Capoeira Fighter 3, the interview - A 1UP classic from January 4, 2008

The fighting game genre isn't as popular as it was in the early 90's, but given the attention that Street Fighter IV has garnered in the past few months it is safe to say that the fans haven't gone anywhere. Director of SF IV, Yoshinori Ono, believes that the game is like a sleeping giant, ready to be roused from a long slumber with a kick to the ribs. I believe the genre is asleep as well but more than just to be awoken it is ready for a renaissance.

Developers from every corner of the world are going to take notes on SF IV and begin developing fighting titles of their own. I'm certain there are fans of Killer Instinct ready to pounce on Rare when they see a potential for success. Those old enough to remember Primal Rage will petition to get some closure on the sequel. But those that focus too much on the past will fail to see the future of the genre. The world has grown quite a lot since the 90's. There is a whole new generation ready to test out the fighting genre.

The only guarantee that we have is in Capcom capturing the pure aspect of the fighter without 3D gimmicks. Until SF IV comes out we have to find titles cut from the same cloth. I don't mean a fighter by SNK, Namco, Taito, Sammy or DIMPS, but something more local. The game featured today has a lot of the classic Street Fighter vibe, it's creator inspired by Capcom's greatest, Street Fighter Alpha.

It has been two years and three months since I last did an interview with Scott C. Stoddard. His name should be important to you and everyone here on 1UP, especially those that consider themselves fighting game fans. Scott created a fighting game by himself. Okay, to be fair, his friends Adam Ford (most of the backgrounds and character selection art), Ethan Halvorsen (new music), and Trent and Melissa Halvorsen (arcade dialogue and ending art) helped at the end. Regardless I don't know of anyone else that can claim to have made a good, let alone great, fighting game all by themselves. I'm talking about character designs, backgrounds, models, animation, music, balance... the works. In this age of multi-million dollar development budgets, Hollywood writers and endorsement deals, it is humbling that one man is keeping the genre alive. The name of the game (in case you haven't guessed) is Capoeira Fighter 3. Go on and check out the demo but be sure to come back here.

Capoeira is a beautiful martial art. It looks amazing in videogames like Tekken and Street Fighter III and doubly amazing on film. A former practitioner of the art, Scott currently works at a game studio but has been filling his free time by plugging away on Capoeira Fighter for near a decade. As a dedicated family man his time is precious, it takes years for his titles to come out. Unlike Capcom, Scott has never stopped working on his series. This most recent release is by far the best and deserves some love on 1UP.

BigMex: Scott, it's great talking with you again. So tell us are you still with the team at Avalanche? I understand the company is part of Disney Interactive now. How is this working out for you?

Scott Stoddard: Disney is a great employer. I did have to animate Hannah's singing lips for the Hannah Montana Wii game, but I'm lead animator on a cool IP project right now. Plus I get into Disneyland free!

BM: The team at Avalanche (and you) now keep a blog. On the Avalanche Software blog the artists all contribute to monthly themes. Are you going to become more involved with those now that Capoeira Fighter 3 has gone "gold?"

SS: I plan to. I've had a lot of fun with my posts in the past, just been a matter of priorities lately trying to get CF3 out the door. All this coding is turning my brain lefty. I definately need to do more good ol' drawing and painting.

BM: Before we get to the actual CF3 questions is there an upcoming game you are working on with Avalanche that you'd like to mention?

SS: Sorry can't mention anything here, but I can say that it is more exciting to work on than Hannah Montana.

BM: Now let's talk about the genre. The fighting game scene has been pretty quiet these past few years. Everything changed in October when Street Fighter IV was announced. What was your reaction to the announcement?

SS: Loved the trailer. Watched it a few dozen times. The motion and ink effect was fun. The impacts and cloth had a great feel to them. Only hitch was the faces and hair. They look really, I mean REALLY bad compared to what I know Capcom is capable of. They've had so many cool stylized versions over the years, but SFIV looks like they hired a middle schooler to design the faces. Very sad to see them going away from the anime look.

BM: Back when I first interviewed you two years ago, you mentioned that Capcom needs to do a cel-shaded 3D fighter with all the characters from past titles. Your words now seem prophetic as details of SF IV have been released. Were these steps logical for the franchise?

SS: As long as the gameplay stays true to the old 2D version, 3D has some very attractive advantages.

BM: What are the advantages of working in 3D over a sprite-based system?

