Fight Club

After three years working at BlackOps, I decided the time was right to set up my own company. Genuine Games was formed with two co-founders, Russ Gubler and Steven Batiste. My role changed to Chief Technology Officer (CTO), but I always prided myself on being a hands-on manager, staying close to the programming and production of the game.

From Boxing to Fighting

After the success of Knockout Kings, we thought a fighting game would be a good first project for Genuine Games. I think we underestimated the effort and skills involved to move from a sports boxing game to a full fighting game. Expectations were very different, and the fighting game community was unforgiving.

The mechanics are completely different. Boxing games have a limited move set and realistic constraints. Fighting games need complex combo systems, special moves, and precise frame-by-frame balance. We were learning this the hard way.

Technical Innovations on Xbox

Looking back at the videos, I still think it looks good for a PlayStation 2 (PS2) game. We also made an Xbox version that I think looked outstanding.

It was the first time we used very high-level detail models and constructed complete rendering pipelines with textures, bump maps, light maps, and normal maps. The results were groundbreaking for the time, and the Xbox version looked very good.

The Online Challenge

Late in development, the publisher decided we needed an online version for player versus player (PvP). This was a big challenge late in the project, but even worse, the PS2 was extremely difficult, mainly due to requirements from Sony and the early implementation of Sony's online services.

We were adding PS2 online as Sony was trying to figure out how to make online services work. The obvious choice was to not support online for PS2, but hardware manufacturers have rules about equivalent features across platforms. If online is supported on Xbox, it had to be supported on PS2.

The technical hurdles were significant. Network code has to be rock solid, and doing it on PS2 hardware with Sony's nascent online infrastructure was brutal.

Lessons Learned

Fight Club was a steep learning curve. New company, new team, new publisher, new engine, and new tools. It was a very challenging project with lots of late nights, but we eventually reached the finish line a lot wiser.

The biggest lesson was understanding the difference between game genres. Just because you can make a good boxing game doesn't mean you can make a good fighting game. They're related but fundamentally different beasts, and the audiences have completely different expectations.