Gregg Tavares Interview on M.C Kids (Patreon)

Here is my "interview" with Gregg Tavares from M.C. Kids for the Nes, it is not a "proper interview" per see more a chit chat on e-mail.

There was some great bits that come from this interview and I do not want to leave anything out.

Mucho Love

-DJ Slope

------------------------------------------------------------------

Q1, So firstly can you please say who you are, what you did on M.C. Kids and what other games you have worked on?

A1, Hi Dan,

Ok Well my name is Gregg Tavares. I've been making games and game related tech for over 30 years. I've made games on Commodore 64 up through PS3/Xbox and most things inbetween. The last thing I did was go to Google to work on a game engine. That got cancelled. I then helped implement WebGL in chrome, it's part of the tech that lets browsers run games.

On M.C. Kids I was the lead programmer. There was one other programmer, Dan Chang, who currently works at Nintendo. One artist/designer, Darren Bartlett who founded a game art company called Liquid Development, and Rene Boutin who now runs is own indy game studio and Charles Deenen programmer/musician.

I've worked on a bunch of games. A few highlights, Centipede for the C64, Gunship for the C64, Gex for 3DO, Crash Team Racing for PS1, LocoRoco for PSP. And of course M.C. Kids for NES. 

Q2, What was the process of getting to this game? did McDonald's approach you or did you go to them?

A2, To be honest I don't actually know. I was working at Virgin Games at the time. I was first assigned to make Caesar's Palace for the Gameboy, a set of gambling games. After about 2 weeks I was moved on to a Terminator game for NES. After a few months of that I was put on the M.C. Kids team. I didn't think to ask how it started but I remember being excited because it was for McDonalds and they said they would promote it on Happy Meals for a month which at the time they sold a million Happy Meals a day. 

Q3, Correct me if i'm wrong but you worked on M.C. Kids at Virgin. What was the reason for the name change to McDonald-land in the UK and why was it moved to Ocean as the developer? I cant find any differences between the 2?

A3, Wow, I had never heard of McDonaldsland by Ocean. I just Googled it. I had no idea. I assume Virgin negotiated with Ocean to have Ocean sell it in the UK and part of that was to put "By Ocean" in it. 

Q4, Mick and Mack obviously ended up getting a sequel with Global Gladiators, what are your views on your game compared to that one?

A4, Haha. Well, I'm impressed with the art for Global Gladiators. Of course it's on Genesis so it benefits from 16bit graphics vs 8bit. It's got 12 levels on a cartridge over 2.5x larger than M.C Kids. M.C. Kids has 33 levels. IIRC Global Gladiators has almost no mechanics or things to really interact with but maybe my memory is bad. M.C.Kids has rewind blocks, upside down spinners, bouncing platforms, heavy bouncing platforms that require you to be carrying something, platforms on tracks, treadmill platforms, a boat you can ride and pickup, sand you can dig, blocks you can pick up, zipper teleporters, ghost platforms that have to be filled in by blocks, falling leaves to jump on, cloud mazes, moon gravity, and more

Q5, Was it always planned that Mick and Mack would become a franchise?

A5, I don't believe there was any planning :P   We originally called them M.C Kid and Mickey D but someone thought that was "controversial"  

Q6, What was McDonalds involvement with the game and what guidelines did you have

A6, They were pretty much uninvolved. All they really told us was "no food references!"  They didn't want it to appear to be a direct ad.

Q7, How long did the game take to develop

A7, That depends on how you define it. I spent 6 months or so making a sprite animation tool that I was planning to have the artists use for both M.C Kids and the NES Terminator game (that never really started development).  Dan spent 6 months or so making an assembler and linker for 6502 with features for making NES games in particular, handling the NES's memory bank system automatically. At some point the boss decided we were spending too much time on tools and demanded no more tools, just make the damn game. So, we got serious around March and shipped in September if I recall correctly. Only 7 months although with serious overtime.

Q8, You was asked by Nintendo to change the world map screen as it was too similar to that of Mario. Can you elaborate on this?

