I meet with Q*Bert creator Warren Davis and we talk about his new book! You do NOT want to miss this one.
Transcription (AI created – may not be 100% accurate)
Shane R. Monroe
Hey everybody, this is Shane Armand row and you are in the passenger seat with me. It’s passenger seat radio. It is December 3 2021. And we are not in the hot. We’re not in the car. We are in fact on a call with the amazing Warren Davis. My guest today famous for games such as Cuber, jous, to the laserdisc game us versus them, Terminator two Revolution X. And we could just keep going and going and going. Welcome to the show. Warren.
Warren Davis
Thank you so much is great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Shane R. Monroe
Pleasure is all mine. And soon to be my listeners as well. So the last time we spoke, and this was Classic Gaming Expo 2003. That’s almost 20 years. That’s a lifetime ago, a lifetime ago. Right? It feels like two weeks ago.
Warren Davis
Yeah, I think about it next year. Next year is the 40th anniversary of Cubert. You know, I developed the game in 1982. So 2003 is like half of his life cycle ago.
Shane R. Monroe
Man, I feel like I should be out like buying coffins or something at this point, I just, I blink and 20 years goes by 40 years goes by. It’s unbelievable. It is indeed. Well, retro gaming radio is no more I did everything I could with that show. And I think eventually, retro just kind of ran out. I told all the stories I ran there for what 12 years. So but I am glad to be able to bring you on to this new podcast. I’ve been running this one for 15 or 16 years at this point. And a lot of my listeners followed me. So you’re going to be reaching the retro gaming radio audience. And thanks to social media, just about everybody else too. I think so. And while this isn’t an audio show, primarily we are going to be broadcasting this on YouTube. So you can see worn in all of his glory, and I’m going to be doing inserts. I’m going to be doing insert, videos, overlays and all that good stuff for the YouTube video. So most of you just lose to listening to this show. But in this case, we’re gonna make it a nice video presentation as well. That’ll be available on YouTube on my channel, Monroe world. But enough about me. Warren isn’t just here to catch up or for his health. He has written a stellar new book called Creating Cubert and other classic video arcade games. That’s a long title. Fortunately, creating puberty is kind of the top level there.
Warren Davis
That’s the bigger part and then the rest of his little subtitle. So it’s okay.
Shane R. Monroe
You don’t have to just elaborate and Cubert then yeah,
Warren Davis
okay, we went, you know, we talked to the publisher, we went through lots of lots and lots of times. You know, I mean, because I thought well, I mean, I am known mostly for Cubert. But I this book is about my entire career in the in the arcade industry. And I worked on, as you said, so many more things, but I didn’t know how to get that into the title. Anyway, so that subtitle is what we compromised on.
Shane R. Monroe
I like it, it’s just sometimes it’s a little long off the tongue there. And it’s going to be available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble on December 21. And that actually,
Warren Davis
if I may, it’s available now. You can jump on there right now and preorder it’s, it’s available everywhere that you might, you know, webinar books are sold.
Shane R. Monroe
Great. Great. And that’s available both digitally. And thank you thank you hardback, thank you for not making that a paperback,
Warren Davis
you know, not my choice, in fact that, you know, if you if you know anything about the history of the book, it originally I originally self published about I want to say was it what year is this 2021.
Shane R. Monroe
Last I checked, I think was totally wrong. So
Warren Davis
two years ago, I came out with a self published version of the book, I was totally prepared to just self publish. And it came out just before the pandemic hit. So all of my planned appearances, I took it, I took the book to one show, which is free play Florida in 2019. And, and then all of my appearances for 2020 got cancelled because of the pandemic. So in my boredom, as I sat in my home doing nothing for months, I reached out to some publishers, and that’s and then found a publisher who was interested in so that began a very long road towards the republishing now of this book, which is essentially the same book but you know, the publisher had requests and so there’s some slight, very slight differences, but, and that means that anybody who did get a copy of the original version, which by the way, had a different title, it was called, you can’t call it brotherly love. And that is the cartoon balloon of Cubert. Swearing, right? So, and that title was indicative of a story in the book which we can talk about But anyway, I had a different title. And and so those are collector’s items. I, as soon as I made a deal with the publisher, I was I’m no longer allowed to print or publish the original, which was a paperback just strictly for cost reasons really. Yeah. But I’m happy that you’re, you’re pleased, it’s going to be hard back.
Shane R. Monroe
I am. And you know, it used to be, you know, it was always about cost and cost and cost and the skin as cheap as we can. But there have been such beautiful books like artwork, books of classic video gaming, I guess they call them coffee table books, where you open these up, and there’s these beautiful, gorgeous color pictures of arcade cabinets. You can’t really do that with a paper bag, you’re kind of holding it like this, you’re breaking the spine. But there’s just something awesome about having that that book in your hand. So I’m pleased that it’s hardback, I imagine it probably raise the price a little bit, but I’m happy to pay my bills.
Warren Davis
I don’t and I wouldn’t call this a coffee table book by any No, no, no, you know, again, is sort of out of that decision. It’s kind of out of my hands. Is that a publishers decision?
Shane R. Monroe
So speaking of publishing a book, especially in this day and age with everything that’s going on, I mean, I know there’s no computer chips in there. Right? But if there have been problems? Yeah. Hey, you never know publisher prerogative, after all. Was there any trouble getting your book published during the pandemic?
Warren Davis
Yes, and I would, I’d have to say it’s ongoing, you know, technically, the book, even it’s available for pre order and has been for some time. And the process of just doing any book is a fairly slow one, as I’ve come to learn, this has really been sort of an eye opening experience for me having never worked with a publisher. But, you know, there’s, there’s lead times involved, and there’s, you know, printing and shipping and binding. And right now, in fact that the book is actually scheduled to be bound, it was supposed to be bound. Today, the day this day that we’re talking, it’s at the binders supposedly going to be and so this would start a process where then would be bound, it would be shipped to the warehouse, it would be mailed out to the pre orders and available for purchase, but it’s unclear whether it actually is going to make their deck being bound today, there’s it again, it’s all COVID related stuff. It’s affecting every industry it’s affecting, it’s affecting a lot of people in a lot of different ways. And I’m just sort of caught up in it. But you know, I’m very optimistic, it will get out there very, very soon. And, and people will be able to hopefully enjoy it.
Shane R. Monroe
So, one of my listeners, I asked, I solicited my listeners for some questions for you. And one of the questions that we got was, Is it possible to get an autographed copy if we buy directly from you or anything like that?
Warren Davis
That’s a great question. And and, yes, happily, I’m happy to say the answer is yes, I do. When I was self publishing, I created a website so that I could sell autographed copies. Certainly, I’m trying to make appearances at retro gaming shows around the country. And so if you can see me, I’m happy to autograph a copy in person. Once Once I’ve got books in my hand, I will be taking them to shows to sell and sign but but if you want to order one once, I can actually get copies in my hand. I will then make them available on my website for purchase. And you can you know have them autographed or not and and I will I take requests on how you want them autographed if you just want a signature if you want a personalized happy to accommodate people but and that site is Warren Davis shop all one word Warren Davis shop dot square SQ U ar e dot site, s i t e. Okay. And currently, again, it’s not available because I don’t have the books in the hands, but I will make them available once I can get them. Well,
Shane R. Monroe
we’ll make sure the link is in the description below along with the Amazon link and Barnes and Noble link and anything else you provide to me that you’d like them to have to make sure they can get your book. Sure. Sounds good. All right. Well, I’ve got a laundry list of stuff here and bless you for giving me your time. So I read the book over the course between two and three days on and off. I was glued to it when I when I was able to get the time for it. And let’s start off with this. So I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. Some days. I don’t remember breakfast today. And you say in the introduction that many memories were jogged by recent conversations with your colleagues. What sort of Challenges are involved in writing a book that you made a steady disclaimer, that was not a historical record, there your memories as you remember them. But when you’re trying to write something with historical reference like that you strive for accuracy and you want to fill in the gaps in your memory. Did you do anything special when researching this book?
Warren Davis
I mean, it was absolutely a concern of mine, when I first had the idea to collect a lot of my stories and write a book that was like, probably my primary concern is like, do I remember enough of the details to make it an interesting story? I mean, I, you know, memory is a weird thing. But thankfully, because of all the retro gaming shows that are out there, and because I was attending them, and I was running into old colleagues, I had opportunities to bring things up, if there were things that I felt were fuzzy, I would ask about them. And I said, Well, what what are your memories about that? And, and I found that, for the, for the most part, I think my memories were, you know, in concert with most other people. So that that helped. And every now and then a colleague would supply a story, a little detail or a little thing that I’d forgotten. So, you know, I basically just sort of accumulated the details as I went along. I mean, it was a, it was a long process to write this, it took me probably two years, I want to say, and, and so if I felt like I had something that I’d already written about, but I learned something new, I go back, and I incorporate the the new details and things like that. And
Shane R. Monroe
that’s awesome. It’s gonna be a very iterative process than
Warren Davis
it was an iterative process, not unlike making a video game, because we’re gonna
Shane R. Monroe
talk about that. I’ve got a question here that actually uses that word.
Warren Davis
Alright, well, I’ll hold off. But so yeah, it was it was a huge concern. And, and I do feel like I feel like I did pretty well, I again, I can’t swear that everything. I’m not a researcher. Right. And so that’s the only reason I put in the disclaimer, but I do feel it’s pretty accurate.