SS: Iteration, iteration, iteration. It is so much easier to fix and change things on a 3D character, or tweak 3D animation. Let's say you want to make Ryu's head smaller (or you want to make it ridiculously small like they apparently have for SFIV). In a 3D system, you just open the model, scale down the head, re-export and your done, maybe 5-10 min tops. If you want to shrink the head on a 2D character, you're pixel pushing every sprite, probably days, if not weeks of work.
The main thing 2D still has going for it is control. You know exactly what that sprite is going to look like because it is only ever going to be seen from one angle. In a 3D game, an animation might look great from one angle, and terrible from another.

BM: Is there a particular character that you can't wait to try out?

SS: Mostly I'm just curious to see the gameplay in motion. The screen grabs didn't wow me, but you've really got to see it in motion to judge it fairly. Some of the screens looked like the faces were going to be a lot more animated, which looks promising. I guess I would go for Ryu because it would be easiest to get a feel for the new gameplay using a familiar character, unless of course they include Elena... got a soft spot for capoeiras.

BM: What do you think about the Saving / Revenge system that EGM / 1UP has reported on?

SS: Hmm... I'll have to try it out. Sounded kinda muddy in the article I read, but might work better in actual gameplay. The idea of keeping the match interesting to the very end is definitely a good goal.

BM: Now that we have established your love of the Street Fighter franchise let's talk a little about your title. It's been two years and change since we last spoke, can you guess how many hours you've spent bringing Capoeira Fighter 3 from beta to final copy? Or specific time spent balancing moves and tweaking the engine?

SS: 1,000's easily. Adam Ford who worked on the backgrounds, and had a strong SF background played CF3 with me on our lunch break almost everyday. I also played nights, and my brother John put in quite a few hours with me. Overall I am very satisfied with the final product. There are still a lot of things that other games do better, but I have to honestly say, when I get together with friends that used to play SF, we would rather play Capoeira Fighter now.

BM: How has the reaction been for your title during development and final release?

SS: We've got some diehard fans out there. We're starting to get more fan vids on youtube. That's fun to see what people are doing with the game. I've also invited the shoryuken.com forums to test it out, they have responded pretty positively, and made some very useful suggestions that I implemented. Things are still pretty quiet as the final build is only available on my site right now where it's had a few thousand hits. Shockwave is really where most of the fans play it. I expect things to be more exciting when Shockwave releases the download version in Jan-Feb '08. Usually get over a million hits a month there.

BM: You mentioned previously that once CF3 was finished you hoped that a publisher might bring it to the home consoles. Any luck with that?

SS: I've talked to a few companies about getting it ported to XBLA and there have been plenty of fans asking for a console version. Turns out it's really tough and expensive to develop for consoles, so to answer your question, we're looking into it, and we want to do it. It's just a matter of finding the right company that is willing to port our game instead of working on their own IP.

BM: There are new and expanded modes in your game, ways to cancel out of combos and supers, a story mode, tag team, solo and versus options. Can you highlight the control scheme and these new modes for us?

SS: Yeah, CF3 is um... full featured to put it nicely (bloated is how I was feeling trying to bug test all the little things I've put in over the years), but the final product is very satisfying and much deeper than most fighting games.

As far as the fighting system goes, there are quite a few little polishing tweaks in the final build. CF3 is very combo heavy. Special moves can be linked with regular moves, but cannot be repeated in a combo unless a hyper move is used to cancel the move usage. To balance out the crazy long combos, you can special dodge to escape between moves or to air recover. So you see a lot of situations where one guy gets an uppercut into a jump kick, then he escapes and returns a punishing downward blow sending the attacker back into the ground. The back and forth in the air is lots of fun, and tends to generate gameplay that is more focused on the flow of combos and escapes than any one move by itself.

We also added color coated swooshes to indicate overhead hits so you can tell how you need to dodge.

There are the usual arcade and versus modes, plus a few other practice and minigame modes.
Capoeira Fighter 3's arcade mode is unique in the fighting genre, because of the branching story. You choose one fighter to start, and depending on that character's story, you may or may not start with a partner. The cool thing is that the partner's story is actually part of yours. Half way through you'll have the option to switch partners, or in some cases to go solo, so there are two endings for every character. Trent Halvorsen and his wife Melissa did all the writing and ending art, and they did a great job weaving all 29 character's stories together. It is also possible to play co-op if your fighter has a partner. I've had a lot of fun playing through co-op with my 4 year old son. He can already do most of the super moves.

The other unique thing to Capoeira Fighter is the match types. My brother an I grew up on SNES Street Fighter II. We started to get bored after a while, so we set up our own mini games, seeing who could get the other guy against the wall first, or who get past the guy to his back wall first. So when I made Capoeira Fighter, I wanted to put more of that stuff in the game to mix it up and keep the game fresh longer.

