Yug: So you’ve been here 13 years

Kevin: Pretty much to the day.

Yug: Wow. Well I’d love for you to tell me from your point of view a bit of the history of the studio here, as it has such a pedigree in the Australian industry.

Kevin: Well the studio is 28 years old, and there’s no one here that was here 28 years ago – although we still run into a few of them around the place.

Yug: Really?

Kevin: Yeah, I mean, there was only a few of them back then. It was founded by Fred Milgrom back in 1980 originally as Beam Software, and Melbourne house was the publisher name. I can’t remember exactly how the names held together up until the 90’s, but the Hobbit was where it really all started. They made it in 1981 and it sold numbers that you’d be happy with today.

Yug: Actually, there’s an event on at ACMI, gives some great history on the origins of the Hobbit.

Kevin: Well I spent 4 or 5 years working with Phil Mitchell who left in around 99, and he was an original programmer on the Hobbit.

Yug: So there was the Hobbit ...

Kevin: Way of the Exploding Fist, and hundreds of games over the 80’s and early 90’s, pretty much until PC gaming really kicked off. Around about the time the Playstation came in the team started getting larger and you had to put more resources into making a game. That meant you weren’t pumping out a game every few months. In the early days, the programmers did design. Originally there were no designers. Then you realise that someone with specific talent in those areas was needed (no offence to those programmers. Some of them had great artistic talent). About the time that I came on board, the teams were starting to get larger, and by then the PlayStation 2 teams were very big.




Yug: I guess these days you have everyone that has such specialties.

Kevin: These days the number of designers on your team will be higher than the number of people in your entire team was back then. You’ll have more tools programmers on your team. A lot of people do have the ability to jump between different areas. It’s great now being a part of Krome because if you’re an animator and you want to get into a different area and you have skill and talent in that area, you’ve got the ability to move around.

Yug: So, you came on board around the time of the Playstation?

Kevin: I started in around about 95, around the Playstation 1. I was actually here doing a PC title for Microsoft – NBA Full Court Press – probably the first Microsoft first party title done in Australia.

Yug: Ok, and then I suppose things moved onto the Playstation 2?

Kevin: Well the Playstation 1 was pretty groundbreaking, and really changed everything.

Yug: How so, what changed?

Kevin: It could do more than the PC’s could at the time. These days you look at your PS3 and Xbox 360 AND an expensive PC and they all look as good as each other. But back then 3dFX were just coming into being and that was the first time you had 3d acceleration on PC’s, mass market. Meanwhile, the Playstation had already been doing this at that point, and it was already in everyone’s home, 5 times the population of Australia sort of figures.

* laughs *

Yug: So did you work directly on any Playstation titles?

Kevin: I helped out on a couple, but I mainly worked on PC titles up until I went onto Playstation 2 titles and Dreamcast stuff.

Yug: Dreamcast stuff?




Kevin: LeMans 24 hour was racing game of the year, a fantastic game. I think we did a PS2 version, or someone else may have done it, because back in those days – and we still do it now – we give out different versions of games to different studios.

Yug: I don’t get any sort of competitive vibe between the companies here.

Kevin: It’s a friendly competitive vibe.

Yug: LeMans, was that the one where you could play it for 24 hours straight?

Kevin: Oh yes. With QA we actually ran a 24 hour test, they ran a 3 shift – 8 hours each – where literally one guy plays it for 8 hours, his shift ends then he hands the controller to the next guy that walks in and he plays it for 8 hours, and then at 3 in the morning someone else comes in.

Yug: So no-one tested it for 24 hours solid?

Kevin: Not one person! You can’t ask someone to work that long! Gamers played it for 24 hours, there were 24 hour parties and all sorts of stuff, but from a QA point of view, we did it in shifts.

Yug: Pretty crazy! So when did the company change hands from being Melbourne House?

Kevin: It change hands to Infogrames in 99. We’d just shipped DethKarz on the PC and GP500. We shipped a little bit after for Microprose.

Yug: Now, you were here at the time, was there much disruption? What happens when a company changes hands?

Kevin: Well back then it was interesting because the company actually had a few different branches in it. There was a section called ‘Smarty Pants’ dealing with kids educational games, there was the ‘Hot Games’ website, and other research work going on. So when Infogrames purchased it, they took the game development side, and Fred – who had been around since the start – he took the other parts and went on and did other stuff with those. Meanwhile, we became Infogrames Melbourne House.

Yug: Which eventually turned into Atari.

Kevin: Infogrames around that time were buying Hasbro and one of the things that happened with that is that they got the Atari name, and they could start using it – especially in North America, because it’s well known there.




Yug: Were there any other developers that were renamed to Atari?

Kevin: There were other companies bought around that time. There was Gremlin, who became ‘Infogrames Sheffield’, but I don’t think any other companies changed their name.

Yug: What was the last title that was developed when it was ‘Atari Melbourne House’. I would have thought maybe Transformers?

Kevin: Well, we did Test Drive Unlimited on the PSP and PS2, which despite what people think, wasn’t actually a port. We did those and more or less finished them when we got bought, so they were done as Atari but finished after the handover. Very similar to what happened with GP500 when we got bought by Infogrames. We were working for a publisher, Microprose, at the time.

Yug: So I suppose that brings us up to Krome Melbourne ... Is it Krome Melbourne House?

Kevin: We’re just Krome Studios Melbourne.

Yug: Again, was there much of a shuffle when it changed to Krome Studios?

Kevin: There was a little bit. It’s always hard to change what you’re doing. Melbourne House had been independent for almost 20 years, got bought by Infogrames, became part of a big multinational company but we were kind of this little developer on the edge, sort of ignored, which was to our benefit a lot of the time. But when Krome came in, we had to get ourselves back into a fast-moving environment. It’s much crazier, especially for those who have been around a long time, and there’s a lot of us here, which really says something.

Yug: It really does. Over 10 years in the same company, you don’t hear about much in other developers, they have massive turnovers.

Kevin: Well there are people here who have been here for 17 or 18 years, but obviously we’ve lost people in that time as well.

Yug: What’s the reason that there are so many people here that have stayed here for so long.

Kevin: There probably is a reason, but I think individually you have different reasons. People have left over the years to go to another job, some another country, some another project. We made racing games for a long time so we lost people who didn’t want to work on racing games any more. We didn’t have the ability then to say ‘oh here you go, we’ll just stick you onto this other project’. We’ve now had people from Brisbane and Adelaide move to Melbourne and vice versa. One thing you can say though is that people wouldn’t stay here if they didn’t like the other people they work with.

Yug: So, you’ve been here 13 years, are you going to stick around?

Kevin: Yeah, obviously the takeover from Krome was a bumpy ride. We had to learn a bunch of new things. A lot of people had to get to know that there are 300 other people you’re working with but you don’t know them. You try to do stuff with email but it’s not the same. Of course, after that bumpy ride, Brisbane – Adelaide – Melbourne, we are all working together, but at the same time we all have our own things we’re working on.

Yug: Have you met many of the other Krome Staff in other studios?

Kevin: I think percentage wise, no. I couldn’t say we’ve met a lot. But that being said you’ve got a company of 200 people in one building, My guess is that not everyone in Krome Brisbane knows everyone there either. The cool thing is people come here or go there and a lot of the time you bump into people you used to work with 10 years ago. It’s kind of neat, and that helped a lot in the transition because there were familiar faces.

Yug: Cool, thank you very much for your time.