Shane R. Monroe
So the book opens with sort of a lighthearted discussion, framing what technology was like when you got started, and there’s no internet, there’s no color TV, there’s no computers and wait, there were color TVs. But you’re talking about watching shows and black and white in my childhood. Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in similar time areas. Yeah, I think you’re a couple years older than maybe, but I try to share that timeframe with my children or their friends, my friends, children or nieces and nephews. And I find it almost impossible to try to to relate technology levels like that, by the way, you did a sink job in the book, I thought it was really well done. I’m gonna I’m gonna unofficially swipe it to be telling my my family members about it. But you actually had a generation of computer programming before me. I mean, after all, my first computer was a trs 80 model three with a cassette drive, which I bet you would have loved to have had a cassette drive. Because you were you were the punchcard programming that tape programming. And easily the most fascinating discussions in the book was working with computers like the man robot, which, by the way, great name, man, robot, 11. Computer, can you share a little bit about what that process was like for you?
Warren Davis
Yeah, I guess. I mean, you know, being I was fascinated by computers from a very early age. And I also had, I found an aptitude for math. So even also, from an early age, it was just something that sort of came easy to me. And I just happened to be lucky enough to go to a high school in New York Sheepshead Bay High School, that just happened to have and this was such a rare thing I can’t even begin to describe but they happen to have a computer that that was available for students. And it was the size of a desk. It was literally a desk with a typewriter on it because we didn’t have CRT screens as we know of them today.
Shane R. Monroe
No visual, you can’t see what you’re typing really?
Warren Davis
Well, you you’re typing so you can see it on a piece of paper. Yeah, yeah. You’re literally typing. And the machine is is taking in the keys that you are typing. And then it’s typing, you know, like if you you programmed to do something, it will then it starts typing on its own. So that’s how it communicates back to you. And but yeah, it was it was just, it was science fiction basically. To me, and and I learned how to program it and I, I actually was, it was it was another odd thing because I was a sophomore. When I started learning how to use this computer. Normally you had to be a genius. Junior, but I think so there were these senior guys who were in charge of the computer lab. And they there were no juniors, who I guess were capable or deemed worthy enough to be their successor. So I was a sophomore. And so I became their successor. So I learned my sophomore year. And then I was in charge of the compute once they left, I was in charge of the computer lab for the next two years. Anyway, but it was, it was an amazing time it was it was a it was a fun time. You know, it was an experimental time. And yeah,
Shane R. Monroe
well, you know, in college didn’t seem like it was that much better. So we’ll fast forward a little bit. And we were talking about RPI, you creating a gin rummy game on punch cards, and you only talk about it for a few paragraphs. When I went back to look at the book after I’d read it. And I was trying to build my notes. I swear, we talked, you talked about that longer. But you had talked about the concept of iteration of that software. And explain to them about, I always pictured that you had a terminal in your office that you would have punch cards, and you would feed them in. And that’s how you taught the computer. But you had to go to a mainframe.
Warren Davis
Right? Yeah, right. There were no terminals, when I was a freshman. And when I came to RPI, I think my senior year is when they first installed CRT terminals for students to use. So it just took a while for them to filter down to for average use. But when I was a freshman, the only computer you had available to you is the mainframe. In the in the in the big computer lab, and you literally walked with your program, whether it was wrapped in rubber bands, or if it was a big enough program, you had these punch cards in a box. And you had to carry them into the lab, hand them off to somebody, they had
Shane R. Monroe
to be an order.
Warren Davis
Well, of course, yeah, you’re in big trouble. You, you would have to hit them on somebody, and then they would take it and they put them at the end of all the other programs they had to run and usually come back the next day. Oh, and get your cards back with
Shane R. Monroe
a printout of the results. And people get pissed. They can’t next day Amazon.
Warren Davis
It was it was a different time. And
Shane R. Monroe
yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was
Warren Davis
saying you, you, you you, you couldn’t really do anything until you got your results back. And then you if you had a bug, you had to fix it and then send it in and go through the process again.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah. And so the process, again, isn’t a matter of taking one card out of that deck and, and fixing the code on that card and then putting that in sort of iteratively you had to get that whole stack again, and take that whole stack back down, right? Well, they would give you the stack back. And if your bug was in one card, then you only had to replace that one card, but you still had to give them the whole stack back. You couldn’t say my program is this and replace this card.
Warren Davis
What they wouldn’t do it you would do? I mean, like, again, you hand them a stack, right? They run it, they give you the stack and the results back. Gotcha. No, I look at the results. If there’s a bug, I figure out what statements were where the bug is. And I have to replace those cards. And then I gave him this the whole
Shane R. Monroe
stack had to go back. Yeah. Man, Unity developers need to stop complaining. That’s all I have to say. Let’s, let’s move on to another small another small portion of your of your pre video game days. Let’s talk about Bell Laboratories. You were working on consoles for telephone operators. And I love in the book. You’re like, I gotta tell you what a telephone operator is. I mean, really, my 15 year old son doesn’t know what a telephone operator is. Yeah, he put the words together and say, Oh, he’s an operator for the telephone. But you did mention something really interesting about making calls to your friends in Israel, or a friend is yes. So I, I may have dabbled in a previous life when I was a juvenile, by the way, in the world of boxing, and not boxing, but more like blue boxing or rainbow boxing. So when you start talking about making calls to Israel and having access to these current consoles, I was always wondering, did you I mean, did you understand the technology of the blue box and the 2600 hertz and all that stuff? Or were you strictly hardware?
Warren Davis
I was not hardware. I honestly I wasn’t hardware or software. Okay, I was in the testing group. So what that meant was, you know, the hardware existed, the console that the operator sat at was pretty much standard. And then they would keep coming out with these different software revs with new features and such and then okay, When they decided to release that, they would have to install it into a non operational office somewhere in the country. And, and then we would go in for months, and test the new features, and, you know, test the old features to make sure they still work. And, and, and then when we were done, it would go live. And then they could, you know, obviously other places in the country could get that software update as well. So, I wasn’t really, I mean, I was trained as a hardware engineer, and a software engineer, that was my schooling, I opted for a, an engineering program that was sort of like a mix of hardware and software. But I didn’t get to do any hardware. Working on the operator consoles, I actually was, i Lo, I was loaned out at Bell Labs to a different division, where I actually did some hardware design. But that had nothing to do with operator consoles that had to do with pattern recognition of speech, which was an interesting project also. But getting back to the operator thing. Yeah, I didn’t I, I didn’t dabble in any of that sort of a blue box hardware or anything like that. And I just had the opportunity to make free phone calls from from the offices in which we were testing. I still pretty cool, though. Yeah, it was, it was pretty well.
Shane R. Monroe
So throughout the book, you constantly go back to or discuss your, your acting career. And throughout the book, it sounds to me like the tale of a man with his heart sort of pulled in two different directions. And it’s funny when I was in when I was in high school, I felt like I had a fork in the road where I was either going to go into criminal law, or I was going to go into computers I, I went to computers, and I think I did the right thing. So but it’s felt like you were always pulled in some cases, it was for two editions, you were pulled in other cases, it seemed like it was tugging your heart the other way. So tell us a little bit about that early acting background because you’re the Cuber guy, but I think it’s fascinating that you have this big acting background.
Warren Davis
Yeah. It’s it’s, it sort of astonishes me as well, I was a child. And I do think I mentioned this in the book I, as a child, I was not interested in being an actor. Mike, my interests were both computers, always interesting, fascinated by computers, but also in filmmaking. And I used to make films with a friend of mine when we were kids. Specifically, we’d make monster movies. And I was fascinated by Monster makeup. So I would make myself up to be the monster. But you know, the performance part of it was not like, I never thought I would be an actor or had any desire. But I’ve always, always, even from a very, very early age, wanted to entertain people I’ve always been, that’s been my thing I love to, I just feel entertainment is something that is worthwhile. It lifts people and I just always wanted to do that in some way. So video games is certainly a way to do that acting as a way to do that filmmaking is way to do that. So all of these things sort of fit in, but I really wasn’t interested in acting until college. And I kind of was dragged into an audition by a friend. So I, I did radio in college, okay, I had a radio show. And one, I had the opportunity to do like little comedy bits on my radio show. And then my senior year, I did a radio show with these two guys, one of whom was heavily involved in the theater group at my college. Oh, and so, you know, he got me to go to an audition. I got cast in a play. No real training. I think i i Out of curiosity, I took acting one, right. It’s a class that my school offered, which was like, really not. My school was a technical school. RPI was not a you know, liberal arts college. Right. So, but they did have acting one, which was mostly, you know, silly exercises and weird stuff anyway. But I got cast, and I did this play. And I have to say, I had so much fun doing that. And the just the, you know, the curtain call to stand up and take a bow and have people applauding was intoxicating was like a drug. And I thought I maybe I should do this more. So as I went out through my life, I did it more community theater, you know, until I actually quit Bell Labs and moved into Chicago proper. I was in the suburbs of Chicago and I moved into Chicago to study at Second City because I thought, you know, I don’t really want to be an actor. I don’t feel like I relate to these drama people, you know, as I would think I just don’t Okay, so let me just clarify it my impression of actors were the kids in the drama club in in high school. That was amazing actors and real actors. Yeah, I didn’t feel like I fit into them. I love doing that. Like I said, the show in college. And I loved. I did a couple of other plays in college, and I had fantastic screens. I love doing community theater. But, you know, I never saw myself as that as a career choice. But when I quit Bell Labs, and I moved in Chicago, I had seen shows at Second City. And I thought, oh, yeah, that stuff. I think I can do the improvisation. Yeah. So I when I moved in Chicago, I went to Second City, and I said, where do you go to study this? And they pointed me to the players workshop, which is a school taught improvisation run by a legend in the improv world, Josephine Forsberg. And I took, I took a year’s worth of, you know, I took their entire program, it was a year. And then I started performing with a group with a comedy group sketch comedy improv. You know, and again, I didn’t stick with it, because I got a job making video games. And honestly, I did get tired of it. After a while, I just felt like it was it wasn’t, it wasn’t quite for me. And then I got interested in actual performance. And then I took a real acting technique program, which I was taking. While I was making games, that golly,
Shane R. Monroe
yeah, I think I’ve got some notes about that, too. So we may have to come back to this topic again. Sometimes I wasn’t sure how these questions would play out. So
Warren Davis
I do want to say something because you you said something about my heart being tugged in two directions. I, I, I don’t know that it was at my heart was Tang. I, I I never felt like I wanted to do one without the other. And I’ve always been able to do both. So I feel watching it. You know? Yeah, in that regard. But yeah, I mean, it’s like, I can’t imagine completely giving up one and just doing the other. So I just I tend to I don’t know, if it’s I get bored easily by 10. I like doing a lot of different things.
