Lizard-An Interview With Brad Smith

Video games were part of my life since I was very young. I think it began with an Atari ST that my family got when I was 3 years old. Growing up I owned many different game consoles, but never an NES. Many of my friends had one, though, so I had no shortage of time spent playing Nintendo games.

I have a background in music, and I’ve always been interested in the music of games. For a good composer, the constraints of the hardware call upon inventive musical solutions, so chiptune has a lot of unique music to it. A few years ago, I found a program called Famitracker for making very authentic NES music. I’ve always had an interest in transcription, taking music from its original orchestration and trying it out on a totally different set of instruments. I used Famitracker to make a complete cover of the Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon.

From the positive response I got to the Dark Side of the Moon project, I got drawn into the internet community of people who make music for the NES.  I bought my first NES. I started doing research on the hardware, and I began maintaining an open source NES sound emulator called NSFPlay to put the new things I’d learned into practice.

I found my way to the NESDev online community. It is a very welcoming place with a rather positive culture, in my opinion. People sharing ideas about the Nintendo and helping each other make software for this old machine. I don’t think any other old game system is as well loved as the NES, and we have such a great wealth of technical information about it collected over many years. I made my contributions to sound emulation, but at the same time I learned everything else I could about the NES. I found it fascinating.

The NES came at a very interesting point in the history of game consoles. The previous generation was so limited by the machine that the games always felt small. As a game developer, the machine tells you too much about what your game can be. Pitfall doesn’t seem very expansive by today’s standards, but it was a truly monumental effort to build even that on an Atari 2600. To me, this is too much restraint. On the flip side, the generation after has games of soaring scope. I feel that on the SNES, the hardware has a much weaker impact on the game’s design. This is no longer interesting to me; if I’m going to go through the challenge and effort involved in working with these older consoles, I want to have to deal with the constraints of the system more visibly. The NES sits right in the middle, where it’s still awkward and kind of a nightmare to work with, but just powerful enough to be extremely versatile and capable. It’s a machine that really puts its mark on the games you make with it, but still gives you enough room to try a lot of interesting ideas.

The sound hardware itself is rather unique, as well. A lot of contemporary systems had audio that could produce just a couple of square waves for tones, and noise for percussion. This includes the ubiquitous AY-3-8910 (ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, MSX, Amstrad CPC) and similar chips like the one used by the Sega Master System. The NES is similar in scale, but a few tweaks give it a very distinctive sound. First, it has two square wave channels, but the width of the square pulse is variable, giving 3 different tone qualities. This does a lot for the variety of sound. Secondly, instead of a third square wave, it has a dull sounding triangle, very well suited for bass. The triangle has no volume control, and this forces the rest of the music to be balanced around it. The unique tone of the triangle wave feels like the heart and soul of the NES sound to me; it’s difficult to work with, but solving that problem is what brings out the spirit of NES music. The third component of NES audio is the noise channel. It is not particularly unique, but well suited for percussion and sound effects. Lastly it has a very limited sample playback device. A lot of games don’t even use samples,because they take up too much precious space in ROM. None of the Mega Man games used samples, for example. Many games use samples for drum sounds (e.g. the bongos in Super Mario 3), but a few games made extreme use of it like in the loud basslines of Journey to Silius.

So, that’s my long answer to why I want to work with the NES. Yes, part of it is nostalgia, but I am nostalgic for many other systems too. There is really something special about the NES itself. It has some strange goldilocks balance of constraint that lends a wonderful character to its games.

WTN:  I have noticed that with each passing year, people start to become more and more interested in the older consoles. Did this have any impact on your decision to develop for the NES?

BS: I don’t have a very good gauge for how popular retro consoles might be, because I’ve always played old games as much as I do new ones. I have definitely noticed emulation and preservation of old games getting better and better over the years, and especially the last several years as Nintendo and other companies have embraced emulation commercially. I’m sure that the increased interest has improved the community, and that must be part of the motivation to make Lizard, but in an indirect way. It comes out in individual interactions, talking with people about games, the encouragement is on a more personal level.

WTN:  What can this community of gamers expect from Lizard?

BS: Lizard is an open world platforming adventure. The emphasis is on exploration and experimentation, making your way around and seeing what you can do. There are no guns or swords, as I am trying to keep the emphasis off of that kind of action, instead focusing on how to move safely around dangerous obstacles, and finding effective ways to get to new places. There are six different lizards to find and wear, each with a different ability. For example: the Lizard of Bounce can make long jumps with a suitable platform to bounce from, and the Lizard of Stone can petrify itself to hide from danger. Choosing the right lizard can make a big difference, but at the same time, I want the player to have the choice to try a different route, or even just do it the hard way. The world is connected and nonlinear, letting you pick your own path.

BS: I think there is a good variety of difficulty available in games today. Some games have annoying forced tutorials, and many games seem built to reward persistence more than skill, but if you’re looking for a good challenge there are recent games that will scratch that itch, e.g. Dark Souls, XCOM, Volgarr the Viking.