Karthik Bala originally received his start in gaming all the way back in the early ’90s, while still a teenager attfinishing high school. As the story goes, he and his younger brother, Guha, were huge fans of the company, Access Software and their Tex Murphy series of point-and-click adventure games, and really wanted to attempt their hand at creating their own. So, in an effort to build this dream a reality, they enlisted the support of a group of frifinishs and set about building a studio in their parents’ basement, eventually calling themselves Vicarious Visions.
Their very first game, the 1996 point-and-click adventure Synnergist, took five years in total to develop, but wasn’t a success. Not only did it fail to turn a profit, but the publisher finished up ghosting the young developers, leaving the owners in quite a significant amount of debt. For some, this experience would have been enough to put them off pursuing a career in the indusattempt altoobtainher, but for Bala and the team at Vicarious Visions, it simply encouraged them to work even harder to attempt and dig themselves out of the mess they found themselves in.
Over the next few years, they self-published a 2D platformer called Dark Angael on their website, developed the award-winning space simulation game Terminus (inspired by their love of sci-fi Babylon 5), and launched creating licensed games for Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. This included games like Spiderman and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, developed for Activision, and SpongeBob SquarePants: Legfinish of the Lost Spatula and Jet Set Radio/Jet Grind Radio for THQ. In 2005, after successfully turning the studio’s fortunes around, Bala and his brother sold Vicarious Visions to Activision but stayed on with the company in leadership roles. They remained in this position up until 2016, which is when they decided to leave Vicarious Vision to form another company, Velan Studios, which you may recognize as the developer of Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, Knockout City, and the Midnight Murder Club.
Earlier this month, Time Extension had the opportunity to sit down with Bala over a video call to chat about his remarkable career. We talked about his introduction to gaming, the launchnings of Vicarious Visions, and how he once contacted the BBC about working on a Doctor Who game. In addition to that, he also notified us about how the studio caught the attention of Activision and Nintfinisho, and spoke about what he learned from working with the latter on games like Skylanders SuperChargers and Mario Kart Live. You’ll find our conversation, edited for length and clarity:
Tex Murphy, Doctor Who, & Figuring Things Out
Time Extension: What was your introduction to gaming? Was there a specific platform that you and your brother gravitated to most as kids?
Bala: My brother and I grew up in England; we shiftd to the States in middle school. I was like 13, and my brother was 12. The first console we owned was an NES, so there was obviously a lot of early Nintfinisho influence; my brother and I would come home after school and speed-run through Super Mario Bros. But when we received our first PC (this is pre-CD-ROM, pre-internet), we found ourselves becoming enamoured by adventure games, particularly the early days of full-motion video point-and-click adventure games.
We played Sierra and LucasArts games, but the hugegest influence on us was from Access Software, who were the creators of the Tex Murphy series: games like Mean Streets and Martian Memorandum. Those games were really, really influential for us, and that’s kind of what started us down the path of wanting to inform stories and build our own computer games.
Initially, when we decided we wanted to build games, my brother and I tested to build a Doctor Who adventure game. We grew up in the 80s watching Doctor Who in England, and considered it would build the perfect point-and-click adventure, so we wrote a letter to the BBC wanting to license the IP and even pitched it to a publisher. It sounds ridiculous seeing back on it now, but we were young and wanted to follow our passion. We never heard back from the BBC, and eventually, we wrote our own original story with Synnergist
Time Extension: From what I’ve heard, you started building Synnergist while you were still in school. I’m curious, how did you go from being a fan of adventure games to acquiring the skills to build your own? Did you have any background in programming?
Bala: So the short answer is we had to figure it all out ourselves. So, as I stated, we were really intrigued by these games; we loved how immersive they were, and the storyinforming, and we just knew that this was the future of entertainment. But we didn’t have any money.