A8, So I really wish I knew all the details. The way I understand it, we originally had a scrolling map that looked very similar to the style of map in Super Mario World. We took the game to the summer CES (back when there was a summer CES). After that we supposedly got a letter from Nintendo that claimed we'd copied Mario. I don't personally believe we copied Mario. Plenty of games have maps. Plenty of games have jumping and collectables. On top of which the goal in M.C. Kids is not to get to end of the level. The goal in M.C Kids is to find the puzzle cards. If you don't find the cards you can't progress in the game. That means you have to explore the levels, something you don't have to do in Mario.

In any case, as a developer for Nintendo systems you can't fight Nintendo. If you fight them they'll just say "fine! No shipping for you". So, apparently Virgin Games had to sign some contract that agreed M.C.Kids was a copying parts of Mario. In exchange for signing Virgin Games was allowed to publish the game but only on Nintendo. Also apparently Virgin had some contract with Sega that said they'd ship every game they made on a Sega platform as well. The compromise was Global Gladiators.  

Q9, Quite a lot of the power ups that were intended to be in the game never actually made the final release. Can you elaborate on this?

A9, I remember we wanted to have many more powerups. Things like flying or shooting or running or whatever we could think of. Unfortunately with such a limited timeframe we didn't have time to put any of them in. I don't remember plans for any specific powerups though, only that we wanted them for variety. 

Q10, What are you doing now and how can people find you

A10, Haha, well I'm actually trying to figure that out. I've been travelling the world a little, spending about 1/2 of each year in Tokyo and the rest in other places. During that time I made a website teaching webgl fundamentals (

http://webglfundamentals.org

). I also made made a system called HappyFunTimes that lets you make local multiplayer games for 50, 100, or more people. I've had 92 player bomberman once. (

http://docs.happyfuntimes.net

).  And in the last few months I made a website to make art using something called vertex shaders. You can see the ones I've created at 

http://vertexshaderart.com/user/gman

 or try to make your own.

I'm trying to figure out what to do next ;)

I can be reached on twitter @greggman or at my website 

http://greggman.com

Q11, One final thing, do you have anything to say about the GameBoy port?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47PGMzC0m3w

Its quite funny, from what I can tell it went like this...

• You (Virgin) worked on M.C. Kids for American audiences
  
• M.C. Kids got changed to McDonald land in the UK and the only difference is the beginning of it says "Ocean presents" instead of "Virgin presents" the title even says M.C. Kids still?
• There was dumb down version for the GameBoy made but only for American audiences, this time though they take the McDonaldLand name
• That gets changed by Virgin back to UK shores but with different sprites and ends up becoming a COOL SPOT game (Spot: the cool adventure) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS0rcoBbTzQ

what the hell was going on lol if you have any input that would be great
Anyway, thanks for your help with this I will continue scripting part 2.

A11, First off OMFG!!!

I seriously had no idea about these GB games.

The GB McDonaldland looks inspired by M.C. Kids but it's clearly a different game with it's own levels and enemies etc.

Spot: The Cool Adventure is clearly just the same game with Spot it in.

It's shit like that that ruined the Atari 2600. Devs still do that all the time today making crappy shovelware games based on licenses. Either they're some biz dev type guy who thinks by having a license their shovelware will sell. Or, they're a brand manager at the owner of the license who thinks "We need a video game for our characters fir the young'ns" and hires a cheap dev to make a game in 3 months.

Actually that's not fair of me. It's possible it's a good game. I haven't played it. Most people think M.C. Kids is a shovelware game at first unless they actually play it and can generally see someone tried to make a good game.

But honestly I have no idea. I see it says the GB games were made by Visual Concepts which is still around. You might ask them. I assume these are some of their first contracts before they went on to make some big hits.

As for your video, awesome! I knew about the Treasure game. I never played it but being by Treasure I assumed it was pretty good. I had not seen the 2 Japanese games. The first NES one looked pretty good.