We ended up with 6 match types, all of which I enjoy (Adam hates the money game). Knock Out is the regular beat-up-the-other guy match. Then there is Ring-King, where you can damage your opponent by keeping them out of the center of the arena. Ring of Fire has a fire pit where you can score extra damage knocking the other guy into it. Money Game plays like capture the flag, and finally Ring Out is a quick match where the first guy to be hit out of the arena wins. You can also set it to switch randomly every round which keeps you on your toes.

Minigame Mode allows you to record scores for each fighter in things like the most damaging combo, the longest combo, busting targets etc... It's a great place to master combos.

BM: The roster of fighters has really expanded. In addition to the fantastic library of capoeira fighters you now feature a lineup of fighters from all over the world. I spy an homage to Street Fighter II as well as at least one character inspired from a popular movie. Can you introduce us to the new faces and some of the new fighting styles presented?

SS: Yeah we felt like the game needed some other styles to balance it out. We ended up building almost half of the 29 character roster with non-capoeira martial artists. Among my favorites are Jimmy Zappa who plays like a classic fireballer, except that we replaced the fireball with a lunging sweep kick. Panda is bubbly asian school girl that happens to be very good at tae kwon do. There's Aleron, the English boxing champ with small man syndrome and his nemesis, Angus, the Irish street fighting soccer player in a kilt. We also have Helicopter the German break dancer, and your monkey kung fu fighter Macaco (AKA Avery).

BM: You have some unique faces in the lineup, Arubim and Saryn aren't human, these are cameos from another game you created, right?

SS: Yes, Saryn and Arubim are from Guardians of Altarris, Spiritonin's take on a Final Fight style game. We needed two more characters to fill in the blank spots on the selection grid and we thought it would be a fun and completely non-logical mix. They are definitely some of my favorite characters to play.

BM: The CF3 design a character contest brought in some interesting designs, I was lucky enough to be one of those selected as was Pantera by a younger artist. Did you have fun coming up with moves for these characters?

SS: Yes! They both turned out to be very fun and different from the other characters in the game. They each have very distinct personalities that come across in their vocals and attacks.

BM: The fighting game genre is a hard sell for publishers. If your game is not a license, MMO or a GTA-clone then you really can't pitch it. This is where the life long gamer takes things into their own hands. You are a member of a small group keeping the genre alive. The new, unique, fighting games are not made by the big studios these days. Tekken and Virtua Fighter are becoming carbon copies of the other. 2D fighters (not made by SNK) are few and far between. Subtle Style from Japan was made by a small team and distributed on PC before it caught the attention of the industry. Now an arcade version is being released to great reviews. In Korea a one or two person team is making Chosun Musa, a fighter based on mythical Korean warriors. Here in the states you've been plugging away single-handed at Capoeira Fighter for years. How does it feel knowing that you are one of the small global developers keeping the genre alive and unique?

SS: As someone who got into video games because of games like Street Fighter II, it's sad to see the genre displaced in today's market. I made Capoeira Fighter so I could have my own engine to try out new gameplay concepts and see if I couldn't offer something worthwhile to the genre. The PC is a very small market for fighting games, but Capoeira Fighter has proved popular and profitable so far. My hope is that the fighting community give it a serious look. I don't think they'll be dissapointed.

BM: Do you think people in the industry should devote more time to building these small games in a variety of genres rather than focusing only on their work project?

SS: I think a lot of guys do that already. Maybe not on the scale that we have attempted here, but you see lots of games on the web that are developed on the side. It's definitely good for me and has helped me understand the industry better.

BM: Do you think that the industry could invest or support these developers by offering release time, stipends or distribution?

SS: It would be nice if console development was more friendly to small developers. From the research I've done, it's pretty daunting to get a game on a console, time, resource and expense wise. Even with something like CF3 that would be a simple port, it is still more than my small team could handle for a console.

BM: Do you foresee a time where digital distribution will replace traditional publishers and give you a chance to gain a wider audience and / or monetary compensation?

SS: I don't see publishers going anywhere, they will adapt. I still rely heavily on publishers for the majority of my profit because they handle all the marketing and ad sales etc...

BM: Any fears that Street Fighter IV will cause the other publishers to have a knee-jerk reaction and begin creating bad fighting titles rather than investing in yours? For reference think of the horrid fighters that flooded the market in the 90's after the success of Street Fighter II. We had to wade through Fighters History, Shaq-Fu, Blood Storm, Time Killers, Thrill Kill, Rise of the Robots, Pit Fighter, War Gods, etc...