Shane R. Monroe
And that is that is it’s apparent in the book that you enjoy the shuffle. For some people that would be that would be crazy. They wouldn’t be able to do that or even want to do that. But and so yeah, just sort of an observation that I made. And we’ll talk more about the acting stuff here in a little bit. So let’s move to God lib. So Ron Waxman sounds like a real piece of work. You tell a story or two about him in the book, including meeting him outside the building for your job interview. And honestly, I really thought we were going to get more Ron stories later in the book. But you brought him up a couple of times, and I didn’t. I feel like there’s more stories there. But tell us about interviewing there at Gottlieb because I think interviewing based on all the classic developers I’ve talked to over the decades, it seems a lot different applying for a job then. Then what it’s like now. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Tell us about the Gottlieb interview. Oh,
Warren Davis
it was just such it was such a different time. In that video game industry was still relatively new. It’s not like a million people. Although Gottlieb was one of the last of the coin up companies to get into video games. You know, Williams is you know, it was already Williams that come out with defender by then, you know, Pac Man was out. I mean, pretty much everybody Stern. All the pinball manufacturers. Certainly, obviously, many of the Japanese companies were making video games. But as far as American companies, Ghalib, I think was the last of the major pinball manufacturers to decide to go with video games, they came out with a couple of licensed games, Japanese developed games that they licensed and manufactured. Before they decided we we should put together an in house video game team. And even then, I sort of came in, I want to say later, about a year after they made that decision. So they had a very small team. And the other thing I should say about the interview is that I kind of went into that with a little bit of an attitude. Because I’d quit Bell Labs thinking, I’m done with engineering. I just thought I’m gonna I’m gonna be an improviser or an actor or something like that this engineering thing, you know, I, I’m giving up on it. Because, you know, as much as I enjoyed some of my experiences at Bell Labs, there were other things about Bell Labs who were very corporate and I just felt like I didn’t fit in with the other people and so so, I, I went to this interview with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder go I don’t really know if I want to go Back to engineering. As much as I desperately loved the idea of making video games, I was like, I’m prepared to, you know, walk away. But the interview itself was I don’t know how to describe it, really. But first there was that encounter with Ron outside the building, where basically I didn’t know who this guy was. And he just said, watch out for that Waksman guy can be a real asshole. You know, like, oh, okay, thanks for the heads up. That’s a weird thing for somebody to say. And then of course, it turns out, he’s that Waksman guy. As I’m reading later on, like, I think the last interview I had was with with Waxman. I had a, you know, another a middle manager named Bill Jacobs, you know, was the guy who sort of gave me the tour around, he introduced me to people show me the place. They were off site. Now, Gottlieb had their main plant in North Lake, Illinois, but we were in Bentonville in a plant that was pretty much dormant. And it was a manufacturing facility. But there were no games to make at the time. So it was empty, empty, empty plant that’s being set up as a as a line for manufacturing, video games, but none none to be made. Tim Skelly was working on reactor at the time, but it wasn’t quite ready for production. It was almost ready for production when I started. Anyway, so I went through that interview. And, and but it turns out Waxman once, you know, he came off very gruff, and hard to read. But once you got to know him, he was just an absolute pussycat. I mean, he was this guy who you be afraid of maybe have to look at or the first time you met him. But he was he was a wonderful guy. And he and how he Rubin, who, who was the VP, Ron was the VP of engineering, how he was the VP of Business Development. And the two of them, created the video division at Gottlieb and ran it. And they are, I mean, they are the heroes I dedicated the book to them. They really are the the people who shepherded the all of us who work there and gave us an environment to work in. And I can’t say enough about him how he’s still around. And man. It’s like, he hasn’t changed. Ron passed away a few years ago, but how we how he’s still out there still kicking, he’s as crazy as ever.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, I was fascinated by something as I was reading the book, you know, you many people that were involved in the industry, at least at least early on. And this makes sense when you think about it, but I don’t know why it struck me, but they never released a game, you kept talking about people that were working for these groups that they didn’t have a game under their belt, they didn’t have any. They had no Providence, and yet they were at these big name companies. And honestly, that was you too, right? I mean,
Warren Davis
I never made a video game in my life. So I didn’t know how to do that. But right. You know, the number of people who had created video games in America, it’s a short list. So you know, if Yeah,
Shane R. Monroe
yeah. You mentioned Tim Skelly. And he he had a couple of games under his belt. So he was kind of like royalty, right? Because he knew what was going on. He done this before. He’s like that. Yeah, what’s that?
Warren Davis
He was the rock star. He was the guy we looked up to, and he became the sort of unofficial mentor for the team for the entire group.
Shane R. Monroe
So like, when you have one, like old sob bones, I mean, I know the guy was probably like, 20, or something. But when you have the old sob bones there, and everybody else was just trying to figure things out. How was that from a development team point of view? How did that kind of work day to day?
Warren Davis
Well, I mean, I mean, it’s not like Tim was looking over our shoulders every every day is that, you know, like I said, he was the unofficial mentor. So he was just doing his thing. Gotcha. And, you know, we all learned by just sort of seeing what he was doing. If we had questions, we can come to him and he would answer them, you know, he would sometimes give us algorithms. Like he gave me a random number generator, or when I needed one and things like that. So yeah, he was just helpful. He was but but as we were all on our own, you know, that our mandate from management was make a game. Just make yourself a video game and management knew, management knew that none of us knew how to make video game we were learning. And they kind of knew that nobody knew what a good video game was. At that point. It was, you know, they really they knew that so they just they gave people freedom and you know, they had They had a small group of programmers at the beginning. And then after the success of let’s say, Cubert and mad planets did pretty well, that was con Yamamoto. And then Mach three was another huge hit for them. Then they had money coming in, and they started to expand. But it’s yeah, it’s a whole long story.
Shane R. Monroe
It’s interesting now. So you do tell another fascinating tale about a possible Superman to game by Tom Mel and now ski, sorry, if I butcher any of these names, please feel free.
Warren Davis
That’s exactly his name.
Shane R. Monroe
And part of the game in your part of the game was dealing with Rubble, this fascinated me, because I’m a game player. Still, I’m 50 something and I’m still playing video games. And I am an amateur game developer, nothing of your cloud, of course. But I put a couple of things that I found this really interesting, from a technical standpoint about how you approached the concept of getting rid of this rubble. And it’s really good when you buy the book, and buy the book, and you read this piece of it. It’s, I love your thought process of clearing the rubble, something as simple, seemingly simple task, and it was interesting. But you did mention though, that of course, Warner Brothers owned the franchise, and God live was owned by Columbia Pictures. So yeah, that licensing wasn’t gonna happen. It just wasn’t, it wasn’t gonna happen. But I was always I’m always curious when we, when people talk about that, like, how far into the game development process was the IP still alive in there, it still looked like Superman, it still looked like Zod it still, it had the the IP, you know, mesh on it. How long did that happen? Before you guys gave up?
Warren Davis
Oh, I’m not even sure. Tom was working on this game before I came along. Okay. And I sort of, you know, I was sort of given to him as a means of me learning the ropes, you know, learning how to how to how to program on our hardware, which by the way, was really fairly easy to program on was a sprite based system. So it wasn’t like it was challenging, you know, to, to, to get stuff going. But you know, there was a lot to learn and baton, you know, basically just farmed out something very simple and separate from the actual gameplay, because that was that’s what he was working on. But as far as the the character licensing, I mean, I think all of that happened before i He was was hired. So I think by the time I was hired, they knew they weren’t Superman license, and it was but they didn’t care. It was like, Look, you know, there’s Superman, and then there’s generic superhero. So you know, as long as we don’t make him Superman, we can do whatever we want. And listen, you’re talking about, about really like 16 pixel.
