The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 3
Welcome to Quicksilver!
This is the third post about the story of our company. You can jump to the beginning here: The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 1 and to the previous chapter here: The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 2
Our story is four decades long, and still going strong. It involves more than 50 games and many more non-game projects that frequently cross over in surprising ways. In this chapter, we’ll explore a number of those projects, including several that are hardware-related.
Non-Game Projects: High-Technology Consulting
The mid-1980s were a brutal time to start a software company. Interest rates were at record highs, and some sectors of the technical market, such as video games, were retrenching and fighting for survival. It was in this environment that Quicksilver launched, on May 1, 1984.
Fortunately, we were located in one of the hottest technology development regions in the world. In those times, Southern California was home not just to massive aerospace companies but also to a large number of hardware companies such as Printronix, JVC and Western Digital. And we had friends at several of these companies.
Even better, consulting for these hardware companies paid very well. We pursued these hardware relationships and landed a number of interesting projects that helped keep us in the green while we developed our far more speculative game business.
One key early customer was Western Digital. They needed skills that we had, along with a group of other local consultants. We were all very experienced with assembly language programming and with the way hardware worked. Some had EE degrees, nicely complementing our computer science expertise. Our previous game work, which required the creation of our own versions of DOS, also helped here. We understood a lot about the way computers accessed their data, and about the IBM PC “BIOS” – the low-level code that ran when the machine booted up.
We got very good at making the most of devices like the ones shown here, such as this Adaptec SCSI board and old-school 5.25” Seagate hard drive – so good that we were asked to develop the complete code for several SCSI “host adapter” boards for IBM PC hard drives by Western Digital and another local company, Rancho Technology, which had the distinction of having built the world’s fastest hard disk controller, clocking in at a whopping 1.2 megabytes per second.
One of the highlights was working on the CD-ROM driver that went into a computer made by a very large company that shall remain nameless, but whose machines looked a lot like this internally:
This helped cement our reputation as experts in storage media, and led to several more years of work with Western Digital, ranging from hard disk design to maintenance of their internal testing tools to advance development on some top-secret projects in one of their labs. We even had Western Digital business cards and an office in the building pictured above.
Most interesting, though, is that this project led directly back to the game business and set in motion one of our major relationships of the 1990s, with Activision. That story will be told in our next chapter.
Non-Game Projects: Cutting-Edge Multimedia
The 1990s were big on “multimedia”. Activision even briefly changed its name to Mediagenic (that didn’t last). And a company down near San Diego, Compton’s New Media, claimed to have invented and patented the concept of multimedia. They sued everyone in the business, including us, demanding a percentage of every company’s revenues. We banded together, located plenty of prior art, and pushed back so hard that the US Patent and Trademark office actually revoked their patent.
In spite of that short-lived challenge, the multimedia business thrived. We developed a CD-ROM version of our hit game, Castles II, with half an hour of color digital video courtesy of a special video driver written by Interplay. We did a multimedia version of the game Shanghai for Activision (more in the next chapter). And, in our most ambitious multimedia project, we signed on to create an interactive digital version of a nine-hour video series called Heritage: Civilization and the Jews, produced by Thirteen-WNET in New York.
We had a super-cool CD-ROM burner back then; looked a lot like this, except it was a foot tall and included a full-height 5.25” hard disk that could hold up to 1 gigabyte of data! It cost us $10,000, and the blank discs cost $50 each. So getting involved in a project like this was a big deal:
Once again, with Heritage, we were in the midst of a technological revolution. We started working on the project by demonstrating how desktop computers could display high-quality, broadcast-quality video using special add-on hardware adapters that decoded the brand-new MPEG-1 data file format. Unlike today, when computers can easily handle digital video, this was an extremely demanding task and required not only super-fast hardware but also gigantic – for that time – hard drives as large as 1 gigabyte in size. Even storing copies of the videos posed problems on our development machines.
WNET put huge resources into the project. They had an office in New York City with 30 artists, map-makers, multimedia personnel and researchers who painstakingly built high-resolution digital maps of the world with overlays showing 5,000 years of history. The production quality was top-notch; any of these maps could have appeared in National Geographic or in a coffee-table book.
But, as usual, there was a catch: WNET’s producers wanted to create large amounts of enhanced, interactive content. After all, interactivity was one of the core precepts of multimedia. They needed a way of scripting these interactive elements. And they also needed a way of ensuring that the resulting data files were extremely small; although the video files were large, they were going to be streamed by the computer, so they didn’t need to stay in memory the entire time. The interactive elements, by contrast, had to be loaded from the CD-ROM before use and had to remain in memory, which was a challenge since the computers of that day typically didn’t have a lot of RAM.
