With the release of Robotech DVD box set 7, many fans are turning to the Extras disc and discovering footage of Robotech: Crystal Dreams for the first time. Crystal Dreams was a Robotech game that was being developed for the Nintendo 64, but ended up being cancelled when Gametek, the developers, closed down. Many Robotech fans had bought Nintendo 64’s just so that they could play this game, and the news of Gametek’s demise came as a disappointment to many.

Now, with the official release of the Crystal Dreams footage and the news of the upcoming Robotech game, we figured it might be time to settle the questions about Crystal Dreams once and for all by interviewing two developers who were involved on the project…

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STEVE: I'm here with Opus (Doug) and Lizard (Ian), the developers at Gametek… er, former developers at Gametek…

IAN: Former developers at former Gametek!

STEVE: The now defunct Gametek, who worked on Crystal Dreams. Doug, what was your position at Gametek?

DOUG: I was the second of two programmers and also the story designer.

STEVE: And Ian?

IAN: I was basically a utility and database developer, but I was also a big Robotech and anime fan, so I helped alot with the story and the scripting, and stuff like that.

DOUG: Also doing several of the voices on the game... for all of the bad guys

IAN: No, it was only the totally psychotic, over-the-top loony bad guy.

DOUG: Well, that and Eboliar.

STEVE: When was the project originally announced?

IAN: It was before I started working there, and that was May of 95.

DOUG: I first heard about it in February of 95 and a lot of the people I was working with at Sega were heading over to Gametek to start working there. I stayed on at Sega for a while until they invited me to join them, which was about December of 95. By that point, most of the work they had done over the past year basically had to be tossed. We started from scratch at that point.

STEVE: What was the reason?

DOUG: Mainly changes in the Nintendo hardware. At that point there wasn't much. We had, I think, one development system from Nintendo. That was still two years or so before the thing was going to appear in stores. So Nintendo kept changing the hardware on them.

IAN: And that was actually an emulator that ran, if I recall correctly, on a PC?

DOUG: It was a SoftImage, on Silicon Graphics

IAN: Silicon Graphics, thank you. So we didn't actually see a physical Nintendo unit until much later. They also completely changed a lot of the API's for the graphics calls. One of the first things I did was write a program that would go through all the C++ code that they'd already written using the old calls and map them to the new calls and remap the parameters and so on. Just to try to get some utility out of it

STEVE: Ian, where were you before working at Gametek?

IAN: Northern Telecom, doing database work there. Gametek was my first and only experience with the game industry. Now I write various RPG supplements for various D&D publishers and so on as a part-timer. My fulltime job is doing database programming.

STEVE: Now I recall reading in gaming magazines a while back about a game coming out from Gametek. In the article they had images of the game, and it was announced as Robotech Academy.

IAN: Right, it was the working title prior to Crystal Dreams.

DOUG: The original idea was that Robotech Academy, I'm not sure who wrote up that idea, but that was the idea they sent off to Nintendo to initially get approval to do the game. If I remember correctly, the basic idea was that it took place before the cartoon series began. You were bascially a cadet and most of the gameplay was supposed to take place inside simulators where you were trying to improve your skills as a cadet and graduate from the Robotech Academy. Once I came in, I realized that really didn't give us a way to hook you into the characters and some of the other things that we wanted to do. So I tossed out that storyline and we basically started over from scratch, when I joined.

STEVE: So besides programming, you were also the lead on the story development?

DOUG: Yes. Lizard and I both came up with the basic story idea, and then wrote all the dialogue for the game over the next six months or so.

IAN: I remember when we were actually trying to come up with a title for it. I was thinking "Crystal Dreams" as he said it. We both kinda hit the idea at the same time.

DOUG: Which of course came out of the fact that when we first started we weren't sure how powerful the Nintendo was going to be. Because we wanted to make sure we'd have the ability to have a lot of stuff on screen to shoot at, we came up with the idea, this had already been decided by the time I joined Gametek, was that there would be a new enemy, these crystals that were very simple to draw. So no matter what the final capabilities of the Nintendo 64 were, that we'd still have the ability to put in a bunch of stuff on screen. And so we had these crystals and we had to work them into the story and that's pretty much what the title was.

