In the arts in general, stepping out of line can open up new horizons. In the early 90s, for example, the music industry was dominated by pop and hard rock artists—a seemingly endless stream of Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Guns N' Roses, interspersed with similar acts.
In rock specifically, "glam metal" had been reigning supreme for years and showed no signs of relinquishing its throne anytime soon. Until a trio from Seattle released a well-produced album with a punk-like sound, kicking open the doors of the global charts: Nirvana.
The video game industry wasn't any different, stuck in a concerning monotony until it was turned on its head by Street Fighter II. Amidst the dominant beat 'em ups, the side-scrolling gameplay with endless enemies seemed like the inevitable recipe for success.
Who would dare deviate from the norm and risk losing money? The Ryu squad, with its one-on-one fights in cartoonish graphics, became one of the greatest games in history. The king of beat 'em ups was dead, but a new paradigm reigned. Who would dare to challenge it now?
Almost a year later, a fighting game ditched the cartoon style for digitized images. While Pit-Fighter had followed this path with considerable acceptance in the past, it also seemed like an outdated approach. But with a hefty dose of violence, Mortal Kombat ventured where no one expected: it went head-to-head with the already established Street Fighter II.
Inevitably, it began to spawn clones. Among the early ones were some good like Killer Instinct and shortly after, War Gods. But in the initial wave was also Way of the Warrior.
Which wasn’t good, quite the opposite. But with its unlikely, borderline amateurish journey, it saved Naughty Dog. Yes, the same studio that would go on to create some of the biggest franchises for each PlayStation generation in the following years: Crash Bandicoot, Jak & Daxter, Uncharted, and The Last of Us.
And don't think "this has no relation, it was a long time ago." If it weren't for the persistence in producing that junk, the company would never have approached Sony. "If we had opted for exclusivity with 3DO Company [instead of publishing it through Universal, as happened], it could have been the end of Naughty Dog," said Jason Rubin.
Playing fo making games
Naughty Dog was founded by Rubin and Andy Gavin. Schoolmates, the duo would often chat in the back of the classroom about programming and game design before they ever dreamed it could be a profession. Rubin, a good artist "for a 12-year-old," created beautiful game designs, but with terrible code. Gavin was the opposite. The meeting was a chance to combine their talents.
Long before Way of the Warrior, they made a few games with insignificant sales, including Ski Crazed (released for Apple II when they were 15), Dream Zone, and Keef the Thief. The latter, published by Electronic Arts, performed much better and sold around 50,000 copies across various platforms, recalled Gavin.
Planning? Business plan? What's that?
"Our business plan was to do what we thought would be cool. Profit? Whatever we could get. Expenses? Ask our parents, they paid for the electricity and rent," Rubin said recalling how things were shortly after the release of Ski Crazed.
Their first standout game would be published by Electronic Arts: Rings of Power, also the first of Naughty Dog for consoles, the Sega Mega Drive. "It was very sophisticated and complex," Gavin explained, "and took about two and a half years to produce." Rubin recalled it as a slightly longer period: three years.
The initial (and only) batch sold out. According to Rubin, despite the success, EA did not restock the cartridges. They had just released John Madden for the Mega Drive, which was selling like hotcakes in the morning; they didn't want to manufacture anything beyond that.
Rings of Power became one of the most sought-after used games. "There were several reasons for this," Rubin explained, "from the cost of cartridges compared to other games (it used more expensive memory and storage space), our royalties (quite high), to internal competition for limited manufacturing space."
3DO
Disheartened by EA's treatment, they took a break to think about what to do next. Eight months later, they received a call from Trip Hawkins talking about the 3DO.
"He is a persuasive man, but perhaps the strongest argument for the system was the disk-based console with a lot of memory and disks that could be ready for production," Rubin recalled. "We wouldn't be screwed by decisions based on cartridge manufacturing anymore!"
Hawkins provided the development kit, and the two started working, still without a publisher. "We funded the game out of our own pockets," Rubin said, noting that Way of the Warrior marked "our transition from making games as a hobby to entering game development as a profession." Part of the invested money was what they earned from Rings of Power.