We considered using some of the popular formats of the day, but they were clunky, slow and produced huge output files. So we designed our own format. Leveraging some existing tools. and adding our own custom scripting language on top, we were able to develop a user-friendly system that WNET’s team could use, with minimal supervision and almost no daily interaction with the programmers on the other coast, to create more than 100 unique interactive sequences for the product. The resulting “Heritage Engine” became a key Quicksilver technology (to which we owned the rights, as part of our development agreement with WNET).
Heritage was an epic endeavor. Production – almost all of it in New York – required literally years of work. The legal clearances alone cost more than $250,000. Started in the mid-1990s, the product didn’t officially release until 1999, with two expansions released in the years following. By then, DVD-ROMs had supplanted CD-ROMs, so the product ended up shipping on a single dual-layer DVD-ROM, one of the largest software products ever developed at that time: 8.7 gigabytes of data.
One important element of this project that’s worth highlighting: we built a custom tool that could then serve us in the future. This has been a common theme throughout the company’s long life: the creation of custom technologies that save time and amplify our abilities. Whether graphics editors, custom operating systems or custom app frameworks, all of these pieces of software have become valuable to us and to our customers because they make our development efforts faster, less expensive and more reliable.
Non-Game Projects: Desktop Publishing
Quicksilver first met Baudville at the inaugural conference of the Software Publishers’ Association in the fall of 1984. We were debating which new computer would survive the test of time: the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST or the Apple Macintosh. We took the position that Apple would win this battle, and backed it up by buying one of the very early models: the 512K Macintosh. Baudville’s founders wanted to get into the Macintosh business, so they tapped us to develop a series of products in a relationship that ultimately lasted for 35 years.
Some of our first products included a series of desktop publishing apps. We started with the complex challenge of porting the company’s Apple ][ Award Maker product to IBM PC and Macintosh, which was tremendously complicated, since every dot-matrix printer of that day required custom low-level code to control the platen and ribbon, and had different numbers of dots per inch. Worse, the pixels on the printers were not even square, so all sorts of adjustments were needed in order to make the output come out correctly. Fortunately, our extensive experience with low-level programming (sometimes known as “bit banging”) came in very handy, and were were able to produce the first generation of products for these newer machines fairly quickly.
We then had the pleasure of traveling to Baudville’s headquarters in Grand Rapids, MI and then on to an off-site brainstorming session in lovely Traverse Bay, where we pitched the concept of a high-resolution laser-printer version of Award Maker. This was clearly an idea whose time had come. Laser printers were far, far easier to control than the old dot-matrix models, and produced beautiful pages at the then-amazing resolution of 300 DPI – and, with SQUARE PIXELS! Although the output was only black and white, that wasn’t a problem, because Baudville’s side business involved selling pretty paper stock for certificates. It was an ideal match.
We consider one of our big design strengths in these products to be the way we anticipated user needs and designed the user experience to make it as easy as possible to achieve good-looking results with minimal effort. For example, we set up templates for all sorts of content and all typical variations (e.g., number of signatures) so the resulting document would always be aesthetically pleasing. Then we built “wizards” to walk users through all of the necessary steps. This is harder to do than to just provide a general-purpose document editor, but the end result is much more satisfying for everyone.
Non-Game Projects and The Dot-Com Boom
The late 1990s were a time of intense activity as the Internet became more and more intertwined with daily life and companies began spending heavily on technologies like email, Web sites and online ordering. Money flowed into sometimes-dubious ventures, spawning jokes about companies that went after “eyeballs” at all costs, or promised that “we’re losing money on each sale, but we’ll make it up in volume.”
It was during this time that Quicksilver sent what would become known as the “million-dollar Christmas card.” One of our contacts (a former client who’d moved to a new company) was looking for a team to build a very specialized application that required complex programming skills but also good knowledge of graphics formats and an ability to architect a high-performance server system using the relatively weak processors available at the time. He realized that these challenges would be a perfect fit for a game company.
We helped pitch the concept to prospective business partners, and one of them enthusiastically decided to fund the new venture. In the next nine months, we built one of the very first online coupon delivery systems, featuring a popup application for Microsoft Windows, a highly secure delivery mechanism using what was then very advanced encryption, and special encoding tools that could download and display attractive coupons with very little network bandwidth. This was important, because many people still used slow modems or ISDN connections to access the Internet.
The project paid well, and we even earned shares in the new company, Save.com. Unfortunately, the company closed down less than a year after we launched because they were unable to attract enough of a user base. At its peak, the app had more than one million users signed up, so from a technical and design perspective it was a hit. But the business side wasn’t able to capitalize on this base; we were a little too early.
Coming Up Next: Chapter 4 – An Unexpected Connection
We landed our next big game-industry job as a fluke – the result of a bug in the CD-ROM driver that we’d written for that un-named big computer company.
The Quicksilver Story: Chapter 4
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