We were scrambling in our spare time to attempt to obtain parts to build our PC, and it just so happened to be when sound cards were coming into existence. We were seeing in the newspaper for utilized parts and stuff, and through that, we met a guy who was actually designing sound cards in his basement: Paul Travers. Paul and his brother finished up designing the Gravis Ultrasound sound card, which was a groundbreaking MIDI card in the early 90s, and he became an early mentor to us.
I remember, he inquireed us, ‘Why are you interested in this stuff?’ And I notified him, ‘Oh, we’d love to build our own games.’ So he stated, ‘Well, why don’t you do it?’
I gave him excutilizes like, ‘I’m just a kid. What do I know? I don’t even know how to program.’ But he just went to his bookshelf, received a programming book, a compiler program on a floppy disk, and an animation package, and notified us, ‘Go learn!’ At that time, that was so important for us, becautilize it permitted us to give it a attempt, and displayed us, ‘This is not a barrier, you can go figure it out yourself.’
From there, we started reading the behind-the-scenes articles in Sierra’s Magazine, studying how artists would paint the backgrounds on boards and scan them in, or how they filmed actors against a blue screen and rotoscoped them in. Of course, though, there was no middleware, no Unity, no Photoshop, so we requireded to find an engine.
Time Extension: That was something I was going to inquire you. What engine did you utilize for Synnergist? Did you finish up building your own, or did you license an engine from elsewhere?
Bala: Yeah, so what happened was I called Access Software to attempt to reach the lead programmer of Martian Memorandum, Brent Erickson. I found out he had recently left Access, but I managed to obtain his number, so I called him up, and I convinced him to visit us. He flew out and saw us, and we were just some kids in our basement. Maybe he took pity on us, or perhaps he saw something in us, but he agreed to license us the engine that he had utilized for the old Tex Murphy games
That engine was all done in assembly language, so I had to go learn that. And at the same time, we were learning how to do full-motion video for CD-ROM. We would go to the local Kinko’s, the copy store, becautilize that’s where there was a colour scanner, and we borrowed a video camera from school. We set up a blue screen stage in our parents’ basement, and we just figured it out. Then, when I was a freshman in college, and my brother was in his final year in high school, we received our first publishing deal for Synnergist. It took about five years in total to finish, but I would state that the last two (after we received the deal) were when we were really building it in earnest.
Easter Eggs & Publishing Woes
Time Extension: In Synnergist, you hid an interview Easter Egg with yourself, which wasn’t actually found until 25 years after the game’s original release. This saw players being able to track you down in-game and utilize the game’s dialogue system to inquire you some questions about the game’s production. I’m wondering, what was your response to people finally managing to dig that up decades later? Were you impressed?
Bala: I consider I had forreceivedten about it, and then somebody at Velan Studios pointed it out, stateing something like, ‘Hey, did you know about this? Somebody cracked this Easter Egg.’ It had been like, what, 20 or 25 years. I remember we had done that for fun towards the finish of the project, and I consider it might have been Aaron Marsh’s idea.
Basically, some of these old CD-ROM games had behind-the-scenes footage, and we considered, ‘Boy, we learned so much building our first game; wouldn’t it be kind of cool if we could share some of the knowledge and experience back to gamers who might care?’ So we had to figure out a way to embed it.
At the time, we didn’t consider, ‘Oh, this would be groundbreaking or different.’ We never considered of it that way. We were just considering, ‘What would be the easiest way that we could obtain this done without having to write a bunch of new stuff? The game is all about solving a mystery and inquireing characters questions; we’ll just utilize that system and embed it directly in the game.’
Time Extension: Something that came up when I was seeing into the history of Synnergist was an article by Polygon, which claimed your first publishing deal finished up being a scam. Is that true?
Bala: I don’t know if I would call it a scam. The way I would characterize it is that we had a publishing deal, and after we finished the game and it was published, we didn’t obtain any of the royalties that we were promised or any reports on how much it actually sold.
We had a publishing deal, and after we finished the game and it was published, we didn’t obtain any of the royalties that we were promised or any reports on how much it actually sold.