SS: Yeah I remember buying all those games looking for another SFII experience and being sorely disappointed every time. It will be interesting to see. I don't think anyone is going to do anything serious until they see SFIV do really well. Grade A console games cost so much to make now. If Capcom's strategy to return to the SFII roots proves successful, and the fighting genre regains popularity, we will definitely see more fighting games. It's all about the money.

BM: Do you hope that SF IV sparks interest in your fighter as well?

SS: I hope anything sparks interest in my fighter. It will be interesting to see if any of the bigger developers use any of my ideas like the match types and abilities attached to hyper combos...

BM: You said that your back would have healed while you were working on this title. Is it well enough for you to return to practicing capoeira with your friends?

SS: Been thinking about that seriously. I do need to get back in shape, but my family also needs me back. I think I'll be taking it easy for a few months.

BM: You are a dedicated family man but does your wife ever have to pull you away from the computer and say enough is enough, especially now that CF 3 is out? Or are you just thinking of things for CF 4? SS: My wife is very supportive, and she keeps me balanced. Plus she did the voices for several of the girls! She is very excited to have a full time husband & dad back, and I am excited to be done. I imagine a CF4 is inevitable, but there will probably be a few more iterations of 3 with some characters added and a few more features that we wanted to get into it. I hope the game does well. Thanks for the interview!

So there you have it, the first interview of the new year. If you are a fighting game fan then you should support the dream and buy a copy. Even if you aren't big into fighting games then you should at least give the online version a spin at Spiritonin or at Shockwave.com. Scott deserves some exposure for his hard work so do me a favor and please, please, please tell a friend. Tell the editors at EGM and 1UP to shine some light on the small developers. Street Fighter IV is still a long ways off, so how about putting some hype behind a homegrown fighter for a change? Have a great weekend and let me know what you are up to!

---EDIT 2025---

Did you ever play this classic game when it came out? Did you know about the free download of the newly polished 60FPS version? Download the Legacy Edition of Capoeira Fighter 3. I’d like to read about which long gone fighting games would come back in the comments section. As always if you enjoyed this blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

The Return of Capoeira Fighter 3: Ultimate World Tournament!

If you didn’t believe in Santa Claus then you might want to start believing now! The fighting game community got a special present before the end of the year. Shout out to Luis Lopez for giving me the heads up! The best web-based fighting game ever made (and one of my favorite fighting games of all time) was now available for free download! Windows users only. The criminally underrated Capoeira Fighter 3: Ultimate World Tournament was a Shockwave-based game released by Spiritonin Media in the 2007. I must have played thousands of matches over the years whenever I had a break. Adobe ended support for the Shockwave plugin on 2019, and it was only a matter of time before CF3, and countless other games would be made obsolete. None of the defunct titles made me sadder than losing CF3.

Series creator Scott Stoddard had actually been plugging away at the title in his free time. Adding some polish to it, and trying to make it even better. I did a deep dive on Capoeira Fighter 3 on the blog. For the record Mr. Stoddard had also created a noir fighting game called Death Vegas shortly after CF3 had been released. I managed to dig up an old interview that I conducted with Scott during the 1UP days. I will post it this weekend. Make sure you Download the Legacy Edition of Capoeira Fighter 3, join the Discord (https://discord.gg/PTpuvqkyhF), and give Scott some feedback. It would be nice to see this game get some momentum, and even get featured at EVO.

So this is the last bit of good news that I want to leave you with. A huge thank you for Scott Stoddard for revisiting this gem, and giving it out to the community! May every project you work on bring you much joy, and success! I want to thank all of the visitors that stopped by in 2024. Thank you to those that left a comment, or shared my link on social media. This was the most prolific year that I have ever had on this blog A total of 169 posts in a year... nice! I would not have done it without the support of my friends, and family. I may not be as prolific in 2025, but I will try to find neat things to share with you. I hope 2024 went well for you, and I look forward to playing lots more Capoeira Fighter 3 in 2025. Did you ever play this game when it was available? Is this the first time you’ve heard of it? I’d like to hear about it in the comments section. As always if you like my blog, and would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

Daigo owns Arcadia Magazine! - A 1UP classic from October 11, 2010

Hello friends, I trust you had a good weekend. I picked up the November 2010 issue of Arcadia this weekend. The cover story was a feature on the upcoming Kidou Senshi Gundam: Extreme Vs. an arcade update of the popular Gundam series. It is very much in the vein of the classic Sega title Virtua On.

Despite the big reveal on the Gundam game, this issue was packed with tons of info on Super Street Fighter IV. In particular the official announcement of Yun and Yang in the arcade as well as an interview with Producer Yoshinori Ono.

