Interviews// Rare Senior Programmer, Nick Burton

SPOnG: And you must have found a similar thing working for Xbox Live Arcade with Jetpac Refuelled.

Nick Burton: Yeah, Xbox Live is the same in that you've got a memory restriction, obviously. We restricted ourselves with it to an extent, though. We thought, "We want to reach as many people as possible, so we want the smallest package possible." So, again, there was creativity there.

Our package was 32Mb, now it's into the hundreds. But there's a download cost involved. If it's a kid, and they've only got a memory stick for the 360 because they've not got a hard drive, then we still wanted them to be able to play it. To fit a couple of games on a memory card and their saved games.

So, it's like, "We're going to do it for the lowest common denominator. 32Mb." It's a challenge. We wanted sprites, and the sprites are expensive.

In the Xbox Live quality space, they are expensive. So, I was saying to the graphics programmer, "You can write some things like daily Photoshop filters that run real time."

So, I can store the sprites on this weird format and we can do things like change the hue and the saturation and mirror bits of them and join bits together in almost, like, skeletons and things like that, and then get Will Overton (a concept artist on the game) on board.

There are not a lot of assets on there. I think there's about eight Meg' of graphics, and that's with all the backgrounds and the title screens. To get that, yeah, there was compression involved, but it was more creative thinking of how do we put this together or how do we put that together.

With Steve for the audio, his first thought (was) "Oh, I've only got a few Meg', so I'm going to have to do it as MIDI."

Steve hates not having fidelity. MIDI''s great, but it would have made his life harder. So he thought, "No, let's go for streams". He's going, "How many can I have?"

"Well, you've got 8Mb. We're going to be really generous and we're going to have half graphics, half audio", this is unheard of, effectively.

You usually get the arse-end of a megabyte or something – and he managed to get three or four very high-quality tunes out of that just by thinking about how they were layered, how the compression was set, and the kind of music as well. It all came together really nicely in the end.


SPOnG: Was it refreshing, going back to a smaller game?

Nick Burton: Yeah. What happened was – I won't say a holiday, because developing a game's never a holiday, if anybody thinks that then they're losing it – but it's good fun.


SPOnG: I know this isn't something you're specifically working on, but can you talk about how the avatars came about? Were you approached by Microsoft with something very specific?

Nick Burton: I don't know how the inception of it started, I know how the execution's gone. It's pretty cool, and it's very cool to be doing something that's almost, effectively going to be built into a re-wiring of the box, because Microsoft can do that, they call it an "evolving platform".

How it actually started... I'm pretty sure it came out of one of our other products... and they just kept refining... it's like chipping away at the coalface, basically - "It's good, but it could be more', and obviously that was coming from the Microsoft side, as well.

At one point I'd heard, 'Microsoft copies Wii!' And it's like "Well, no". Avatars exist everywhere. (They) just didn't pop in the console space. You go to Second Life, play Oblivion, for goodness sake! They're all there. It's just unifying it a bit, giving people that identity. Yeah, Nintendo found the way and started it, then the refinement process starts. Sony are doing it with Home.

It's that thing: the time is right, the planets are in alignment, so it's inevitable. It's just great that we're right at the core of it, really. It's a cool thing.

It's surprising, actually. It's one of those things – you see it in the studio where you're seeing it and going, "Oooh. Actually that's really good!" It's that thing that I love about Rare, that something just comes straight out of left field, even internally sometimes.

SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time!