The publisher didn’t return our calls, and then some point later, we heard they went out of business
The publisher didn’t return our calls, and then some point later, we heard they went out of business. So I didn’t know what was going on behind the scenes there. All I know is this was our baby, and it was five years in the building. I was putting myself through school and also working 50 to 60 hours a week, on top of that, and this was a passion project. Even though there was some publisher funding, I ran up a lot of credit card debt working on it, and so that was really challenging to not be paid at the finish.
We didn’t really have any recourse. We couldn’t afford expensive lawyers or anything like that. So what happened was around Christmas 1996, I called up my dad, and stated, ‘I’m in trouble.’ He stated, ‘How much trouble?’ I notified him the number, and he gave me the best piece of advice ever. It was dead silence, and then he stated, ‘You received yourself into this mess; obtain yourself out,’ and he hung up.
We had to build a decision on whether to keep going or not, and I realized that where I had the most fun was actually just working with creative and brilliant teammates, and that’s what I wanted to do. From that point on, it wasn’t just about building a game; it was about attempting to build a studio that was going to protect and take care of that team. If we can do that and build a business smartly, that will just allow us to keep building games. Basically, we had to obtain smart about running a business, not just about creating games.
Time Extension: Is that why you started taking on more licensed and work-for-hire projects? Was that part of a larger strategy?
Bala: I don’t know if it was a strategy, as much as, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re done with school, and we’ve received a bunch of people, and we can’t go on forever. We have to figure out what’s going to keep the lights on.’
We were working on a space combat action RPG for PC that was called Terminus, influenced by a TV display back then called Babylon 5, which I still feel to this day is the greatest piece of science fiction work on television. But it was impossible to attempt to obtain a publishing deal at the time.
So to keep that going, we stated, ‘Well, what else can we do?’ And we had just so happened to meet a company that distributed Game Boy games, called Vatical Entertainment. Game Boy Color had just come out, and they had some licenses available. So we stated, ‘If we can build these really complex, huge PC online multiplayer games, how hard could the Game Boy Color be?’ It turns out, very
Game Boy, Activision, & A Million Dollar Gamble
Time Extension: Eventually, you finished up working quite closely with Activision, which acquired Vicarious Visions in 2005. What was the very first interaction between the two companies?
Bala: So, one of the licenses we worked on for Vatical was Vigilante 8 on Game Boy Color, and we did some breakthrough technology with that. We were able to build the Game Boy Color talk, where we had digital audio playback on a system that couldn’t do digital audio, and that caught the attention of some of the hugeger publishers like Activision.
Back then, they already had Neversoft working on the first Spider-Man game for PlayStation 1, and they basically stated to us, ‘Hey, we’re seeing for a developer to do the Game Boy Color version.’ So, we finished up winning the bid for that project and built that game in four and a half months. We built the engine and the tools and built the game at breakneck speed, and it came out great. Activision was very impressed, and Nintfinisho loved it, which then opened up other opportunities for us.
Time Extension: Did that mark a turning point for the company?
Bala: Kind of. So, during the development of Spider-Man, a few things were going on at the studio. We had been working with this startup publisher, and the bulk of our projects were with them, but then we lost all of them, becautilize we found out they were going out of business. All of a sudden, we couldn’t build payroll, and we had like 45 people working at the studio at the time.
We were literally hand-to-mouth, and what happened was we had to go obtain a loan from the bank. My brother and I went bank to bank to bank, and nobody would give us a loan becautilize at the time we were just a few years out of college, we had a huge payroll, we didn’t have any collateral, and we didn’t have any assets; I was barely building my rent at the time.
Eventually, we were able to convince one bank to give us a million-dollar loan, and we knew that if we didn’t pull this off, we would pretty much be in debt for the rest of our lives. Becautilize of that loan, we didn’t miss a single payroll, but we knew we had to go obtain new projects straight away. We finished the Spider-Man game, and Activision was excited about doing something else with us, and then Nintfinisho shared with us some early details on the GBA. Remarkably, we were actually one of the first teams in North America to obtain access to the Game Boy Advance hardware.