Joining Ono to talk about the game is the SF phenom Daigo Umehara.

This issue of Arcadia totally belonged to Daigo.

Daigo already had a running column in the magazine but the November issue turned out page after page of interviews and his take on the various fighting games as well as his competition on the international level, including the USA's own Justin Wong.

As if all that weren't enough there was even a manga in the back about a couple of inept bounty hunters trying to track down Daigo.

They never do find Daigo as they spend most of the time springing traps on themselves and getting into trouble.

It's really nice to see how Daigo has come up in popularity in Japan and how Capcom is making sure that the press remembers what games he is famous for. Fame can only take a player so far, skills are what will keep Daigo from being forgotten by the masses. Let's just hope that Capcom might get around to tapping another community member the next time they go about designing a new Street Fighter game...

I'm just saying.

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Catching up with Team Hydro, part 3 - A 1UP classic from June 10, 2009

No thanks to Kotaku for failing to recognize this blogger as the person that uploaded the video clips and reporting on H2Overdrive. I'm not a staffer with 1UP and I didn't get paid for this. I'm just a fan of the game who had to work for a few months on getting interviews and footage. I posted the clips to share with everyone online, but a little acknowledgment would have been nice from Kotaku.

If I had to sum up H2Overdrive in a single word it would be "Stunning!" Before I even mention the controls, boats, levels and features I have to start with the graphics. They are among the most impressive of any arcade racing game, ever. This goes back to Sega, whom are the kings of racing games in the arcade.

Sega has rarely been matched at the genre by an outside developer and hardly ever been beaten, especially not by an American developer. That was until Hydro Thunder (HT) came out. Granted, visually HT didn't have the polish of the Sega Model 3 gems, but when combined with fantastic boat designs, levels, water physics, secrets and super-tight controls it was more than a match for anything Sega (or Namco or Konami) could do. Now imagine how much further graphics have come in the past 10 years. How nice models, textures and effects look now on a high definition LCD rather than a CRT. You'll get an idea as to how stunning H2Overdrive (H2O) is compared to the classic arcade title.

There is still a part of me that asks "what if?" I'm one of those that wishes to have seen footage of Hydro Thunder 2 in action. Even though the game was cancelled I was stoked to have known that the original boats would have gotten a facelift and some of the tracks would have been revisited and changed dramatically.

What Specular Interactive did was more than finish the sequel that had been canned by Midway all those years ago. They tried to secure the name of HT but couldn't manage it. In their favor they did the next best thing, reassemble the HT team and create a new boat racing game from the ground up. They took the best elements from HT and concepts from HT2 and then supercharged them. The boats are now far more brutal than they've ever been, yet carry over some familiar themes from the classic title. My favorite from HT got a new lease on life, while I'm not keen on knives I will say that it looks and plays just like I remember... only, somehow better.

Okay, there is no mystery to the "somehow." Team Hydro is back and in full effect, using everything they've learned while working on many other titles over the past decade. This translates into a game that is as easy to get into as the original, and yet like the original, provides enough of a challenge to veteran gamers. The control varies on the different boats. Those that prefer something steady and reliable have something to fall back on, those that prefer lots of drift (yes, even on water!) or hard turning also have something to choose from. Those eager to modify their boats, search for shortcuts and secrets will return again and again to get the most out of the title.

H2O uses the trusty steering wheel and throttle setup from HT. There are no pedals but the boats can perform some unique things by shifting the throttle and pressing a boost button at the right moment. The cabinet itself is more than an upgrade kit to an old Hydro Thunder cabinet. It is a new design from the ground-up, with all new electronics and controls. It feels very solid but the devil is in the details. The gauges on the cabinet have working electronics, showing speed and boost fuel. Most manufacturers would rather just slap a sticker with graphics over the gauges. The cabinet lights up to show who the leader is on a multiplayer race. The steering wheel is tighter than the original HT and the sounds and music are channeled through the seat, bringing players closer into the experience. There are also plenty more things going for H2O but rather than talk about it I'll let the people at Specular explain these features...

1. Who are you and what do you do?

Brian Silva. Short answer: Senior Artist/Game Designer. Long answer: I mostly build the tracks in H20verdrive (terrain, props, skies, etc), placing ramps/boosters/other obstacles in all tracks. Plus track design/layout, coming up with and collaborating on new gameplay features, as well as overall game tuning/balancing, and some other things I can’t think of right now. Oh, I also do the announcer vocals and various other voices in the game.

Steve Ranck, founder & president of Specular Interactive, Inc. I spend most of my time as engine & gameplay programmer, as well as lead designer and producer.

