidance on controls. The click wheel while great for scrolling presented a challenge for those accustomed to directional pads, four trigger buttons and shoulder buttons typically found on traditional game controllers.
With that said, many of the first games were successful games on those old flip phones which had number keypads as controllers! I not only recommended/suggested button mappings but even designed the instruction pages for the iTunes Store.
The majority of my work was on the original titles. Here are notes from my favorite of that era.
Vortex
Basically Breakout in a circle, this game worked perfectly with the iPod click wheel interface. When I came in, this project was already rolling and the visual style was already set. My tasks were scaling with the creation of more levels (Circular backgrounds), Animations of when you beat the level and the doors opened, various menu screen concepts and of course the instruction pages for the iTunes Store.
Sometimes this most simple game designs are the best! I especially liked this review from launch.
Hold Em!
Poker has been around forever but in the early 2000, with the advent of the World Poker Tour and other coverage on television, Texas Hold’Em style poker games took the world by storm. Of course this meant we needed some kind of poker game in the iTunes store. Now we could have easily had a third party game developer make one for us but Apple wanted to create one from scratch.
My tasks for this particular game were focused on the AI players. Since we were a very small team of 2 (3 once we had an intern), there was no way we could design and create hundreds of characters in 3D to be rendered as sprites. To get around this, we decided to use video of actual Apple employees and extract frames to create simple animations for things like, look at cards, bet, fold, win, etc.
Not only did we need to do typical things like create shot lists of all the moves required, we needed to build a makeshift blue screen backdrop, a blue poker table, and prop playing cards that were larger than life so they would be legible in the final video frames. It was a blast to direct people how to act like a poker pro and it seemed like our actors had a good time as well. Do any of the people below look familiar??
I took all the footage into an old compositing tool called Shake (Node based interface which I loved. Apple did too so we bought the company and stopped supporting the software!) and created flip books for all the poker moves for every actor. Here is an initial test composite of a sample background, UI and keyed video. We were pleased but…
We could not play back 30fps in our game, Bummer! The Click Wheel iPods graphic performance we could say was lacking a bit. So, I removed frames to only get the raw movement and made it fit in the game engine. Compared to the original footage, it wasn’t great but this was the only path to get simple character animations into the game.
To augment our video actors we created some Easter egg players in 3DSMax like various dogs, aliens, etc. I then keyframed the characters to create the same flip books for our video characters.
This work for Texas Hold’Em was just the beginning, as a new device was on the horizon that would present a new way to play Texas Hold’Em!