IAN: We kinda said, alright, if we're gonna have to have these crystals flying around, where do they come from? What's going on? We kinda back-filled, from a technologically based decision, we then rebuilt a story, back-filling around a place in the Robotech timeline we could fit in the story we wanted to tell. We made a couple of decisions about the story to kind of... (mind going) there's a lot of conventions for these kinds of games, for the gameplay conventions, and we had to fit the story around those conventions. So we try to come up with things like, you know, your character has to keep getting the better and better gear and weapons and so forth. Why don't they just give him the best stuff because he's not really in the military, he's sort of a mercenary pilot associated with the military. And then we got the whole pilot gets kicked out and disgraced back story for him, and you have to win back the honor he had lost, win back the love of his micronized Zentraedi girlfriend... All this other great Robotech soap opera stuff that I felt would have made the game much more than just "log in, blow some stuff up, get a high score, blow more stuff up." We wanted to really have a plot.

DOUG: We really wanted to have some of that soap opera element that the Robotech cartoon seems to have. The love traumas and all that. We had music as well.

IAN: A lot of the dialogue was recorded... multiple phrases for different things depending on your relationship with characters, whether they liked you or hated you at different points. They might say "oh thank God you've returned, I was so worried" or "oh, you made it back alive, oh well." You know, depending on how you were doing with that character and so on. That would've been a lot of fun.

DOUG: By the time we had actually seen actual Nintendo hardware and had gotten much farther into the production of the game, it started to become more and more obvious that we could've done what we wanted to without the crystals. But by then we'd already been working on the storyline for a year or so. So, the crystals stayed in the game. By then we'd already recorded the dialogue and all that. It was too late to change it. But the original decision to put the crystals in the game was purely technological. We just weren't sure how powerful the N64 would be.

STEVE: How many people were there working on this project?

DOUG: There were two programmers... five to seven artists at different times... two sound guys...

STEVE: Are the sound guys included with the artists, or is that separate?

DOUG: That's separate. And then I'd say one additional designer, being Lizard.

IAN: Did we actually have seven artists working on it concurrently?

DOUG: Over the course of the project, we had seven different artists. At any given time, we usually had about 5 artists working, and at times some of them were sharing their time between other projects as well... those thrilling Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy games...

STEVE: Now, a lot of people have speculated over why Gametek was unable to bring this game to market, and a lot of people haven't seen your website, to see the reasons in your FAQ. I was wondering if you could explain that.

DOUG: Well... probably the basic way to put it is Gametek was too small of a company for this kind of a project. We didn't have the funds to hire enough people to really build this scale of a game. Most of the people working on this project were wearing 2 or 3 different hats in the project. I mean, the lead programmer was fulfilling the role of Producer, Lead Programmer. I was not just fulfilling the roles of Programmer but also Designer. On a typical project of this size you would expect to have five or six programmers. We had two. We just didn't really have enough people to do a project of this scale, and I think in hindsight we got too ambitious. We should've done a much smaller scale of game to start out with, and once that gotten out, we could have done something more ambitious. But we just didn't have enough people to get this thing done. Gametek just didn't have enough money to do it. They were used to doing little Wheel of Fortune games on Sega Genesis, not huge 3D polygonal action shooters.

STEVE: Now if the game were to be scaled back, to be a more realistic project for Gametek, what do you think would've been tossed out?

DOUG: Well, one of the first things to go wouldv'e been the huge open universe. The game was originally designed to have this massive open universe where you could fly anywhere you wanted to. You'd stumble across missions as you flew, and many of them would just be randomly created on the fly. We probably would've organized it much more like a traditional flight sim where you saw a briefing, you went in a played a specific mission you either won or lost the mission and then you came back and saw the next cutscene, the next briefing for the next mission. That probably would've been the first thing to go. We probably also would've scaled back the number of ships we had in the game. One of the early decisions that we made was, just a technical decision, we wanted to get all these ships in the game. But we couldn't fit all them into the memory of the Nintendo. So we had to toss out some of the fancy hardware tricks that the Nintendo handles to fit all the ships in, which means we had to come up with other solutions for sorting polygons and that kind of thing. That really impacted us later.