Shane R. Monroe
Digital likenesses there.
Warren Davis
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, and I always sing the praises of Jeff Lee, who, you know, created in 16 pixels created character of characters with personalities, characters with distinct looks and walks 16 by 16, grid and 16 colors for the entire game. And it just astonishes me what he was able to accomplish.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, I actually I’ll skip a skip a question or two here, because I definitely wanted to talk about him. So the God led graphic artists, Jeff Lee, sounds like simply an amazing human being in general. And he appears all the way throughout the book, and you’re, you’re working with him here, you’re working with him there. And like you, I wasn’t gonna bring specifics up about about the characters in that game. But it sounds incredible. Not only as your graphic artists, but also as your friend and your sounding board. It sounds like you guys, like spent a lot of late nights eating pizza and drinking Coke or whatever. What’s he doing these days? Is he still in the business?
Warren Davis
Honestly, I we don’t see each other that much. We don’t talk that much. But we occasionally run into each other at retro gaming events. So I’m not that’s a question better suited for Jeff. I would say you should you should get him on and give it I would love. I would love to
Shane R. Monroe
talk to him. Just based on what’s in your book.
Warren Davis
It’s yeah, no, he said his contributions to the videogame industry are far and wide. He because he basically was the artist for Golly. Yeah. So, you know, he was creating art for virtually everybody. We had a couple of programmers slash artists. So like, there was a guy named Chris Brewer who, who is also an an artist as well as a program and Tim Skelly created his own art. But, you know, for the rest of us, you know, and then there maybe were four programmers, you know, when I was hired, but Jeff would, you know, whatever we were working on, Jeff would be supplying the art for that.
Shane R. Monroe
So that Superman game went through a lot of iterations. Pro vid guard Argus?
Warren Davis
Yeah, that was my sort of like, you know, jokey name for it. Yeah.
Shane R. Monroe
So that game and we don’t have to go into great detail because it’s in the book. And it’s, it’s really well written on that. But was that iterative process? Because that one seemed to be different. Like you talked about cube burden tuning. And we’ve got more to talk about that later. But that seemed to be a dramatic, dramatic version of software iteration. Did that happen a lot like that?
Warren Davis
I think you didn’t want it to happen quite that much. That was maybe maybe more than you wanted it, that there are other. There were other games that kind of went through that. And and yeah, I think, you know, listen, if something’s not working, you want to fix it. Right? You don’t want to just throw it away. So it’s I think it’s part of the process. But yeah, I mean, yeah, they did give up on it. That’s the sad part at the end of the story is that eventually they just said we, somehow we can’t make this work. Okay, the caveat to all of this that we’re talking about is that like, a couple of years ago, they Jeff Lee and Tom malinovski. resurrected the ROMs for this game. And with the help of Doc Mack at the galloping ghosts arcade, they created a version of it that you can play at a duck’s arcade. I don’t know, anywhere else. It might be. And so they gave it the name Argus was the last name that this you know, because COVID Guard Argus is a collection of names that had, but they settled on August, and it’s released if you can
Shane R. Monroe
play it now. So way cool.
Warren Davis
See, you can see the little me walking down the bottom, because I’m one of the little pedestrians. And then you can see my rubble fall out and fall with no gravity. And then you can see the bulldozer come out and push it. Yeah, you can see all that.
Shane R. Monroe
You talk about that era. And this is this is the same sort of thing I hear from other classic game developers. It was the wild wild west. And when you talk to the entire developers, Wild Wild West men hot tubs do bees women hot, right? I mean, that’s what Wild Wild was. That was it? Wow. Yeah, it was crazy times apparently at Atari Howard Scott Warshaw could tell you stories. But you know, today, you could borrow two or three concepts from hundreds of different genres that are out here right now, and create something that could succeed and maybe even be taken as something new. But back then it didn’t. There was nothing to borrow from you guys. You guys had to come up with this stuff from scratch. What was it like back in the Cuber day? How do you draw inspiration? When you’re a beginner? You’re at the boy.
Warren Davis
I mean, I, when you it’s like a writer, if you have a blank page in front of you, you, you have to fill that with words. If you’re an artist, you have to fill that with with images. Um, you have reference
Shane R. Monroe
material, though, at least right? I mean, stories have been around since the beginning of time. And you can well,
Warren Davis
yeah, but I guess the question is, do you sit down and say to yourself, I want to rehash something that’s come before? Where do I want to create something new? That’s the first thing that anybody who’s creating has to ask themselves. And believe me, I’ve run into plenty of people who sit down and go, Oh, I’m just gonna recreate something. I’m just gonna take this movie that I love. And I’m gonna change the little things here. And yeah, but if you sit down, he said, just want to do something different. Well, then you had many opportunities, you have fewer opportunities today, to do something different because in video games, it feels like everything’s been done. And, you know, you’re, you’re always limited by your technology. But, you know, at that time, you know, the cartoony graphics were still somewhat new. So like, we went through the 70s. We went through Pong, and Nibbler, and tank and all these black and white with little white blocks on a back black background. So you know, then all of a sudden, it’s like, whoa, Pac Man, Donkey Kong, and we were just, you know, maybe like, two years, I think, you know, Space Invaders like 78 and that was you No black and white blocky. So, I was hired at the beginning of 1982. And just those few years, we had this whole new graphical capability available, you know, larger sprites, 16 by 16, sprites and 16 colors was like, Oh my God, we’ve got 16 Hold colors, you know, so that you just you do whatever comes to your mind. I mean, my, my goal in making a video game was that it should be fun, it should be something that I’m going to enjoy playing. And so I think I leaned into sort of the puzzle aspect of it. And again, you know, the thing I’m leaving out, of course, is that there was no plan for Cubert. The first, it started out strictly as a programming exercise. So it was just one of the things where I saw that as your pattern of cubes filling a screen. And then I said, Oh, wow, you know, if a ball fell on that, on a cube, it would have one of two ways to bounce. And so that was just the lead in for me to do a little programming exercise. And then people saw that, because that was a goal, right? It’s I just set myself a goal. And once I had balls falling on a pyramid, then people were like, wow, that looks pretty cool. And then everything else just sort of happened organically. And it evolved, as you know, one step at a time.
Shane R. Monroe
In the book, you discuss that it was a very, I guess, you excite loosey goosey type of development environment back in those days are no deadlines, no pressure, nobody can scale, he wasn’t looking over your shoulder the whole time waiting for you to deliver this or that. So none of the I guess kind of business parameters that likely key modern day projects on cores, the margin of death to Christmas, the Thanksgiving, all of that and all that nonsense. So it might be hard for people to understand what motivated developers like you back then, when you didn’t have the rigors of what we would call maybe modern software development, working around you. I mean, you say self motivation. And that sounds great, but it seems kind of foreign. Now. Can you comment on how you kept yourself motivated without those parameters?
Warren Davis
I mean, I don’t think it’s difficult to be self motivated. When you’re doing what you want to be doing. Right? I mean, you know, think about, you know, if you if you’re hungry, you know, make yourself a meal, right? Or you go out and buy water, it’s, you know, it’s not, you’re not analyzing how you’re going to accomplish this task of eating right? It’s good. You want to do it. I don’t think it’s any different. You know, you if you want to, if you if you want the opportunity to make a video game and you are enjoying that process, you just do it. That’s what you do. Yeah, I’m not I’m not sure how else to answer that.
Shane R. Monroe
Well, that’s fair. I mean, there were there were times in the book that you discussed on certain projects. You had some crazy deadlines. We’re going to talk about us versus them later. But you had some of these really crazy deadlines where you were, you know, working days, nights, holidays, weekends, trying to to meet this deadline. And yet, listen, everybody wants the paycheck. Everyone wants to, to, you know, bring home the money. But it seems like you were sort of in a position where you really did just get to do what you love and get paid for it like everybody’s dream. I mean, everybody stays in a job, because they at least somewhat like it. But you seem completely ecstatic to be doing what you’re doing. I think that feels kind of rare. These days.
Warren Davis
Oh, yeah, man, I think I was very lucky. I mean, it you know, it’s one of the reasons I left Bell Labs is because the work I was doing, on that Operator Console, the testing, that that was never a dream of mine. In fact, I were loving that. I was well, I was hired by Bell Labs, because I was looking for something that involve both hardware and software. Now, you could make the claim that writing tests and performing them involve some understanding of hardware and software, but honestly, it really doesn’t. And so I felt, you know that what I was doing, there wasn’t what I really felt like I was hired to do, which is hardware and software development. Then, I mentioned a little earlier, I was on loan to another group, and I did some pattern matching hardware. This was their r&d group. Speech recognition was science fiction that they didn’t exist. So that kind of work that I was doing for the r&d group was fascinating to me, and I was really liking that. But then I was only on loan to them. And so they were pulling me off to go do the next set of tests, which meant months at the office. is just literally writing a test document, and then a month in some office performing the test, and I didn’t want to do that, and they would not let me stay in the r&d group, and I quit. So part of it is recognizing that you are not doing something you want to be doing and, and looking for a better opportunity, you know, but at a godly, I’m not saying it’s all it was all sunshine and roses, you know, there were pressures in there. And there were concerns, and eventually there were deadlines. Because that, that that method, and I do talk about that in the book, it’s that method of just letting people do whatever they wanted, was not exactly sustainable as a as an apartment. You know, they, they were lucky with Cubert and Mach three. And Matt planets, I’d say, which was a moderate success. But, you know, then they started hiring people who were just spinning their wheels for months. And even at the beginning, there were a couple of games that spun their wheels, and went nowhere. And, yeah, it’s you taking a chance doing that, and eventually, you know, the party was over one point, so. But still, you know, you if you love what you’re doing, you you take the good with the bad.