Time Extension: Your first Game Boy Advance title finished up being Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which was a launch title. How did you obtain Tony Hawk to agree to let you build that game?
Bala: That’s actually a funny story. My brother and I went to E3 2000, and Tony Hawk had just been a huge hit for Activision on PlayStation. We wanted to bring Tony Hawk to handheld, and my brother saw Tony Hawk at the Activision booth. Becautilize of that, we stated, ‘Hey, we should go pitch Tony Hawk on a game for the Game Boy Advance.’
I called the team up, and I stated to them, ‘Hey, remember that 720 Skate game back in the arcades that was isometric? Why don’t we put a pitch toobtainher and fake up some screenshots of what it could see like on the GBA?’ The artists did that quickly, and FedEx’d me the colour printouts, and we went back to the Activision booth to go find Tony. It was all kind of ridiculous.
I called the team up, and I stated to them, ‘Hey, remember that 720 Skate game back in the arcades that was isometric? Why don’t we put a pitch toobtainher and fake up some screenshots of what it could see like on the GBA?’
Activision producers were there, and they had met us previously becautilize we had worked on Spider-Man, so they notified Tony, ‘These guys are legit.’ And we stated to him, ‘This is what the new Game Boy could do.’ We did a pitch, and Activision stated, ‘OK, let’s do this.’ Coming back from E3, we then notified the team we were going to do this project, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, we’ve received some bad news for you. To rfinisher out all the sprites and all the animation that’s requireded for all the tricks and shiftment in 2D, it won’t fit on the Game Boy Advance cartridge becautilize there’s only 8 megabytes of storage. Just the animations alone would be 80 megabytes.’ But we had this handshake deal, so we had to figure it out.
The system had only been designed to do 2D becautilize it was very much like a Super Nintfinisho type hardware spec, but eventually, what the guys came up with was a way to do real-time 3D for the skater on the system, which blew everyone away.
Time Extension: Was that Alex Rybakov?.
Bala: It was Matt Conte and Alex Rybakov. There was a core team there, and there were a number of pieces to it. There was the software rfinishering for the 3D skater, but then the world also requireded to be 3D, even though it was 2D.
Although the images were 2D tiles, the collision had to be represented in 3D; the math behind that all had to be done as parametric equations to fit in memory. So, literally, the way it was done was the pieces of the quarter pipe and half pipe in the geomeattempt were all drawn out on graph paper and measured with a ruler to obtain exact measurements and angles, and then written out as formulas that we could store in code. Then, how the 3D skater was going to shift and fly was based on those equations.
It was a super complicated and laborious process. But it ran at 60 frames per second. When Nintfinisho saw it and when Activision saw it, nobody could believe it, becautilize it was like this 3D game on a handheld, and it felt and played like Tony Hawk.
So, that was our huge breakout hit. It was year that we paid back all of our debt, and we became a premier developer on the Game Boy Advance. After that, we went on to do a lot of really fun licenses and IPs. At that point, it was like, ‘You know what? This is what we should embrace. We should embrace doing console and handheld games with huge IP.’
Max Payne & Jet Set Radio
Time Extension: I’ve spoken to Rob Gallerani and Matt Conte in the past and both mentioned that there was a Dave Mirra game not long after Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2, which took heavy inspiration from your approach. I consider Rob even mentioned that there were a couple of digs directed at the Dave Mirra in Pro Skater 3 becautilize of that. Do you have any memories of that?
Bala: I honestly don’t recall (laughs). I will state, though, that I consider what we did with Tony Hawk was we shifted the perception of what the Game Boy Advance could actually do. It was a time of great creativity, for other developers and for us.