At the time, the access time of discs was a major concern, one of the barriers the team needed to overcome. "The 3DO had 3 megabytes of RAM, which was more than the largest SNES cartridge," Gavin explained. "The CD itself had 600 Mb. There were technical details that needed to be addressed when programming for the 3DO. You had to use smart design to reduce and eliminate loading times."
In Way of the Warrior, the entire program was done with asynchronous loading, according to Gavin. "Loading is done while you play, anticipating what will need to be loaded." This allowed them to achieve very short loading screens in the game.
Comedic Mortal Kombat
Deciding to make a fighting game was an easy choice. It seemed like a relief after the complex RPG for the Mega Drive. "It didn't take us the three years that previous games took," Rubin said. "RPGs are bigger and require much more time and effort."
According to Gavin, "all the resources were put into two characters on the screen. They are big. They have a lot of animation and many moves compared to other games of the time."
The main inspiration came from kung fu films that the creators watched in their teenage years. But of course, the DNA is evident; you can't deny the "paternity."
Not that they deny it. "On some levels, it’s a kind of more comedic imitation of Mortal Kombat. It's quite exaggerated," Gavin admitted years later.
The first step was to bring the duo back together. During the production of Rings of Power, Gavin was studying at the University of Pennsylvania and Rubin was at a school in Michigan—over a thousand kilometers apart. So, communication was only via modem. When the production of Way of the Warrior began, Gavin was finishing his degree at MIT, and the solution was for the duo to rent an apartment in Boston, where they would live and work on the project.
Everything was produced as cheaply as possible. It was contrary to what one would expect from a major production for a next-generation console. The young Naughty Dog was in dire financial straits, and friends were called in to portray the characters. Each was paid a maximum of $25 for their work.
"The people we had in this game were all friends and family," Rubin said. "We couldn’t afford to pay anyone."
A big help from friends
The voice of the character Shaky Jake was provided by Dr. Rodney Brooks, head of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of Gavin’s professors, "probably the leading robotics scientist in the world," he said. Another was voiced by a friend named Vijay Pande. A molecular biology PhD from MIT with a postdoc from Berkeley, he was one of the first collaborators of Naughty Dog, having worked on Rings of Power as a programmer and designer. "He’s the secret character in the diaper," Gavin said with a smile, referring to Gulab Jamun.
Rubin himself voiced two characters: The Ninja and Konotori, as well as the voices of High Abbot and the narrator.
Some were "more or less" professionals, like actress Tamara Genest, who played Nikki Chan—she had a small role in The Switch, a 1993 TV movie, and would later appear in Sleeping with the Devil in 1997. David Liu, credited with the voice of Dragon, appears as a production assistant in the obscure Sino-American romantic comedy Anita Ho. Then a Harvard student and elite Street Fighter II player, Liu was also the lead tester for the game and would later continue in the gaming industry.
Despite the cost-saving measures, the development took a year, with an estimated cost of $100,000.
The studio was the rented apartment in Boston. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been a suitable space, but it was not. It was so small that, to get good shots of the fighters' frames, they had to open the door and position the camera in the hallway. Without the proper lenses, the only option was to move the camera further back.
DIY
The work proceeded in the true spirit of "do it yourself." Rubin’s neighbors, mostly professors and students from MIT and Harvard, didn’t understand the people in costumes walking through the hallway, thinking he was filming adult movies. Gavin stayed up until dawn working on audio processing; the sound leaked from the room and disturbed neighbors who wanted to sleep.
Without money for a professional chroma key capture system, they taped a large yellow sheet to the apartment wall, which also covered the only window in the tiny place. Costumes followed a scheme of severe budget restrictions: like in an improvised carnival, they used everything from pillowcases and bedsheets to parts of Happy Meal packaging. Vijay used a pillowcase as a diaper and a bedsheet as a turban. The jewel in the turban was from a Jasmine costume from Aladdin, Gavin noted. The most expensive costume, according to the producer, cost $150.