Shane R. Monroe
So despite being known for Cubert, right, and that story is probably been told by you over and over again. And panels, interviews, of course, in the book. I mean, you’re not leaving anything out in the book. So if for some reason you don’t know the story of Cubert, it’s there. And it’s incredibly well written in the title. It’s, it’s in the title, so it better be in the book, right? You’d be surprised. But you discuss many times the concept of tuning, and you call it a daunting aspect of development. Can you tell the listeners what tuning really means cuz I thought it was an interesting concept.
Warren Davis
Sure, yeah. I mean, so you know, you’ve got a game, and it plays a certain way, you know, but every little aspect of that games is adjustable. Right? You know, the character’s speed is adjustable, the enemies speed, how smart the enemies are, how wide your collision detection areas are. And then I mean, how fast the enemies come at you, there’s, there’s just so many, depending on, of course, whatever the game is, but there’s so many variables that affect how easy it is to play, how hard it is to play that and that affects a person’s desire to play it in the first place, their desire to continue to play it. What happens if they master it? Does it continue to get challenging later on? That is all tuning and and it is daunting, because you know, you, you can tune it for yourself. But I mean, I don’t know that I’m a representative of the average game player. Right? Yeah. Right. So yeah, especially for Kubrick because it was my first game, it was a very daunting task. And of course, you’ve got other people who are telling you stuff, they’re giving you feedback, like people in the office who are just coming by and playing it. There’s, oh, that’s just too hard. This is, you know, too fast, or, Hey, he shouldn’t fall off the pyramid. You know, I mean, these are the things that people are caught every day somebody giving me some opinion about their feedback. Now, that’s important feedback. I mean, I have to listen, I don’t have to do everything they say, but I have to listen to what they say. Because it is some kind of an indication I have to decide all right, you know, is is there is what they’re saying something I need to respond to. And again, it’s there’s no right or wrong answers. You just have to go with your gut.
Shane R. Monroe
You know, I came from a very small town during that era. And so I never stumbled upon anything nearly as cool as like a field test, or a focus group for video games. And, or to be part of those types of groups. But that was really damn important in development back then. Right?
Warren Davis
Oh, yeah, I think I think it still is, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if they do it still. They may do it other ways. But, you know, even later, when I was working for Disney, with home games, in the 90s, we were still doing focus groups. So yeah, I think it’s a very valuable thing. What what I got out of it was that it’s more valuable. Watching people’s behavior, then listening to what they say. Yes, it’s great. You know, and I don’t understand that dynamic entirely, but people seem to want to sound less excited about something but when you watch them play, you can see just exactly how much they’re enjoying it or not enjoying it or frustrated by it. You know?
Shane R. Monroe
Would you share the story you don’t want to I understand, I mean, we don’t want to give too much of the book away. But would you talk about the little girl Playing Cubert in the field, I thought that was a really neat fun story.
Warren Davis
Yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, we would put games arcade games out in arcades, we had agreements with the arcades, they’d let us put new games in. And then we would do a what they call coin test, you just put it in the arcade. And after a week you want to or some number of days, whatever, you want to see how many, how many quarters it took in. And you can use that data to get your distributors interested in buying more, more of these games. And we were manufacturers, that’s what we wanted to sell and build, build and sell games. But you know, you’re also it’s also odd, because you’re sort of like a little fly on the wall, you know, but but you’re not a fly, you’re a human being. And when you’re an adult, and you’re standing in an arcade, just kind of loitering waiting for somebody to walk up to machine and see what they do. That’s it’s an odd thing. But that’s what I that’s what I did. I mean, I would go to the arcade, watch the game to see if people would walk up, see, you know, again, kind of like in a focus group, but without the one way glass, just watch what people do. So, in this one arcade, a little girl may I think she was maybe 10, or 12, walked up and put the quarter in, started to play just immediately pushed on the joystick, jumped off a pyramid and died immediately. That’s how she gets her other life. Okay, she gets her next slide does exactly the same thing. Ouch. Gets a third life does exactly the same. Maybe she jumped once and then jumped on. I don’t remember. But it was it was really over quickly. And I was worried. I’m like, oh, no, because people did say to me, you shouldn’t be able to jump off the pyramid. And I, I thought about that. And I thought no, I think you should I think staying on the pyramid is an important part of the game that you should have to learn. Anyway, she kind of walked away after that. And then like, then somebody else comes by and you know, other people again, might have had success when she came back and tried it again, which was a good sign. Yeah. And didn’t know fare that much better. But the the crux of the story is that at some point, she was able to watch somebody else play who who didn’t jump off the pyramid. And, and somehow, she was able to figure out how not to jump off the pyramid and die. And then she came back. And so the the critical part of the story is she wanted to come back. And she figured out how not to die. And that was encouraging because at least that means people are interested enough to keep coming back. And as it turned out, of course, you know, people keep coming back in the game was successful.
Shane R. Monroe
So you describe it a meeting, where Cubert finally got his name. And that painted the greatest visual in my head. I was speaking of the fly on the wall, I would have killed to be in that room. And I don’t want to ruin all the fun about how the game name came along. People can read the book for that. But when you akin the meeting to a Monty Python sketch, I almost lost it. So I have to know Do you remember any of the Goofy’s names that came out of that? During that?
Warren Davis
Honestly, I don’t I remember very little from the meeting. But what I what I do remember a little bit is, before that meeting, I had gone around to everybody in the office and pulled them for suggestions for the name of the game because I, I honestly, I just wasn’t interested in a name in the naming of it. I was I again, it started was just a programming exercise, and then all of a sudden, it’s a game, then all of a sudden, it’s on the schedule, and it’s gonna be a real thing. And it’s like, we know we have to give it a name. But I’m like, that’s a responsibility I didn’t want to have. So I just went around to everybody and the one name that and you know, literally filled up like a whole eight and a half by 11 pad of names, like two columns, every line. Maybe it was more than one page. But everybody had ideas, and I just didn’t like any of them. The one that I remember was Arnie Aardvark. One of our managers came up with Arnie Aardvark and I not naming this Arnie Aardvark. But it was kind of that way, it was like they were all you know, they were valiant attempts, but none of them really hit. And then in the meeting was kind of the same thing. We said, We just really, it felt like we spun our wheels for a very long time. And then all of a sudden, as you will read if you get the book. It’s all came together.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, it’s a great story. It’s one of those things that it’s almost worth the price of the book just to to go through that process. That’s too bad. You don’t remember any of them. I mean, I can just imagine
Warren Davis
anyone. I wish I had the paper
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, what what an artifact that would be to have right?
Warren Davis
You know, I, I have a box, or I had a box in my attic that had a lot of old Gottlieb stuff. I was kind of surprised what I found. I found, you know, I found the, you know, their benefits, you know, explanation I found their rules of conduct and things like that I found the actual piece of paper, you sign that gives that basically says, Everything you’re doing is a work for hire, and they own whatever you create. I have that piece of paper, I found that that’s crazy. But I don’t. And I think there’s more to be seen I fIatter dug up. I don’t even know it’s the stuff in my attic has been there. Since the move to California. We made that move in 96. And I think there’s stuff up there. I haven’t looked at since 1996. Honestly, so could be up there. I don’t know. I don’t know. There’s some really
Shane R. Monroe
neat photos and illustrations. Now I got a you gave me a digital copy sort of a preview version. So I don’t know, the pictures seem to like be like they fall in the middle of the book. So you’re on like page 160. And then you’ve got like 30 pages of pictures, and then you land on the next printed page, and there was some really interesting artwork in there. Is there anything you’d like to call out to kind of whet their appetite as to what they might see in those pictures?
Warren Davis
Um, wow. Box was
Shane R. Monroe
cool to me. But I’m, I’m like a developer. So that’s interesting, right?
Warren Davis
Yeah, I’m not I’m not sure. You know, I know that. When I self published, I took all of the photos, images, graphics that I could find and just put them in in insert in the center of the book. And then working with my publisher, on this new version. I guess they didn’t want to have quite as big of a color insert. So we reduce the number of color images and and put a lot of the images in black and white sprinkled throughout. So it’s a kind of a Yeah, a different slightly. There’s some difference in the way that the images are presented. But gosh, I I don’t know what would be of interest to people and what wouldn’t I? I think one of the things I think people might find interesting is the licensing brochure. I don’t know if you remember that, but Gottlieb’s marketing department came out with a licensing brochure, and there’s a photo of it. And it just sort of lists a lot of the Cubert related products that were made available when Cuba, you know, was became so huge in 1983. You know, board games, you know, I did see that, yeah, he shirts, socks that were I think over 125 licensed cuboid products, then. You know, and of course, the Saturday morning cartoon, so, yeah, I’m not sure what people would be would be of interest to people. There’s a lot of behind the scenes. I know, we haven’t talked us versus them yet. But there’s a lot of behind the scenes, photos from us versus them from the
Shane R. Monroe
I was gonna mention that. Yeah.