IAN: It really chewed up development time.

DOUG: We had to build the 3D models in a much more complex fashion than we would have normally if we haven't tossed out a lot of these hardware tricks that the Nintendo had built in. So if we had scaled back the kinds of ships that we wanted to use in the game, cut out maybe a third or maybe even half of them, that probably would've been another thing we would've done... In the end we had most of the Zentraedi fleet.

IAN: On the other hand, we did get some incredibly cool things, like everything was scaled properly. If you flew up next to one of those 3 mile long Zentraedi cruisers, it was 3 miles long in relation to your Veritech. It was basically a big blurry green wall when you got to it...

DOUG: The Factory Satellite was in fact 20 kilometers wide. Saturn was the actual scale that Saturn would be. If you sit there at full throttle above the rings of Saturn and fly for an hour, you're not going to notice much of any change in your orbit around Saturn... it was just so huge.

STEVE: Saturn was actually modeled out? It wasn't just a billboard in the background?

IAN: Nothing was billboards. The Moon, the Earth, it as all modeled.

DOUG: All of it was polygonal.

IAN: We had real high hopes, we had real ambitions for this. We weren't trying to churn out just some random flight sim that had "Robotech" stamped on it, as it could've been Star Wars and we just changed the models. We really wanted to make a Robotech game, that's why we put in the plotline and the soap opera and all the historic weapons. We used the Zentraedi language from the old Robotech comic books. We got permission from the guy who did it to use language. We peppered our dialogue with a bunch of Zentraedi slang words. We put a guide book in the documentation so you'd know what the hell was going on. We really wanted to make this a true Robotech game because we were both fans. It wasn't just like "Oh, Robotech? Ok, giant robots, whatever, they blow up, right? They shoot things, it goes boom."

DOUG: The big huge open universe where everything was scaled properly was really kind of the brainchild of the lead programmer. He was more involved in the design of the game engine, whereas I was working on the storyline, making it a Robotech game. He'd had this idea in the back of his head for a long time, of having this open-ended universe where you had everything scaled properly, where you had planets that were the size of planets and huge ships that you could fly around. And so he spent a huge amount of time getting that side of things working

IAN: In retrospect, faking the ships and putting up a billboard background as you fight Zentraedi fighters with a giant Zentraedi battleship in the background but not necessarily what you were going to go fight...

DOUG: Probably would have sped things up. Yeah. But, it's easy to say that four years down the line, after it all crashed and burned

STEVE: What was the original projected release date of the game?

DOUG: The original idea... when they first got the license and first got approval from Nintendo to do the game, I think they were planning on having it come out about the same time the Nintendo 64 came out, which would be... Christmas or so of 96.

IAN: Did it get pushed back a little bit?

DOUG: Well, the Nintendo came out in, like, October of 96, and it was supposed to be coming out about the same time.

IAN: Yeah, that seems about right. Yeah, cause I remember we went to WorldCon, summer of 96 and Chuck was like, "You can't take four days off!"

STEVE: And was this when it was still Robotech Academy?

DOUG: Robotech Academy lasted all of about two weeks after I joined Gametek.

STEVE: How long did it exist before you guys got there?

DOUG: It would've been... I dunno, a bit under a year?… They were doing some technology stuff, but all that was rolled into Crystal Dreams.

IAN: There was never a Robotech Academy plotline or character development or anything like that.

DOUG: It was just a single document that they sent off to Nintendo to get approval.

IAN: Actually, before you got there, Robotech Academy was already gone, cause I was doing a lot of the plotting before you got there. We'd already come up with a mercenary idea and a couple of things like that. It was going to be really not as tied in with the series as it should've been. It was more of an open universe thing where there was going to be colonies. It would've been a century or two after the series. And that was sort of a vague, general working idea.

DOUG: I never heard this. That's interesting.

IAN: Oh yeah, it was this working idea we had. Remember it had a lot of character names and stuff written out. Then you came in, and between the two of us, we managed to convince Chuck that we needed to get more tightly tied to the real thing. Kept some character names, kept some character concepts, rolled everything back, reworked it into the structure of the series better. We found places in the timeline where we could tie it in...