It turned out to be more complicated than they had calculated. For the first time, despite financial constraints, they were forced to hire additional staff. It was also the last time the duo did almost everything on their own. The industry was becoming professionalized, and that kind of amateur workflow was no longer viable.
“It quickly reached the point where, for the first time, two people couldn’t make the entire game,” Rubin said. Since they didn’t use a blue screen, it was necessary to carefully cut out the characters from the footage, a painstaking and terribly boring task at the pixel level. “So we went out and looked through ads for people to do that,” Rubin continued. “We had people come in to handle the tedious part.”
During the journey, the two went bankrupt. Rubin recalled having $6.37 in his bank account and living off instant noodles. Gavin had only the money from a $14,000 annual scholarship to complete his course, and to survive during production, they had to sell personal items like a stereo system. The apartment was filthy, covered in dog hair (Rubin's dog lived with them), and they could barely maintain the bathroom.
"With the last $10,000 we had, really – although it wasn’t the last expense, it was our last money – we bought a 1m² area at the 3DO booth at CES," Rubin recalled.
And there, they sealed not only the future of Way of the Warrior but also of Naughty Dog.
Right time, right place
It’s undeniable that, despite some successes, Way of the Warrior was a blatant copy of Mortal Kombat. According to Rubin’s own description, who remembered the game’s exposure at CES:
Our “booth” was actually just a TV in a corner of 3DO’s larger booth. It turned out that we attracted the market's attention with our game. Publishers had placed their developers on what they called "multimedia" titles. Basically, multimedia titles were a bunch of poorly filmed trash, interactive videos, and semi-game oddities. They realized too late that those things wouldn’t sell and needed to publish real games.Unfortunately for them, there was only one game close to being complete: our Way of the Warrior, which was a more or less decent imitation of Mortal Kombat. So a bidding war broke out for Way of the Warrior, and for a variety of reasons, Universal Interactive Studios won.
Three publishers vied for the game: 3DO Company, Universal Studios, and Crystal Dynamics. "We got closest to Crystal Dynamics," Rubin recalled, "but there was a division within the company. Half of the people loved the game and wanted to publish it. The other half wanted to buy it and use the engine to make Samurai Shodown, for which they had acquired the rights."
The first interested was Skip Paul, former president of Atari's arcade division and head of Universal Interactive Studios, a new division of the mega-corporation Universal. Hawkins tried in every way to persuade them to grant the rights to 3DO. "But Universal offered us the chance to create and finance more games and gave us creative freedom, and that sounded much cooler," Rubin explained.
An arcade version entered the testing phase by American Laser Games, using 3DO’s own hardware, but was canceled. A version was planned for the PlayStation. Fortunately for everyone, the idea faded away when the development of Crash Bandicoot started taking shape.
Stranger still, despite its questionable taste, Way of the Warrior received so much media hype that it convinced 3DO's owners, desperate for games, to invest in it. At least according to Naughty Dog, the game sold more than the less-than-stellar version of Samurai Shodown.
Mysterious ways
In any case, if you are a fan of Naughty Dog, Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted, The Last of Us, and everything that has come and will come, thank Way of the Warrior for existing at the right time and place. "Besides, I loved Los Angeles," Rubin said, explaining the decision to publish the game through Universal. "In the end, it was a better deal. For us, it was one of the big decision points. If we had opted for exclusivity with 3DO [as developers], it could have been the end of Naughty Dog."
Sinking about a year later with no more than three million consoles sold, the 32-bit would have sunk the partner along with it. On the other hand, Universal provided all the support the guys needed to get off the ground.
"Way of the Warrior came out. It was what it was," Rubin was honest about the outcome. "But Universal told us 'pick a platform, pick an IP, pick a type of game, and we’ll finance it.'
And so we said hello to Crash. And then Nate, Jak & Daxter, Ellie, Joel, etc.
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If you enjoy bizarre games, also check out Kasumi Ninja, a gem of the same ilk, but for the even more failed Atari Jaguar. Those were very crazy times, dude...