2. What are you currently playing or favorite games (when you aren't on a deadline)?

Brian: Professor Layton, Burnout Paradise, Dig-Dug, Robotron, not leveling my useless Paladin to 80, and Tetris DX for GB (but only on the toilet).

Steve: Hmmm… when I’m not on a deadline? Let me see if I can think back that far. The most recent games I’ve played are Left for Dead and Metal Arms. Some of my favorite games of all time are Half-Life 2, Call of Duty 4, and Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Sinistar and Joust are up there, too.

3. What was your previous game development experience?

Brian: Right before this, I was creating art for World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King.

Steve: I’ve been designing and building games since I was 12. My first games were all electronic & mechanical, until I met the Apple II and started writing games in assembly language. Many years later, I got my first job in the games industry with Midway in San Diego where I started on the port of Cruis’n USA for the N64 and ultimately...

[2023 EDIT: This was all I was able to recover from my old 1UP page regarding H2Overdrive. When IGN shut down the servers they wiped countless game videos, and the rest of this blog post. Below was the only part that remained which I uploaded to YouTube thankfully.] 

 

As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

Catching up with Team Hydro, part 2 - A 1UP classic from June 9, 2009

Steve Ranck and the rest of Team Hydro The Team Hydro Interview, E3 2000 

1. First things first, how many boats (submersible, semi submersible or other amphibious craft) can we expect to see in Hydro Thunder 2?

Steve - Oh we’ve got Hydro Thunder 2 questions.

Yeah I’m getting right into the meat of the subject. Hydro Thunder 1; Yeah it’s big, yeah it’s great on the consoles. But let’s get to what’s new.

Steve - First thing we plan on doing is bringing back all the old boats. So all the old boats will be selectable but they’re upgraded versions of the boats. So you’ll recognize them but they’re really tricked out now. And then we’re going to bring in a whole series of other boats. So in total probably about 20 boats. That’s what we’re shooting for.

2. How many tracks can we expect to see in the sequel to Hydro Thunder?

Steve - How many track, well...?

Michael - As many as we have time to make. (laughs) At least as many as we had before.

Steve - At least as many as we had before. But with Hydro 1 we just ran out of time. We just kept on making tracks until we ran out of time.

Michael - We threw in the loop tracks in actually in the last two months or so.

Steve - We actually had a third loop track which is available in the home versions. And we finished that track about a week after we shipped. So it just barely didn’t make it. But I’ll tell you what we did was what Midway does is give every employee that works on an arcade game their own cabinet. So with our cabinets we have this special version of Hydro Thunder.

Aww what’s up with that?

Scott - One extra track.

See you could put that on E-bay.

Scott - Hey. That’s an idea.

Michael - That’s what I was thinking. 

3. Can we also expect to see many more secret boats and tracks?

Steve - For Hydro 1 we did not put enough secrets in. We know that. The players found the secrets in about a month. So we’re going to load Hydro 2 with secrets.

But they’re going to be a lot harder to get into or figure out?

Steve - Some of them will be hard, some of them will be obvious and some of them will be very difficult.

4. Will there be any repeat tracks from the first game?

Steve - Yeah. We’ve already completed... one of the tracks we’ve already completed was Lake Powell. And let’s tell you a little bit about it. What we’ve done is taken Lake Powell it’s the same exact track as it starts off it’ll look identical. But it soon quickly changes into a completely different track. The water levels change so it exposes different canyons and so forth. But the majority of the tracks are brand new.

Scott - You should mention Lost Island is now Found Island.

Steve - Go ahead.

Scott - One of the track ideas we have is taking Lost Island and making a version called Found Island. Where this lovely, lush, tropical, reclusive island has been turned into this overpopulated resort area. It’s filled with cruise ships, hotels and tourists. So the whole track will change based on that.

Found Island? I was going to say Marshall, Will and Holly are going to come by in a raft and you’re just going to throw them over a cliff or something. Hey maybe that’s how they get there. (laughs)? 

5. How much more powerful is the new Hydro Thunder 2 game engine as compared to the first? Steve - We’re pushing about 10 times the number of polygons. And it’s completely revamped. We started off kind of just expanding the engine a little bit. But we just tossed it out eventually and started from scratch. And it’s completely a new engine for Hydro 2.

Michael - We’ve also changed 3D hardware. The first one was 3DFX-based.

Steve - And we haven’t announced the new one.

But it’s a new one?

Michael - It’s different hardware.

Ten times?

Scott - Ten times. And that’s not even counting all the extra effects that’ll be in there.

I’m getting to that.

