Another Possibility
Yesterday, I suggested that the disastrously early shipment of Cyberpunk 2077 was a product of modest optimism at every employee layer, stacked.
There is, however, another possibility.
The Front Page Sports: Football series was, at first, a miracle. A well-animated, intelligent football game with so many excellent design touches in 1992? On a PC?
That simply wasn't possible, and yet it existed. I had a "work" PC at home (thanks, CompuAdd) just for the purpose of playing that game. No actual work was done.
Over the course of several annual versions, I somehow how wound up on a message board with a bunch of other guys who thought this was the best sports game in history. On that board, the designer of Front Page Sports: Baseball '98, who was named Doug Johnson, asked if anyone wanted to beta test his game.
In response, probably the best group of beta testers ever assembled for a sports game signed up. Looking back now, I still can't believe how brilliant all of those guys were. Shaun Sullivan went on to design and develop the PureSim baseball series. Glen Haag wrote about sports games for twenty years (and still does, occasionally). John Ehrlinger--well, I don't know what happened to him, but he was incredibly intelligent.
I also made a sports game, and even though it was incredibly niche, I would hold up the A.I. against any sports game.
FPS: BB '98 had one staggeringly advanced design feature: the PB.ini file. This was a text file that let you customize every single aspect of the simulation. I don't think that level of customization has ever been matched.
After a series of very wonky conversations about baseball, Doug put me in charge of the PB.ini file.
There were hundreds of variables in that file, and they all worked together like a little symphony.
After hundreds of hours of work.
A full season took 30 minutes to sim. I would look at the stats, make adjustments in the variables, and run it again.
I did this at work. I did this at home. Between the beta test and a payroll project I was managing at the time, I was working 100+ hours a week.
In the end, it all worked out, even though Doug didn't ship the latest version of the PB.ini file with the shipping version of the game. It did get in there eventually, though, and the statistical fidelity was unbelievable. Not perfect, because no matter how I adjusted the variables, the engine still had trouble correctly modeling high average, low power players, but I was very proud of it nonetheless.
I had credibility with Doug after that, and we kept in contact. Not often, but it was always a treat. He was a gruff, intense guy who I really enjoyed talking to.
In 1998, he began working on the Front Page Sports: Football series. I don't remember hearing from him then, but in the fall of 1998, he called me.
"Do you want to see the game?"
Of course I did. I was absolutely thrilled to see the new version of the game. Dynamix was making the big move to 3D players, instead of sprites, and after a few years of treading water, this was going to revitalize the series.
He sent me a disc.
I can't even begin to tell you my level of excitement. And within five minutes, I knew that the game was absolutely, unbelievably broken. Pre-alpha levels of broken.
In every conceivable way, it was unplayable.
I called Doug, trying to be delicate. I remember he was listening to music in the background, which he always did, and it was some kind of soothing jazz, I think.
I said that there were quite a few problems, and asked him how much they were going to push back the shipping date, because it was scheduled to ship in just a month.
"They're shipping it," he said.
"How much can you fix in a month?" I asked.
"They're not fixing anything," he said. "That's the version they're shipping."
It was, in short, a catastrophe. Review scores in the 50s, and those were the kind ones.
Two months after release, Dynamix actually recalled the game, because they weren't going to spend the year needed to fix it (and I don't know if even a year would have been enough). Then they cancelled the series.
Doug left the game industry after that, I think. I never knew where he went.
So that's the other possibility with Cyberpunk. The game was still so broken (particularly the console versions) that they had no clear idea when it would actually be finished, and they were going to miss the holiday season.
So they shipped it. Welcome to catastrophe.
Somewhere, Doug Johnson is grimacing.
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