DOUG: In any case, the upshot is that Robotech Academy was just the initial concept they sent to Nintendo to get approval to make the game. And it really didn't survive much beyond there, except as something that got listed on various advertisements here and there.

IAN: Yes, we were very pleased because we said several companies had basically announced the game as available for sale for $39.95. We thought that would be great, we'd just buy a copy, copy the ROM and ship!

DOUG: Yes, there were actually magazines that were listing it as "You can buy this as a preorder!" and that kind of thing. We weren't anywhere near close to getting the thing done, but it was popping up in magazines.

IAN: Oh yeah, when we were in Redwood City I remember picking up some computer game magazines (Gamepro or whatever the hell it was) you know, and seeing it advertised in some places... "For sale! Robotech Academy for the N64!" At this point Robotech Academy consisted of 500 lines of source code and a bunch of models...

STEVE: Now, Ian, where are you working now?

IAN: A company that does software for the mortgage banking industry, so it is of absolutely no possible interest to anyone who might read this article. (Laughs)

DOUG: Well, except for your part-time work doing paper RPG's.

IAN: I'm also writing a lot of stuff for various paper and pencil roleplaying games. Stuff for Fantasy Flight Games, and... who else am I working for? For Sword & Sorcery press and Pelgrane Press for the Dying Earth RPG. And I just recently got the opportunity to do a complete RPG supplement all myself, 120,000 words in 3 months... in addition to my fulltime job and two other writing gigs I've agreed to. I'm not going to do anything but go to my fulltime job and write freelance work for the next three months. And I can't talk about the project because it's under NDA.... so I'm doing a lot of writing at this point. If you guys need any writers, I am available.

DOUG: I'm currently at the 3D0 company, a fairly large videogame company, currently working on a game for PS2. Can't talk too much about it right now, but let's see... the last couple projects I worked on... worked on a game called War Jets,

STEVE: What was that for?

DOUG: That was for Playstation 2, and Playstation 1 actually. And then I've been sort of helping out on various other projects that've gone by, not working fulltime across a single project across a year or so, but just helping out towards the end of several projects, including Dragon Rage Johnny Moseley Mad Trix, a trick skiing game. It seems to be doing well right now. And we're starting work on our next Playstation 2-Gamecube project

STEVE: Did you move to 3D0 immediately after Gametek went under?

DOUG: Pretty much. I took about 3 or 4 months off. At the time Gametek disappeared, it looked like there was a possibility that Crystal Dreams might be picked up by another company and finished. So I was kinda keeping my options open in case that happened for 3 or 4 months, and when that didn't pan out, I ended up joining 3D0… Did any of the marketing materials survive, other than the poster?

STEVE: I haven't seen any.

DOUG: Gametek died right after the 1998 E3. At that point we had, we handed out the comic books at E3, but we had two boxes, about 2000 of those comic books that never got handed out. And we didn't get them back at Gametek, before Gametek died, so I don't even know what happened to them. They probably got shredded somewhere, but I always hoped to be able to track those down.

IAN: If you have a copy of the comic, they are now a valuable collector's item!

DOUG: Yeah, I put one up for sale on eBay and it went for $43! I was really impressed.

STEVE: Now, this cartridge that you have, is it a unique cartridge?

DOUG: It's what's called an EPROM. It's a development cartridge... you basically take a copy of the game that you've built, and you can download it onto a cartridge which you can then send off to the testers. When they're done testing the game, or you're done doing whatever you need to with it, you can erase it, reload a new copy of the game, reload a different game onto it. It's basically a flash ROM.

STEVE: Was this the only cartridge that has this version of the game on there?

DOUG: Yes. Basically what happened was that after Gametek died, I had a mostly complete copy of most of the game code and I had a friend who had a development kit. So I went to him and managed to rebuild the game code and add a few little tweaks and touches so I could put it back into the state it was when we went to E3. So you could actually launch a few ships and shoot at them and that sort of thing. And then I used his equipment to download it into the cartridge, cause I ended up with one of the development cartridges after Gametek died.

STEVE: It's cause here we have at least one copy of the game cartridge

DOUG: Oh really? It must be a much older version of the game.

STEVE: It didn't seem to be very playable. In the video clip that we got for the DVD's, it looked a lot nicer than it did in the ROM cartridge that we had.