Warren Davis
Yeah. I took a lot of photographs when we were up in the plains. So yeah, there’s a I just hope it’s of interest to people. It’s not
Shane R. Monroe
they were really cool. So let’s, let’s continue moving through the history here. So you talk about when Cuber debuted at the amusement machine operators Association. And you, you painted a really cool picture of what that was like. And you you mentioned that it was really cool to see a bank of your game. And people getting to play it. I mean, you got to see people play it like on field test and stuff like that. And you mentioned it, but you didn’t mention was was it was it nerve wracking as hell to say, this is your peer group, right? I mean, this is your industry. It’s not some 12 year old girl the quarter.
Warren Davis
Well, yeah, I mean, certainly a lot of the other a lot of other game developers were there but the the MO a, it was, you know, it was a a sales show. I mean, it’s where the manufacturers are showing off their new machines to their customers who are distributors. So the business model was you know, we were the manufacturer, we make the game we literally build it and sell it to distributors and the distributors, put them out wherever they want to, you know, in arcades, in bowling alleys, pizzerias, whatever. So we didn’t literally make money out of the coin box. We made our money by building and selling the machine. Obviously, if we can prove that the game is is being played a lot and will take in a lot of money that makes it more desirable. And the distributors to buy more of them. So, yeah, it was nerve racking. I mean, again, I didn’t have much invested in the sales. Well, if you read the book, you know that no like royalties on the table for me,
Shane R. Monroe
I got I’ve got that coming up.
Warren Davis
So so but you know, I wasn’t really much interested, I gotta tell you in the business of making video games, I wasn’t interested in that I, for me, it was just nerve racking. I just wanted people to like the game, I just wanted people to find it fun and to want to play it.
Shane R. Monroe
That’s really cool. It’s kind of it’s kind of cool that you can divorce yourself from that. Because like you said, it’s not some you weren’t part of the Sustainable leg of it, your job was kind of done at that point. And you’d produce the best quality product you could. And so whether it’s sold like gangbusters, or it fizzled on the vine, your job was done. Job well done, you got paid. So
Warren Davis
yeah, and it was my first game. I had a game under my belt. So I felt that that that felt was a huge accomplishment. But you’re right, I didn’t have much of a stake in whether it would be a success or not. Obviously, I wanted it to be well, sure. Yeah.
Shane R. Monroe
That’s crazy. It’s really cool, though. So faster, harder, more challenging. Cubert was intended to be a ROM swap out, or I think they called those replacement kits to, to replace the ROMs and an existing machine, probably a Cuber machine, I would assume to extend the life of the game. So Mike, my, my mind’s a little fuzzy on the time period, was that a new ish concept doing kit replacements? Or Had that been around for a while?
Warren Davis
I don’t know that it was, I don’t think it was that new of a concept. I mean, I couldn’t tell you, I couldn’t run off a list of other games that were offered as kits. I just for me, it was just a practical, a practical thing, you know, created essentially out of worry that people were mastering Pubert you know, to to easily, which I mean, that was just from preliminary reports, we would just get some, you know, random reports that certain people, you know, a small number really, but people were playing for many hours on one quarter. So that’s bad. It’s generally bad. But I mean, there’s, there’s another side to it too, which is that other people are incentivized to play knowing that that you can achieve that level, then other people play more? Because they want to get to that level? So it’s kind of a, you know, double edged sword there, I guess. And, but but for me, because it was my first game, I was a little terrified, getting reports like that, and I thought, Okay, I need to, I need to respond. And so I just immediately started on a retuned version that I thought was harder. And also, I had been pressured by my peers and management to make the game easier during its development. And I thought, I think I might have gone too far. So this was an opportunity for me to sort of go back and do the, I guess nowadays, you’d call it the Director’s Cut.
Shane R. Monroe
Zack Snyder cut it this. Yeah,
Warren Davis
yeah, exactly. And honestly, I’m, I like it. I think I like it better than the original qubit. And, and the thing is, it’s just another option, if you like the original qubit. That’s great. But if you master Kubrick, you want another challenge. I think it’s a really great option. Of course, it was never released, as you know, and only got out into the public much, much later. Through Maine.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, I’ve got some follow up questions on that. We tidy these last of the Kubrick questions up here. So you’d mentioned merchandise of Cubert. And it was funny. Exactly. I was in my formative years when Kubrick came out. And I do remember like the lunch box and I remember merch. But it sounds like there was a lot more merch that I was ever exposed to what’s like the craziest merch based on Kubrick that you ever ran across and do you still have any of it?
Warren Davis
I you know, I wish I wish I had more of it. The one thing I still have. I have the Cubert plush toy that my dad that sat in my kids crib. I still have that but honestly that’s all I have a really have the original merchandise I didn’t. I didn’t accumulate a whole lot of it. I certainly wasn’t given any of it. I think I had to go out and buy it myself. But But yeah, it was just, you know, I think the board game kind of freaked me out that there was a qubit board game, you know, there were certainly a lot of handheld electronic versions of cube. And you know, just seeing him on T shirts and socks and you know, stuff like that it it was mind blowing. It was it was really, really strange.
Shane R. Monroe
Be part of pop culture all of a sudden.
Warren Davis
Oh, yeah. And, and, and through it all. I am completely anonymous. Nobody knows that there’s a person behind sucks. wasn’t actually wasn’t that bad. That part? It’s not good. We’re okay with that. Well, fame, that, you know, fame is not ever something I went after. I mean, being famous to me is not a goal. I appreciate that. People liked my work. And that means a lot to me. Yeah. The anime. Yeah. You’re an entertainer. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s about it.
Shane R. Monroe
So once Cuber became the big crazy hit, and they were making lunchboxes and T shirts and the homeports were obviously the next thing to come along. And I think a lot of people who aren’t super video games savvy, might assume that you had something to do with the ports. But as the book discussed, it’s not really how it worked. They were farmed out. And you you’ve consulted from time to time? Well, in your opinion, what was the best and worst home port? Of Cubert? I mean, you sort of alluded to one in the book. But
Warren Davis
right now, I’ve answered this question quite a bit. I, my favorite one was the ColecoVision beautiful version, it was really just, you know, very close to the arcade version I had, I owned personally a Colico vision system. And I just thought it looked and played very, very close to the arcade version. So I was very happy with that one. I think there might have been one or two others that also were good, but I didn’t, I didn’t own them. So you know, most of the the Colico vision one is what I remember. But, and I also remember, like the Atari 2600 version, I just felt was just, you know, terrible, but I, I have sympathy for developers of it. Because, you know, they’re, they’re trying to make a system do something was never designed to do. And so, you know, I give them a lot of props, but you know, I wouldn’t want to sit and play that version. Yeah.
Shane R. Monroe
And so you didn’t have any really significant contributions to any of the home ones? Nothing that you feel close to? Or
Warren Davis
not really, I mean, like you said, I was consulted. I remember having phone conversations with some people who were unclear on either some of the level progressions, you know, I wrote stuff up and it got sent off to them, but I, I didn’t really have much, much contact or involvement.
Shane R. Monroe
So we’re gonna leave Cuba behind because the book is loaded with so much more stuff than just the story of the noser but not you know what we do.
Warren Davis
I know, there’s some idle, and other classes, maybe
Shane R. Monroe
others, we got to get to the end other proceedings is right here. And others. I had to practice a lot to get my hand to point to the right place on the bow. Great. That’s very nice. I did a test this morning with my wife. And she’s like, you’re pointing to the wrong thing. I think that’s why I ended up putting two of them so I wouldn’t miss. Yeah. So before we move off of Cubert, what was the greatest? I don’t know, event prize situation that was afforded to you. By the popularity of Cuba? Was it the Robin Williams connection? The Goodwill it would bank with you later at Williams, or something different?
Warren Davis
It was both of those. I mean, really, it just, it was a calling card for the rest of my career. You know, just to go into any any place and go wow, you created Kubrick. I think people there were people who invited me to interviews job interviews, just because they saw that on the resume. You had no no desire to hire me, but they just want to meet me. Which is fine. That’s totally fine.
Shane R. Monroe
Vocational prowess would probably be or Yeah,
Warren Davis
certainly, it helped me get in the door at Williams no question. And the thing is, then all the stuff I did at Williams helped me get in other doors later so
Shane R. Monroe
we got so much to talk about with Williams. I’ve got I’ve got detailed files. So between Kuma Are you? What’s that?
Warren Davis
I said Are you the FBI?
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, I’ve done DT I’ve done detailed breakdown. I feel like I know you personally. So between Cubert and us versus them, which we’ll talk about in a few minutes. You played around with several game ideas and things The Fly game which listen if you’re going to buy this book and it’s not just about Cuba for you, the flying game is is easily my favorite my favorite sub story in the book, and also something called bunny bondage. Slightly inspired by ricochet rabbit. Now that’s a name I have not heard in a long time. The disposition of that bunny bondage was very hastily discarded in the book. So, does this code exist anywhere? Do you have videos of it being placed this? Can you show this in existence anywhere? I’m dying?
Warren Davis
I do not think the code exists anywhere i i Actually Do I have a, again, my attic. I have just tons of floppy disks that I haven’t looked at in years. I don’t even know if they are still readable. I don’t know what’s on them. I don’t think they are godly code. I don’t think but who knows. However, there is video footage of bunny bondage.