6. Was writing the sequel difficult considering you had a pretty good model?

Steve - No it wasn’t difficult. (laughs) A lot of feedback we got from your pages helped to affirm what we believe players liked in the game. We’re going to bring all that back. At it’s core it’s still Hydro Thunder. The game still feels the same. But it’s going to be that much better.

Scott - Developing was a lot easier in some ways because we could go right in with a drivable engine and start laying out tracks and see what’s going to be fun. Whereas on the first one we were halfway through the project before we could actually start really driving these tracks the way the engine would actually feel in the final version. And only then did we know if it was actually going to be fun.

Michael - In fact they had to redo lot’s of tracks that were too narrow or you know. So this time they don’t have to redo nearly as much work.

Steve - We must have built Lake Powell four times.

Scott - Three or four times.

Michael - Lost Island got redone several times.

Steve - Lost Island over and over again until we got it right.

Scott - Five or six times on Lost Island.

Steve - But we don’t plan on changing the speed of the boats or the field of view or the physics of the boats. Although we’re going to enhance the physics of the boats. We’re going to allow the players to do some things with the boats they weren’t able to do with Hydro 1.

Michael - And we’ll be able to address making the lower end, the easy boats, a little easier to drive. Many of us have watched people play in the arcade for hours since it’s shipped.

Steve - Or our moms. Our mom’s come in there. Mom comes in grabs the throttle and hits the walls. So maybe we can make a boat that almost drives itself. For mom.

A mom boat. Now that would be interesting.

7. Aside from the Mighty Hull attack will there be weapons in the sequel? [ I actually forgot to ask this question at the E3. I'm sorry to the fans that wanted a definitive yes or no. I'll ask Steve Ranck for the official answer and I'll post it as soon as i receive it.] ?

8. Will the weather play a role in the new Hydro Thunder?

Steve - It does. Basically when it rains in San Diego we get a lot more work done... Oh you mean the weather in the game? (laughs) We actually had plans to do a lot more weather for Hydro 1. We didn’t have time. All those ideas are going to be moved into Hydro 2.

Michael - We should have plenty of time.

Scott - We’ve already started playing around with weather effects.

9. Have the physics changed in the sequel (regarding ramps, jumps, collisions and rooster tails)?

Steve - Rooster tails? We’re going to give it another shot. We tried to do rooster tails with Hydro 1. But what happened was it threw up so much mist and spray behind the boats players behind the guy couldn’t see. But we’re thinking of putting them in as a special move. So you can do a special move and throw up a rooster tail and blind the guy temporarily behind you.

10. What videogames are your current favorites?

Scott - Counterstrike. Free mod for Half Life.

That’s the only thing you’re playing?

Scott - That’s all I’m playing. I play that every single night. I’m so hooked on that game.

Steve - I actually got him started on Counterstrike (laughs). So it started out Team Fortress then I kind of moved from Team Fortress to Counterstrike. And now I bounce between the Counterstrike on the PC and Code Veronica on the Dreamcast.

Michael - I play slightly different games than those guys. Although I do like Team Fortress a lot. The last favorite game was Rayman 2 on the Dreamcast.

11. Is working as a team easier this time around?

Scott - I think so.?Steve - We had some “rough waters,” sorry. We had some hard times on the first project with a couple of people. But now we have the core people together and it seems like fun to play because everybody knows what each other’s strengths are and weaknesses are.

12. What were your favorite memories over the course of Hydro Thunder 2’s development?

Steve - We’ll get back to you on that one.

Like for Hydro 1... the Fourth of July party. Where something must have happened.

Steve - Something happened, yeah.

Scott - Yeah.

Michael - Oh the Fourth of July. That was very...

Scott - Was that a fun memory?

Steve - You’re not going to get it out of us.

13. How do you feel about the console versions of Hydro Thunder?

Scott - Steve?

Steve - Mike?

Michael - Nah.

What is this. Like the Three Stooges? (laughs)

Mike - To be honest I was disappointed. I was disappointed by... in fact I have a funny story. We’re not showing Hydro Thunder here at the show. But I found one booth, the controller booth way over there that is showing Hydro Thunder.

Steve - Which version?

Michael - N64. And it’s painful because they didn’t change the wrappers and there’s so many people that can’t figure out how to get into the game and it’s really frustrating. They’re trying to play a two player game and it comes up with a selection and then more selections and more selections. That wasn’t what we thought about when we were designing the original game. And also there’s no extras. You go buy a racing game and there’s like all these other modes and stuff. I’m disappointed in the home games.

Like console exclusive things.