DOUG: Yeah, I would guess you must've had somewhere along the way we must've sent you a work in progress, and yea, right before we went to the 1998 E3, I put in a bunch of extra code into the game to give us the ability to demo the game, to actually let you hit some buttons to launch Zentraedi ships and give them a very little bit of bare-bones AI so they'd try to turn and shoot at you and chase you. And then just built up this little demo universe, where at Saturn you had the fleet sitting out there and all that. And the after Gametek died I had most of that still remaining, so I put that all back in. Just so I'd have a version of the game that I could show off a little bit now and again.

STEVE: Now that the Crystal Dreams footage is getting out, is there anything that you want to say to fans as they see this footage, for the first time for a lot of them?

DOUG: I guess, I hope they can see what we were aiming for. I know we still had a ways to go. We still probably had 5 or 6 months of work before we would've had even a beta version of the game. But I certainly hope they can see what we were going towards. The artwork still needed to be touched up, there was a lot of optimizations that needed to be done, a lot of the ship AI and most of the missions and all that kind of stuff. But I'm hoping at least they can get a little bit of an idea what kind of game we were trying to go for... we were hoping to build one of the first true flight sims. You know, space combat sims, similar to the PC Star Wars Tie Fighter and Wing Commander kind of thing. But nobody had done that on a console at that point so that's really what we were kind of aiming for. To do something along that level.

IAN: There were a couple of nifty things in there, like the pilot reflection. You could see yourself reflected in the cockpit, it was a little transparency layer… And then your emotions would express, so if you got hit you would scream

DOUG: If a character popped up on your consoles and started talking to you, and your character replied, you'd actually see the reflection talking on the cockpit... we had about 40 minutes of dialogue in the game as well.

IAN: It would've been some of the most dialogue in a game of that sort. It wasn't just the standard one scream, repeated "oh I hit it" type of thing. I remember spending some time watching a lot of Robotech of course, and writing down a bunch of pilot phrases said in combat and whatnot, and working out some templates to construct more interesting dialogue just so we'd have a little random background. We had a number of different voices recording just general pilot chatter, you know, "I'm on your tail!" or "Break to wing 3!" and all that random stuff so it would be a little interesting. You wouldn't just hear the same sound over and over and over and over again. That, of course, isn't actually in the footage that anyone's ever seen, but it was in there to be put in at some point.

DOUG: Well, and also try and build this game where we had this very open universe, yet at the very same time we had a very definite storyline... balancing that was very difficult. To try and find ways to still tell a storyline but let the player do whatever they wanted to, fly wherever they wanted to, decide whether or not they wanted to involve themselves in the storyline of the game.

IAN: We had a number of the... Armor platforms where you'd go and buy supplies. We had the black market platform where you can get the secret weapons and whatnot. And you could just fly into one of them. You didn't have "You must go into into platform 12 now!" and where there aren't any other actual platforms, just #12 and you have to go there and it exists only for that mission and when you're done it doesn't exist anymore. It was there. It was there in space, and you could fly to it.

DOUG: And the idea was you could land on and Armor platform, refuel, use the money you earned to buy upgrades for your Veritech and then potentially sign up for say, a convoy duty. But, if you wanted to, halfway through the convoy, you could just up and decide "You know what, I'm getting bored of this" and fly off. Now, that might impact your reputation with the Defense Force. They're not going to like you as much as they did before if you do that. But it was completely up to you to decide what you wanted to do.

IAN: It just occurred to me, in a way we were kind of anticipating the modern persistent world online games... a little bit. Instead it was single player and it was all in a little 8 megabyte cartridge. So yeah, we were over-reaching... just a tad. But you know, a creature's reach must exceed its grasp or what's a heaven for? Or something. I always misquote that... who was that, Blake? Oh, nevermind!

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Crystal Dreams footage is currently available on Robotech DVD box set 7, which is available in the Robotech.com Store

Doug has a section dedicated to answering questions about Crystal Dreams. For more information, you can visit Doug’s website at www.opusgames.com

For information on the upcoming Robotech game for next-generation consoles by TDK Mediactive and Vicious Cycle, click here