Shane R. Monroe
And like something that the normal mortals can get to.
Warren Davis
I do have video footage of bunny bondage is maybe like, I want to say 30 seconds to a minute maybe. And it’s part of a little behind the scenes video I shot at Gottlieb just we were just literally just horsing around. But it happened to be on a screen so I got some of it and I show it I occasionally I will show it at at a show. I just showed it recently at free play Florida. So yeah, it’s kind of into I wouldn’t say it’s readily available. But yeah, I I take it with me every now and then it show it. Yeah. I still think it was I still like the gameplay concept. I don’t want to sound cool. I don’t think I’ve seen that concept ever used in a video game.
Shane R. Monroe
I know. That’s like gold. Yeah. Yeah, it does. Often. Yeah, it just means through.
Warren Davis
Yeah, it’s just the kind of thing where I mean, I was always looking for something different. I mean, I was never one to just try and repeat something that happened already, you know. So that’s always my, my goal is try to do something original. But anyway, yeah, I kind of got bored with it. And I think the problem was not with the concept, but with me. I just, I didn’t know where to take it. And I just kind of got bored. I felt like I was spinning my wheels. And then the opportunity for us versus them sort of fell into my lap when I was approached by Dennis Nordmann. And then it was like a goodbye, Bunny bondage. Maybe I’ll come back to you later. And I don’t think I did.
Shane R. Monroe
So we talked, we talked about this a little bit, but it’s probably worth flushing out a little bit. So you got a really nice little bonus check for Cuber like 20 grand. That’s it? That’s what 1986 Money 85 Money?
Warren Davis
No would have been sooner than that, because got closed in 84. But I’m gonna save like 83, late 83, maybe maybe four, maybe that’s
Shane R. Monroe
pretty good change for 1983, you said
Warren Davis
was going to be 83 because it was 83. Because I use that money for the down payment on a condo in Chicago is my first property that I owned. Yeah.
Shane R. Monroe
But you know, you sort of alluded to this earlier, and I figured this might topic might come up. But many people don’t realize that you didn’t own anything. You own the bragging rights. That was all, as you said in the book. That’s all you you got from that you didn’t get any residuals, no merge none of that stuff. So like, I guess that’s pretty much how it worked. But you did mention something called the godly royalty program. And I wasn’t sure if you talk about that, because I thought that seemed like kind of a little slippery deal.
Warren Davis
Well, no, I don’t worry about that. I wouldn’t call it slippery. It’s just that they instituted a royalty program. It was part of the evolution of the company, they realize other people are doing it if they want to hold on to their talent, if you want to call us that if they want to hold on to their people, they need to institute a royalty program. So they did only problem was it was not retroactive. So Hubert was not included. And in Mach three, which was already out when when the royalty program was instituted was not included. future games would have been included.
Shane R. Monroe
But you did mention like at the end of the chapter of the paragraph there that you didn’t believe that anybody actually made any royalties from that program.
Warren Davis
Yeah, I don’t think that there was I don’t think they came up with a game because the GAVI was shut down in 1984. Now us versus them came out. I’m pretty sure us versus them would have been included in that royalty program. But the problem is it was a laserdisc game. And then that’s the whole other story is the debacle. Yeah. So so, you know, us versus them didn’t make enough to have a robot and then the company was shut down.
Shane R. Monroe
So that there was nothing seedy about it. It wasn’t like they put unachievable goals or anything like that. It was just the option just never came up.
Warren Davis
Yeah, it was just timing. It was just they instituted it at a point where they never had the opportunity to pay anything out. Because they didn’t have a success.
Shane R. Monroe
Yeah, that’s too bad. So let’s fast forward 1983 Dragon’s Lair drastically, although brother shortly changed the landscape of video gaming. Most people at least know of Dragon’s Lair, but few may remember us versus them. And we’ll get to that, why that the book has over 30 pages discussing your involvement in this game. So we have a lot to talk about. But as a precursor.
Warren Davis
We don’t have enough time to talk about all of this. Oh, no, we’re
Shane R. Monroe
gonna have to do this in another interview. give the audience a quick overview of what that game was and how it differed from the quick time event style of Dragon’s Lair.
Warren Davis
So Dragon’s Lair was basically an interactive cartoon where you had to push the joystick in a particular direction at certain key moments to keep you alive. Otherwise, you cut to a death. And that was it. And it was not I mean, you know, the that type of interactivity didn’t really appeal to me. I didn’t like playing it. And I mean, listen, I’m not going to argue with his success. Very successful game. But Dennis Nordmann now we had already done Mach three. So we had our LaserDisc hardware in place, we had a lot of, you know, diagnostic tools were already employed a lot of that stuff. But Dennis Norden came to me with a concept for the sort of B, B movie kind of science fiction, cheesy story. And I was like, all over it. I just thought that was fantastic. So we started working on us versus them, and there was a lot of development. Talk about how are we going to do this? Because it’s, you know, how do you make it interactive? How do you, you know, meld the live action with the, you know, So originally, we were talking about just cutting like a movie, you know, like, here’s this flying sequence, and you’re shooting alien ships and, and then you cut to people on the ground, and then you cut back into the air. And we just thought, that’s the way we would do it. And I that concern me, because it just is like, well, it’s disorienting. I mean, if you’re flying and you’re, you’re targeting an enemy, because it’s not a movie, it’s interactive. And then all of a sudden, you’re about to shoot, and then you cut away to something, you’re gonna be pissed, right? Yeah. Right. So we had to figure out how to do it. And then we decided just to do it with intros. Interview, every every wave of gameplay had an intro, and then sometimes an outro. And then sometimes we, you know, the thing that I really didn’t think would work, but they, they really wanted to try and I said, Alright, let’s try it. If it doesn’t work doesn’t work. We’re what we call the interstitials. Where once in the middle of a round, you would cut away to something just for two or three seconds, and then cut back usually some kind of visual gag, something, give you a chuckle. And then you cut back. So it didn’t interrupt gameplay too much. I was concerned about it. I thought people would be pissed and but people liked it. We kept it in. So anyway, that’s us versus them. In a nutshell, there’s so there’s so much to talk about us versus Ellison. I
Shane R. Monroe
got like 100 He’s, I know you’re, you’re on a time schedule here. And maybe we can maybe we can do a part two of this. I’m trying to think of how I could collapse like these next questions. Because I really don’t want to shortchange your knowledge here.
Warren Davis
Well, I mean, you know, there you people could just buy the book, buy the
Shane R. Monroe
book, and you’d be you get you get everything you read. You know,
Warren Davis
hopefully the book will appear in libraries at some point. That would be that would be great. That’d be cool.
Shane R. Monroe
Pay for it. Yeah, well, listen, buy the book. It’s 25 bucks. I mean, listen, it’s all these stories and so much more. I mean, again, the us versus them thing. I got like five more things to talk about with the Williams yet. But to close up us versus them real quick. It would be easy to assume that this was stock footage that you guys had or that maybe you lifted or licensed a B movie or something to pull the information from, but it’s totally not true. And I think That’s one of the more interesting pieces of the remaining of the us versus them is. You guys went on location and talked just a little bit about that.
Warren Davis
Yeah, we we realized that to get the kind of footage we wanted, we needed to actually shoot it ourselves. It wasn’t like we’re just going to go find stock footage, that was exactly what we needed. Part of the thing we were trying to accomplish was, we’re because we want to have sort of a movie quality, the game is played from different angles. So sometimes it’s a side scroller. Sometimes it’s a first person, sometimes you’re a little above looking down. So, you know, to get all these angles, which were very specific. We needed to shoot our own footage, and we wanted to hit a lot of locations around the country. So we did a, we did one shoot Dennis and I flew out to California. I don’t know how we found these producer guys, but somebody found these guys and went out to clay Lacey, Jetson Burbank, and we were out in the Learjet flying over Lake Powell, in Utah, and Arizona, among other places. And we shot a whole bunch of footage, we sort of explained what we needed, how we needed it. And then they went out all around the place and shot a tons more. Sometimes they shot helicopter stuff, but the the the jet stuff was definitely smoother. Obviously, we speeded this stuff up as well. And I got it all of this. So So I’ve also, you know, we shot all that, you know, we hired the actors, we hired a production company to build a sets, we went and shot all and we Dennis and I with help from rich Tracy, who was the art director and gave Faust was another guy we all sort of contributed to the script, I think was mostly me and Dennis. And, yeah, we had a script, and we hired actors. And we shot all this. And it’s crazy, because I, the guy who played Captain Tracy, who’s like the hero in the, in the control center. He was a friend of mine from my acting class, and go, and so I literally I just had a meal with him. Like, I would say, a month ago, he was out in LA. I hadn’t seen him in like 35 years. And we just got together. So crazy little coincidence there.
Shane R. Monroe
So if, if nothing else, if, if my listeners are paying attention, we’re not even halfway through the book yet. So if you’re concerned that the amount of content in the greatness of these stories, because I’ve got a ton more questions that we’re not going to get to, it should really show how much meat is in this book. I think it’s 280 something pages right in there.