Steve - Yeah. It just doesn’t have a home feel. In my opinion the best version though is the Playstation version. I think they captured the excitement the feel of Hydro better than any other. From a graphics point of view I think Dreamcast is the best looking. But from game play feel, a Hydro feel point of view, Playstation won.

Michael - That two player mode in the Dreamcast was... awful.

We can leave it at that. We don’t want to hurt anybody's feelings.

14. Is there a release date on Hydro Thunder 2?

Steve - Yes but we’re not supposed to say anything now.

Well not the day date and the time. But seasonal, decade at least?

Steve - That actually is also in discussion right now.

Oh my goodness!

Steve - I know I know. It’s not going to be anytime soon.

All right. Good enough.

15. What about the other top secret project you are working on?

Steve - Which top secret project is that? You guys know anything about top secret projects?

Scott - Huh?

Michael - We have a top secret project? What?

Steve - Really honestly we’re legally bound. We can not say anything at this time about the other project. We do have two other projects in the works. They’re using the same engine. So you can kind of figure it’s maybe, it’s sorta, type of genre.

Some sort of racing thing?

Scott - We didn’t say that.

Steve - We didn’t say that. But it could be.

Michael - Infer what you will.

16. How do you feel your experience working on Hydro Thunder will help future projects?

Scott - I think it already has helped with me. Well the fact that we have an established team of people that work well together that have overlapping strengths and know where to help out the other people. I think that’s probably our biggest gain.

Michael - I’ll tell you the experience that the team has now. I mean, a lot of the people on the team were quite new to the industry and quite fresh. Like a few people were right out of college. Just the experience of going from start to end. You know the long hours and everybody knows. It’s a known quantity now what goes into making a arcade videogames. Everybody’s prepared for that... I learned so much. But Gary. Gary came in green and now the guy’s doing geometry.

Steve - We had this one artist he started off fresh. It’s his first job I believe. He didn’t even know what a pixel was. He was a sketch artist. And now you should see what he’s capable of doing, it’s amazing.

Scott - He’s building boats. He’s texturing them himself.

Michael - And entire tracks.

Scott - Very, very talented guy.

Steve - His name is Gary Carbonel.

17. Has Midway allowed the team more creative freedom and time for Hydro Thunder 2?

Steve - Yes. Absolutely. With Hydro 1 there was a point in time when they were telling us to take the throttle off the cabinet. They wanted foot pedals on the cabinet. And we just stuck to our guns we were saying it’s part of the whole boat feel. We wanted to really capture the feel of pushing on the throttle and feeling the motor on your back. What we ended up doing was building a mock cabinet in our pod and when management came and sat down and played it and felt the throttle we never heard anything from them again.

Michael - There was no other discussion.

Steve - They had some valid concerns. They felt that there’s a certain group of players who wouldn’t understand a throttle. Everyone knows how to use a gas pedal. The throttle actually worked out really well because small kids who can’t touch the gas pedal could scoot up on their seat and still reach the throttle and play.

18. What’s been motivating you to keep on making games without getting burned out?

Steve - Well what keeps me going is coming to E3 and seeing all the booth babes.

Scott - That’s a pretty good motivating factor.

Is that unanimous for the booth babes?

Michael - Kudos for the booth babes.

Scott - Oh, and the money. (laughs)

Michael - Oh, there is that. Yes, yes.

Steve - With Hydro 1 we had this vision of the game. We wanted to see it in arcades. We wanted to watch people playing it. And to see that happen is great.

Mike - Yeah it’s a blast to go watch people play it.

19. After Hydro Thunder 2 are there any projects lined up for Team Hydro or are you going to take some time off?

Steve - How about a year off to sail with management?

Scott - I'm sure management will be down with that. No problem.

Michael - They agree like that. No problem. 

Steve - Hydro 2 is our focus right now. I can’t see beyond that. Believe me there’s enough to think about already.

20. Do you have anything you’d like to add for the fans or about the sequel?

Scott - Nope, I’m still stunned about the booth babes.

Michael - Keep supporting your local arcade. Because the arcade industry is really hurting right now. And if people abandon it and they just buy stuff for home teams like us are going to have to be switched to make home games and that would be a real shame.

Steve - It would be bad to see the arcade go extinct. It would be a pretty sad thing. And it’s happening already. Fewer and fewer teams and fewer and fewer companies are making arcade games.

Michael - There’s already discussions at Midway for switching some teams. And it’s hard. The financial reality is arcades are a tough market. So keep going to those, keep putting quarters in.

Steve - Personally I love arcades. I walk in I want to feel the boat throttle. And playing the Nintendo version is completely different than playing the throttle version.

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