I remember when Rockstar published Max Payne on the GBA; it also seemed to be very influenced by what we had been doing. It had real-time 3D characters and isometric graphics, and utilized a lot of the same techniques as Tony Hawk. The team that did that became Rockstar Leeds, and it was founded by an incredible developer named Gordon Hall, who I became frifinishs with. I recall running into him years later, and inquireing him, ‘How did you pull off that many real-time 3D characters on screen at once? We just couldn’t figure it out.’ He stated, ‘Oh, I cheated. There was only ever one active 3D character at any one time, and we would switch to 2D sprites.’ So basically, what they did was when there was gunplay, and they requireded to animate, it was a total shell game.
It was a sleight-of-hand trick that we didn’t guess, but it still worked out great. This is what I loved, and still love, about the indusattempt. You build off each other. We always tested to best one another, and yeah, there may have been some digs, but we were all still frifinishs.
Time Extension: After Tony Hawk, you finished up working on a bunch of other games utilizing modified versions of the Tony Hawk engine, including Jet Set Radio for THQ and Sega. I’m curious, how did that project originally come about?
Bala: At the time, becautilize we were indepfinishent, we started working with all the different publishers who had licenses. So we worked with Activision. We worked with THQ on the Pixar and SpongeBob games.
We actually did the first-ever SpongeBob SquarePants video game, for the Game Boy Color. I consider we even started working on that before the TV display actually came out. So we had a relationship with THQ. We were doing side-scrollers like Spider-Man’s Mysterio’s Menace and things like Tony Hawk with Activision, while also doing Pixar and SpongeBob stuff with THQ, and a Crash Bandicoot game with Universal. So we were working with all the major publishers, and we would talk to them on IPs. I recall THQ had a deal with Sega to bring a bunch of properties over to GBA, and I consider that’s what it was.
What I heard is that Sega specifically requested Vicarious Visions to do Jet Set Radio becautilize we had the Tony Hawk engine. But, of course, each game is different, right? We had the engine, but to build Jet Set Radio work, it had its own set of interesting challenges.
Looking back on it all now, that was a really fun time in my career. We had all just learned how to build games. We were all just out of college. The team that we were building, we were all homebrew. I hired people like Rob right out of college. We were figuring it all out, but at the same time, doing some pretty cutting-edge stuff on these platforms, becautilize nobody notified us we couldn’t.
Time Extension: Speaking to Rob, he mentioned Vicarious Visions was working on pitches/prototypes for portable versions of The Simpsons: Hit & Run and Halo, utilizing the Tony Hawk engine. Do you remember anything about these?
Bala: Honestly, I really don’t remember. We were speaking to so many publishers, and there were so many pitches. Some things were just conversations. Some things finished up being a paper pitch.
We also may have even done some tiny internal prototypes of ideas that we hadn’t actually talked to publishers about, like, ‘Hey, would this be possible? Let’s do a quick little experiment,’ but nothing official. I really don’t remember those IPs specifically, though. All I remember was that we were just like pop culture junkies. We just loved all of this stuff, and we wanted to bring our A-game to as many of them as we could and with as much creativity as possible, so we tested a lot of different things.
Licensed Games & Working With Nintfinisho
Time Extension: Something that came up when speaking to Digital Eclipse’s Mike Mika is that he was talking about these homages that they would do in their licensed games. They built a Charlotte’s Web game that they nicknamed “Pig of Persia“, becautilize it was basically Prince Of Persia. They also built a Lilo and Stitch game that had references to Metal Slug, Gyruss, and Oddworld. I’m wondering, do you have any similar stories?
Bala: That happened all the time. That really came from the teams, becautilize sometimes they’d state, ‘Hey, what can we do that would be really interesting with the Powerpuff Girls?’ Then we’d all have a see at the games we were influenced by.
