Interview With The Father of DirectX, Alex St. John
Alex St. John was the "Gaming Evangelist" at Microsoft when I started my career in the game development biz. He threw me a really awesome birthday party once, though he had no clue he was doing it at the time. He was the guy who really pushed through the DirectX initiative back in the day. And he's now involved in indie games, as the founder of Wild Tangent.

He's been interviewed at Shacknews, principally concerning his role in creating DirectX. This was awesome reading for me, as I was there in this era, on the periphery at least, viewing it from the angle to a game developer trying to figure out Microsoft's strategy (and being immediately suspicious, balking at the idea that a bigger, bulkier operating system could actually make games run BETTER). He also talks a lot about the politics at Microsoft, how he kept almost getting fired, and a little bit about Windows Vista and Gaming (which he isn't too happy about).

We were working with Rendermorphics when Microsoft (under Alex St. John's direction) bought them out. We were really irritated with them because we liked their API but needed some changes (or access to their code to make the changes), and they suddenly became very unresponsive. They were still friendly with us, and really were nice guys, but they suddenly wouldn't commit to anything. We were starting to look at alternative APIs when the announcement came out that they'd been bought, and that their new, improved API would be integrated into Microsoft's DirectX 2 for-friggin-free, and it all became clear.

And it took Microsoft another three years to fix the problem we'd been complaining to Rendermorphics about. DirectX 6 or 7, I think. That stupid execute buffer. It made perfect sense for things like 3D fighting games, or anywhere else where the polygon list was relatively static. But for a game like Warhawk (or any First Person Shooter), it was horrible. When Microsoft told us at a GDC that they were going to kill it dead, they acted like they were leading the charge to get rid of it, although they'd been ignoring the shouts of angry game developers for MONTHS.

Ah, the memories.

Originally, I was hired to be a PC guy at SingleTrac, so I was much more involved in what was going on for PC ports of our games. But very quickly I was pushed on to full Playstation development. I was still a PC game fan at heart, though, so I kinda forced myself into the periphery of things. So some of my coworkers got to go to the events mentioned in the interview, and I just got to hear about them later. My wife says she's very happy I missed the one with the eight-foot-tall vagina. Ah, the game industry in the mid-90's! It was a crazy time.

Alex says in the interview, "I actually attribute my reasons for being successful there to listening carefully to the game developers. My strategy was very simple--I go to them and ask, "What kind of crack would you get addicted to?" They'd tell me, and I'd go back to Microsoft and say, "If we make this crack, those developers will buy it." Very simple. DirectX was essentially the crack they asked me to make. That's the way you hook somebody--ask them what they'll pay money for, then go make it."

That's pretty much exactly what they did, and they made no secret about it. After years of being given total crap to work with on Windows, and told "Here it is, you'll use it and you'll like it!", this was a stunning new approach by Microsoft. Except we didn't even have to pay for it. The clincher for DirectX - more than anything else - was hardware / driver independence. Game developers for years had had to struggle with supporting all kinds of different hardware. The AdLib sound card versus the Covox versus the Gravis Ultrasound versus Sound Blaster versus Sound Blaster Pro versus the really nice MIDI sound cards. And all the different joysticks. And EGA versus VGA vs SVGA and the whole "Mode X" thing. And it wasn't just the game developers. If you load up DOSBox and try out some of the games from around 1990 to 1995, you will find yourself immediately faced with baffling configuration screens asking for IRQs, Ports, and so forth for every single game.

The big thing that DirectX offered was that independence. No more having to create your own configuration screen. No more confused tech support calls by customers trying to figure out why they couldn't hear sound out of their weird sound card that nobody had ever heard of. Then, with DirectX 2, they introduced a 3D API which was pretty fast (if cumbersome).

Like I said, the games industry (and PC gaming) in the mid-90's was crazy.

And as far as Vista? Well, Alex has already made his point known, but he elaborates: "Well, the PC--forget the operating system--is always a great platform. Modern PCs have superior graphics and memory and processing power to any next-gen console. I don't think Microsoft did anything to help the PC as a gaming platform with Vista, and that's a tremendous frustration because I take it very personally. If I would've been there, I would have made much more aggressive efforts to make sure Vista stayed out of the way of games. What you see with Microsoft is, without people at Microsoft who realize that the operating system does not add value to gaming, it gets in the way, they think they can add more value by adding in more sh** that only gets in the way of making a good game. Unfortunately, Vista does that. Microsoft added more sh** that impedes game development. It's certainly possible to make great games in Vista, it's just more of a pain in the ass than it needs to be. I think Vista is a missed opportunity for Microsoft to have done a better job in supporting PC gaming."

Anyway, as you can expect, Alex St. John is very ... outspoken. The interview is awesome, especially if you remember the heady Windows 95 days...

Interview With Alex St. John at Shacknews

I am dissapointed that he never mentions the toga party where the live lion got loose. Maybe he's trying to forget that one.

(Vaguely) related retro-views through infrared-tinted glasses:
* Dress Codes And Development
* The Wildest Birthday Party Ever
* Is Vista Going To Destroy Indie Gaming?
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Labels: Biz, Interviews, retro

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