Warren Davis
Yeah, somewhere around that. Yeah, it’s
Shane R. Monroe
in. There’s so much in there. There’s so many of these types of stories. We haven’t talked about revolution, eggs, or Terminator two, or all of these other. It’s you’ve had an amazing, an amazing career.
Warren Davis
Yeah, in the book, the book, the book really only covers my years in the arcade industry. I talk a little bit about Disney at the end, because when I, when I moved to California in the mid 90s, I worked for Disney Disney Interactive for a few years, and then I became an imagineer for a very short time. And there are plenty of stories there to talk about that I don’t even I don’t even begin to talk about. And then. But I do mention Disney a little bit because some some things related to my arcade days happened while I was at Disney. And again, we don’t have to go into that right now. But so there’s a little bit of talk like that. And then, you know, back in, even in the 2000s, I was still working in the game industry. I was on the team that created the I want to say ill fated Spyro Enter the Dragon Fly, which probably could be a book unto itself, that game was sadly kind of a disaster, I think widely recognized as the the one failure, the one spiral failure maybe. And sudden and again, I mentioned this only because people have been coming to me over the last couple of years asking about that. I thought it was kind of like Kubrick, I just thought it was forgotten. It was it was part of the past. And then all of a sudden people are starting to contact me asking me about Spyro Enter the Dragonfly so it’s really weird how the interest in video game history has, you know, some have been piqued and people are starting to question where did these games come from? Which is wonderful and I’m happy to I’m happy to supply as many answers as I can. But yeah, there might be a whole nother book coming someday if I
Shane R. Monroe
yeah, I mean that’s such a tease those that last chapter loose ends I think it was called were you sort of tidy All these things up and more more questions, more interesting information from the mind of Warren Davis for sure.
Warren Davis
Yeah. Yeah. I also want to mention a few if you’re interested in history. And again, I know we haven’t talked much about Williams, but there is a fascinating documentary about Williams. And it’s history that I appear in briefly. But it’s called Insert Coin.
Shane R. Monroe
Great documentary. Yeah. So
Warren Davis
I highly recommend that to people if you’re really interested in the William side of things. You know, my my contribution was, was pretty much the digitizing system that was used for most of their games. And also, I was on the team that created Terminator two and Revolution X. That’s what I did, basically at Williams in a nutshell, but there’s a lot of, yeah, there’s a lot of fun stories there. And I think Insert Coin does a great job of fleshing that out.
Shane R. Monroe
I thought that was I have plugged that on this show several times already. Insert Coin is fantastic. It’s it’s must. It’s must view. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of video game documentaries out there. Their hearts are in the right place. But it’s our coin. It’s not one of them. That’s that’s top notch stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, I think I’ve already taken you over time. I appreciate it. Maybe again, I’ve got so much more we could talk about if we had more time.
Warren Davis
Oh, but happy to do a part two. Yeah, I’d love to do part two,
Shane R. Monroe
cuz I got so much stuff to talk about. I know a lot of people were probably hoping to hear more Williams stuff here. I got requests to talk about working with David Thiel. And and I guess we can save that all for another time.
Warren Davis
Yeah. Happy to do it. Happy to do it. Yeah. Just to say when.
Shane R. Monroe
So again, the book is creating Cubert and other classic video arcade games. It is available for pre order right now. So go out and get it. Go preorder it, hey, do you get any visibility on that, you know, how the book is, is doing from a pre order stamp didn’t probably tell you that publisher stuff.
Warren Davis
You know what? So coincidentally, I literally just had a conversation with my publisher this morning. And I asked him about that. And he said that the pre sales were very strong. So that’s fantastic. I’m very, very, very encouraged to hear that. And so the the first printing is actually on the larger side. And of course, you know, if if, if they sell out, though, there will be another printing. They just make them as they need them. But yeah, that’s a good news. I was curious about that myself. We had not talked about that at all up until this morning.
Shane R. Monroe
Well, that’s great. Yeah. So it’s, it’s due to release on December 21. Again, it’ll be available in Kindle format, get the hardback don’t get the Kindle version that’s so cheap, and get the good the stuff you can hold in 20 years, you’ll still be able to look at that and, and open it up and read it.
Warren Davis
I can’t sign a Kindle version.
Shane R. Monroe
There you go. Thinking outside the box again, I’m not good, right? No, I
Warren Davis
mean, honestly, you know, I don’t care how people get it if they’re interested in it, that, you know, my my goal in writing it was just to collect these stories for posterity. You know, I love telling stories, but I can’t be everywhere to tell the stories. And there is a historical aspect and, and I kind of was frustrated with hearing other people tell my stories in not quite the right, you know, way. It’s really interesting people, people get things very, very close to write, but then they might they just miss out on some nuance. And I just felt like if I if I, you know, I’m the one who should be telling the story anyway. Anyway, you know, well, don’t get me started on Wikipedia. Oh, geez.
Shane R. Monroe
The fake news of the internet. Okay. Well, anything else before we let you go? But you want to talk about everyone go out and get them? You know?
Warren Davis
Well, yeah, I got to put a little plug in for the new wave toys replicate version of Cuba? I do. Are you aware of that? Do you have you heard
Shane R. Monroe
I did not know that was a Cuban. I own a Dragon’s Lair, oddly enough. And so I like I like the form factor. But I’ve got to be really close to the game to put out that kind of cash.
Warren Davis
Yeah, yeah. So they approached me early this year, saying they’d like to do a version of Kubrick. Well, that’s super, all fantastic. But I said, Well, I don’t own the rights to Cubert. So I, what can I do? And they were like, well, we heard that, you know, you have a sort of unique Cuber cabinet in your home, which is somewhat true. It’s a it was an engineering sample and it’s sort of been Franken Stein’s a little bit. It’s got the swearing marquee. And it’s been, you know, it’s been in my possession for like 38 years or whatever. And they said, they read about it because Tony temple, the arcade blogger, wrote a blog about rare cubic cabinets, and he included my cabinet in that. So that’s how they heard about it. And they were like, well, we not only want to make a replicate version of the production Cubert, we want to make your version, we want to make a Warren Davis Special Edition. Wow. That’s what they are doing. And again, because of COVID, much like the book, it’s been delayed, it should have been out by now. But and they had a pre order event back in July, and sold out on their pre orders. And they are literally just waiting, because of shipping and production problems with COVID. They’re just waiting to get get them in so they can start fulfilling their pre orders and then selling them again. But hopefully early next year, you will be able to buy either a working cubic cabinet, or the Warren Davis Special Edition. And by I will also mention that at my I want to say kind of insistence, I said, Look, if you’re going to do a Warren Davis version of the cabinet, it has to have faster, harder more challenging Cubert Yes, because that is my Cubert of choice. It’s the qubit that I’ve had in my cabinet. You know, for 99% of the time, sometimes I’ll swap out the ROMs for somebody who you know, wants to play the original but and so they have put both versions of the game, the original and faster, harder, more challenging in both versions of the cabinet. So whether you get the production version, or the Warren Davis version, you can play, you can switch between the two versions. And it’s amazing. It’s amazing that you have the Dragon’s Lair so you know these are gorgeous, nominally engineered to they are perfectionist they they are they’re more perfectionist than I am not that I’m a perfectionist, but I’ve tried to go over their prototype and give them feedback and say, well, this needs to be changed. And this is that they’re worse than I am as far as the details. They won’t. They’re not happy unless unless it’s absolutely 100%. Correct.
Shane R. Monroe
They ship Dragon’s Lair with a nonworking laser disc, which is like the absolute I mean, you want to talk about perfection.
Warren Davis
Yeah, no, these guys are obsessive. And it shows in their product. They make a fantastic product. So anyway, New Wave toys, New Wave toys calm. Again, I don’t think you can buy either right now they’re waiting to get the production in, but soon they will be available.
Shane R. Monroe
That is that’s way exciting. I mean, especially being able to have the Warren Davis edition. That’s yeah, I can’t actually meet in the original cabinet. Right.
Warren Davis
I mean, it’s it’s a unique cabinet. That’s for sure. It’s it’s weird. There, you know, some of the artwork is slightly different. Things like that. But and there are other there are other similar Frankenstein cabinets out there because they were based on the engineering samples that went out before production. So there there are a handful of those out there. I don’t know how many exactly have survived, but there are some.
Shane R. Monroe
The story never ends. There’s always so much to talk about. That’s awesome. All right, crazy. Well, thank you again for your time. Trying to be respectful. We’re 12 minutes over. So let’s try to work this out. And we’ll get a part two going on. See what hopefully, hopefully can get drum up some interest in the book. That sounds even.
Warren Davis
That’d be fantastic. You know, I feel like it’s a it’s kind of a niche book. I don’t know if it’s a mainstream of mainstream interest to people. But I think the people, the people who are interested in retro gaming history or in Cubert specifically, I think go they’ll find it entertaining. It’s always my goal, just to entertain and I hope you found it entertaining.
Shane R. Monroe
I loved it. I loved and you know, what’s it and again, I’d really like to stress even if Cuba it’s not your jam, there’s plenty of other stuff including NBA Jam, information contained within the covers. So there’s something for everybody and highly recommended.
Warren Davis
Thank you, Shane. For the time. I really appreciate the support
Shane R. Monroe
anytime, anytime. Well, thank you good sir. And, as always, this is Shane R Monroe with passenger seat radio and we’ll talk to you guys next time. Take care