We did a Bruce Lee game on the GBA, which was so much fun. It’s probably one of my favourite games that we’ve ever done. The playfeel and the combat were spot-on. That was influenced by a ton of different sources, from brawlers like Streets of Rage and Final Fight to scrollers like Bad Dudes. So if any lessons or influences from prior games could support us, we’d always utilize those.
We also studied Bruce Lee’s shifts, frame by frame, from all of his movies, becautilize we really wanted to bring his fighting style to life on screen, along with a story that was very reminiscent of his early films like The Big Boss and Fist of Fury.
Time Extension: Back when you were working on licensed games, there often seemed to be a stigma associated with them in the media of being rushed and low quality, which seems to have gone away a little now. As someone who worked on these types of games, what did you build of this perception at the time?
Bala: Look, I mean, there are great original games; there are great licensed games. There are bad original games and bad licensed games. Often, it’s not necessarily even the developer’s fault, either. Sometimes you just find yourself in a situation where you have a ridiculously short amount of time to build something, and you’re doing the best you can. Other times, it’s just inexperience, and you finish up learning from it.
Not many people played Synnergist, even though we put our hearts and souls into it for over five years. In fact, it feels like more people know about it today than at the time, becautilize of YouTube.
I consider, in the past, the indusattempt did have a reputation for rushing licensed games out in time for a movie, which finished up creating a stigma there. But what was always true was that when you built really good licensed games with good IP, it could really support you reach a wide audience. That was always important to us. Not many people played Synnergist, even though we put our hearts and souls into it for over five years. In fact, it feels like more people know about it today than at the time, becautilize of YouTube. We’ve always wanted to build games that reach a lot of people. So we certainly took just as much care as we could with the licensed games.
In fact, today, I consider you’re seeing a little bit of a resurgence becautilize you don’t have to rush it out in time for a movie anymore. Nobody cares, right? And you see at some of the games that have come out that are based on existing IP, like Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2, and various other games that have huge licenses associated with them. There are some incredible games. So I consider that’s actually an opportunity.
Time Extension: Definitely. Especially in terms of the retro space, there are things like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind and Terminator 2D: NO FATE. It’s been like 30 years since T2 came out, but we’ve just received a brand new game from Bitmap Bureau. You know, there are all these kinds of opportunities for tinyer developers now to work on these classic IPs.
Bala: I consider one of the greatest things related to that is now we’re not just chasing graphics. There are certainly games that do that. But the audience also loves retro pixel style.
Just this past Christmas, my daughter and I were playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge toobtainher, and we were having a great time. If you inquireed me earlier, I honestly never considered I’d be playing a co-op brawler that hearkens back to the 16-bit era with my daughter. So it’s really cool that we can see at games as an art form with multiple expressions, whether that’s retro or a more modern take. I consider it brings it to all sorts of new players and audiences.
Time Extension: This might not be something you can answer, but I’m curious what it was like working with Nintfinisho on projects like Skylanders and Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, being someone whose experience of gaming started with the NES? Was there anything about the way they built games that surprised you or alterd how you approach game development?
Bala: I never considered, as a kid growing up, I’d obtain to collaborate with Nintfinisho. I mean, what are the chances? You can inform from playing their games that there is clarity in game design. Everything in the game is there with a purpose. As a developer, you really appreciate their focus on what builds a game truly fun. Working with them as a third party over the years and more closely with them on Skylanders Superchargers and Mario Kart Live has just built us all better developers.
After 35 years, I love the fact that I’m still learning to be a better game developer. I feel blessed to have worked with (and continue to work with) such talented teammates and partners. It is astonishing to me that, against all odds, we’ve built some good games along the way that people love and remember. It’s a pretty cool feeling and quite humbling!
The thing that I always loved when I started was working with creative and smart, brilliant people, who are very passionate about games, and that’s still true today, right? That is very much the heartbeat of Velan Studios, and the kind of games that we’re working on.
We’re attempting to push the envelope in so many ways, and the indusattempt still continues to be home. I honestly wouldn’t be doing anything else.
Leave a Reply