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| Niklas Malmqvist |
1: The first question that begs to be asked is SPC Vision... what on earth does the SPC stand for and why was Vision stuck in front of it?
"I think Stefan will be the best to answer this in detail. But if I remember correctly SPC was chosen by Joost because he had just bought Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club (so ... SPC) on CD. The vision was just because every division of SPC had an initial after it . e.g. SPC T was training. That is at least the reason I remember being given.
In the very beginning it used to be Stebis, which was a partnership of two persons, one of which was Joost Steins-Bisschop; I don't know which part of the Stebis name is from him. There was some kind of opinion difference, rumour has it that Joost wanted to do software and the other person didn't. So, Ste and Bis went their own way. Joost formed a new company which was named SPCC (no slashes) which according to company rumours indeed stood for Sergant Pepper's Computer Company (this was never to be formally admitted to customers). Stebis still exists and has a website at www.stebis.nl; the company history lists it as founded in 1984 which seems right with my recollections.
I first started working for Joost in the second half of 1985, when Stebis was still in existence, but it was already dying then; I never met the other person nor learned the full details of the breakup (this was just a weekend job for me then). I still have a business card from SPCC (all capitals) somewhere.
A few years later (Stefan probably has more details) the ITC (Informatica Trainings Centrum) was founded and Joost somehow got involved with it. At some point a training company was founded and it was given the name SPC/Training; SPCC was then rechristened SPC/Company. The slashes where displayed very prominently in those days; see e.g. the busines card images on http://cdidev.tripod.com/spc.htm.
One spinoff of the training business was laserdisc; SPC Vision originally did CBT (Computer Based Training) courses, using laserdisc and I think even VHS. Among these people were Joop Hörmann who later founded Studiope (you will find him credited for audio production on many Dutch CD-i titles, and today even CD-ROMs) and Rob Hörmann, the later managing director of SPC/Vison. The CBT business didn't flourish too well and was soon disbanded, but the links to the people where never broken. I believe that Franc Beernink was also from this group.
When CD-i started coming up, it was first done by the SPC/Company people (I have an SPC/Company business card from Arjen Wagenaar). However, it was soon felt that a separate name was better, and since the SPC Vision name was lying dormant they reused it. It was, however, felt to be too "boring" a name for a games publishing label and thus The Vision Factory was born, which was never really a company but only a publishing label.
Luc pretty much answered the question. First there was Stebis (I worked there as an intern and joined when it became SPCC), then SPC/C, SPC/T and finally SPC/V.
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| Tim Moss |
Rob Hormann used to run a computer training school. I attended this one briefly since technically I was a high school dropout and my parents insisted on some kind of training. I reluctantly agreed and spent 6 months at this school after which Rob realised I was different from the rest of the students and sent me to his friend Joost who just started a company called Stebis and needed programmers. Luc was there as a freelancer at the time I believe. I still remember the 286 machine running Xenix with two ASCII terminals we were using to develop banking software.
Anyway Rob was involved with ITC as well (what was the other guy's name, the third SPC director?) and Rob and Joost parterned up and formed SPC Training or SPC/T.
Once the Multimedia hype started, SPC/C jumped on board and soon after SPC/V was born. Once the first CD-i kit came in and I read the docs, discovering it had a 68000 the first seeds for the Vision Factory were sown. The rest is history..."
2: "The Vision Factory" name was certainly well chosen with a string of commercially successful titles. These always had a certain visual vibrance which typified the SPC Vision game, how was this style developed and why did SPC decide to focus on the Philips CD-i platform?
"The CD-i platform happened more or less by accident, at least the games side of it. The sprite demo turned Alien Gate story lies at the beginning of that. This was during the heydays of the Atari ST demo scene. When the sprite demo turned out to be successful I got Niklas Malmqvist involved to get some more graphics for an actual game demo. Niklas' graphics style turned out to be highly influential in the visual style of our games. When we showed the Alien Gate demo to Philips we got a 5-game contract from them almost immediately. We then hired some more people including Tim, Arjen and Luc Verhulst. Luc's visual style was the second key ingredient for the Vision Factory style. All the major games (Alien Gate, Dimo's Quest, The Apprentice, Accelerator, Steel Machine) were done by a combination of the people listed above with input from others.
So I say Nik and Luc are responsible for the visual style, with CD-i being an opportunistic choice of platform.
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| Luc Rooijakkers |
I must confess that even though it is very flattering of Stefan to give us graphics artist full credits for setting the visual style of SPC Vision, I don't feel that that is entirely true. Both Stefan and Tim has just as much responsibilty for the visual style as we pixel pushers back then. Sure - we put the pixels, but those two guys did magic with them.
Like you pointed out, Devin - the shattered space craft in Guardian for example was all Stefan's idea, and both Stefan and Tim had a lot of ideas like that to help 'shape' the visual style and impact of the SPC Vision games. Luke and I did our best to put colourful dots on the screen, but if it wasn't for Stefan and Tim's exceptional skills and enthusiasm, those pixels would've felt stiff and lifeless for sure. Stefan and Tim made Luke and I look good. ;)"
3: It seems that another atypical aspect of the crew behind The Vision Factory was the so called "Bedroom Coder" experience, something quite alien to Philips Media who tended to recruit University Graduate students. Can you tell us about your collective work on the Atari ST Demo scene and how this evolved into your work on CD-i.
"This could be a long answer since a lot can be said about the ST demo scene. Tim and I used to be in a group called "The Lost Boys", this was one of the more popular groups with demos such as "Ooh Crickey Wot a Scorcher" that were big undertakings with many demo screens linked by an elaborate main menu which was almost a mini-game. Niklas was part of a group called the CareBears (which were good friends with the Lost Boys) and Arjen...I forget which crew he was from. The only one not directly from the demo scene as far as I know was Luc Verhulst.
Since all ST demo coding was done in 68000 assembly and the CD-i had a 68000 processor, it was natural for us to write code for it. When we got the contract with Philips and needed more people the first thing I did was call Tim who joined for the making of Alien Gate and later we found Arjen, Luc and Ben. We also enlisted Tim's brother Dave and his friend Mark (both Lost Boys members as well) to do the music for Steel Machine.
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| Stefan Posthuma |
Having demo coders do the games definitely helped shape the style of our games, as Nik points out in his earlier post. We were as creative as we could be, had a unique sense of humor and approached things in a quite unusual and informal manner. I remember the many hours we spent playing Doom in SPC's attic where we were stationed!
Having our roots in the demo scene perhaps made us more relaxed and playful in our approach to the CD-i. Also, programming demos on the ST and trying to push its 68000 processor to the limit, forced the programmers to be great at doing optimized code. I am not sure that you learn that when studying programming in a more 'arranged' way."
4: Was the working relationship with Philips during this 5 game contract quite relaxed with regards to creative control over the games contents owing to the early impressions given by the Alien Gate demo? Also rumour had it that Philips approached ID Software concerning the possibility of a DOOM conversion to CD-i, did Philips ever hint at the possibility of a conversion handled by SPC Vision?
"Philips' experience with producing game development was very limited at the time and it led to some difficulties with their QA department which was located in Belgium. Also, after Alien Gate we were assigned a producer from Philips who was a nice guy but he knew very little about games. Creatively he left us mostly alone, apart from the occasional sneaker-tweaking incident. I still remember a long back and forth about how the sneakers on Dimo's Quest main character looked. Poor Niklas was eternally patient and changing a pixel here and there to appease the guy.
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| Arjen Wagenaar |
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| Legends never die! |