Interview of Bert Hunsinger (October 2, 2024)

Video interview

The interview is available on Spotify and YouTube:

Bert Huntsinger: From Dungeon Master 2 to Rockstar Games (and beyond)

Blog post (Czech language)
A video interview by Jiří “G4ndy” Mataj of ‘Criticall’ podcast published on October 2, 2024.
Duration: 2 hours 37 minutes

Description: Bert Huntsinger (alias Bert Huml), one of the co-creators of Dungeon Master 2, shared with me his journey through videogame industry. Bert created his own 3D scanning home-made device for Amiga computer in the 80s capable of transforming real objects into 3D models. Later was picked up to be part of FTL team, then went to Sony, Midway and Rockstar. Acted as an Art Director on many games including Smugglers Run 1&2 and Red Dead Revolver (the precursor to Red Dead Redemption). Gained expert knowledge of project management and VR development, he is now concentrating on his own passionate RPG project of ambitious proportions. Tune in for discovering more!

Transcript

Jiří Mataj 00:00:00 Greetings to all listeners of podcast on the walk and also the readers of my blog, critical.cz which is mainly concerned about video games. Today, I am honored to be in the presence of Bert Huntsigner, alias Bert Huml, who is one of the co-creator of Dungeon Master II video game which was first released in December of 1993 and this game, Dungeon Master II, was successor to very popular cult classic game, Dungeon Master from 1987 and this game basically created the gender of dungeon crawlers, or to be exact, it caused revolution in that gender thanks to its intricate design of dungeons, clever puzzles and smooth, easy to use, drag and drop interface. It was basically something comparable to what Windows or MacOS did to home computers. It’s like suddenly dungeons have good interface. It was very smooth and playable. So Dungeon Master, this game is very famous, but Dungeon Master II, it is also somehow famous. But there is not a lot of information about this game, and that’s why I search for some of the authors, and I found Bert Huntsinger, alias Bert Huml, and I’m very pleased that he accepted my request for information, request for interview. And so welcome, Bert. Can you please, just shortly, introduce yourself at the beginning?

Bert Huntsinger 00:01:47 Oh, sure. Well, I started at FTL, as you said, in the 1990s, and then went on to Sony to make a PlayStation One launch game. Then I went to Midway, and from Midway, I went to Angel Studios, which became Rockstar San Diego, and that, that was my primary career. Since then, I did, I’ve done some work with VR and a lot of freelance work.

Jiří Mataj 00:02:43 Yeah, we will, I think, get into, into that, into like, every topic you mentioned. So can you, I always start my interviews with asking the computer games creator about their favorite games from childhood? Do you have some like, favorite game from that time?

Bert Huntsinger 00:03:09 Well, you know, the funny thing is, of course, you know, when I was growing up, you know, initially there were no video games like at all. And so the first games that I played as a child was, you know, all the old games like Asteroids and Pong and, you know, Space Invaders and all those really super simple kind of games that were basically those were the sort of games where, you know, a programmer, one programmer, would just make the whole game a lot of times. But those were the ones I played when I was a kid. But my best memory is actually playing Dungeon Master with my dad, where he was, you know, he was in one room and I was in the next room, and we both were playing independently on our own amigas. And you know, he would shout, he would shout to me, “I found a Vorpal Sword!”, and I’m like, “Where?” And then he’d come into the room and he’d go, OK, you got to go over here, you know? So we kind of played that game way, where, where we were both exploring the dungeon, and, you know, I would find something, or he would find something, or, you know, I would solve a puzzle that he didn’t solve. So then we’d help each other out.

Jiří Mataj 00:05:09 Yeah, it sounds like some interesting form of assisted multiplayer or something. Yeah, of course, you had separate instances separate games, but still, you somehow interacted. So very interesting. And as you were mentioning these older games, so basically, you were going to arcades like you were playing on this arcade boxes. This, like, yeah. And I believe you also mentioned to me that you had Atari 2600 at home or something?

Bert Huntsinger 00:05:40 Yeah, the Atari 2600 which, you know, had a lot of the early games on it, but it’s interesting because, you know, the games came out in the arcade first, and in the arcade they were black and white, and when they came out on the Atari 2600 it was actually an improvement in technology. So the the versions on the Atari 2600 were actually better than, you know, what you could play, you know, at the arcade. And that’s kind of how it kept happening for a while, is, you know that the arcade would come out, they come out with a game and put it in the arcades, and then the consoles would get better technology and put those games out on the console, but they’d actually be better than what was in the arcade.

Jiří Mataj 00:06:42 Yeah, I think this is valid for this early arcade games, because very soon Atari 2600 was rather obsolete, I believe, because the graphics slowly started to be considered very simplistic, and new consoles came, but I also had this Atari, but it was a clone. It was in 1990s, sold like here in Czech Republic, in this eastern Europe. And I had fond memories of these games, yeah. So is there some, some game in particular, which, which you liked on this Atari?

Bert Huntsinger 00:07:28 I can’t remember the exact games, but I remember that me and my friends in the arcade were playing Joust and we were playing Defender, and I never did well at those games when they were in the arcade, all my friends were better than me. And so when I got those games on the Atari 2600, I just made a point of getting really, really good at those games. So I think those two in particular, Defender and Joust, were two of my favorites.

Jiří Mataj 00:08:20 And since you trained on Atari, was this like ability transferable to the arcades? Was it like, usable then, or you were only like the better on Atari?

Bert Huntsinger 00:08:31 Kind of, yeah. I mean, it was transferable. I mean, not completely, but mostly, I did get better generally at playing video games.

Jiří Mataj 00:08:47 Okay, thank you for this remembering of your childhood games. And then I also had one question regarding your nickname, because in Dungeon Master II credits, you are mentioned as Bert Huml, which caused some confusion, because I was not sure if you are the guy or somebody else is Bert Huml. So you clarify that Bert Huml was your nickname because Huml was surname of your father.

Bert Huntsinger 00:09:22 Yeah. So my natural father was Jim Huml, and so when I was born, I started out as Bert Huml. But then my mom got remarried, and the man she married, she had him adopt me so that we all had the same last name, which was Huntsinger. But I had always thought that I wanted to change my name back to Huml once I was an adult. But then, when the time came, I decided to keep Hunsinger, because it just ended up being not as important as I thought it was to change my name back, because my dad, my real dad, who I had a good relationship with, he didn’t care what my last name was, so it didn’t bother him that it wasn’t Huml, and it didn’t bother me anymore. So I just left it as Hunsinger. But so that first game, I had it listed as Huml. And then, I didn’t change it after that. And the other part too is that Doug Bell, who was one of the owners of FTL, is my cousin and so his mom, was originally a Huml before she got married.

Jiří Mataj 00:11:22 Yeah. So basically, Doug Bell, the director of Dungeon Master and Dungeon Master II, the big guy from FTL is your cousin. So it was, maybe we will come to this. It’s interesting aspect that FTL maybe was little bit like a family company, even, or if you were a cousin of Doug Bell. Interesting aspect, yeah! I was reading your mobigames.com profile, and you stated there that the FTL, the studio behind Dungeon Master and previous games, and also behind Dungeon Master II, that they picked you after they saw a CG animation, which you did for the Amiga World animation contest. So can you tell me something about this animation? Why was it so interesting?

Bert Huntsinger 00:12:18 It’s funny because I actually looked just recently, I looked for the animation to see if it was anywhere on YouTube, and I couldn’t find it anywhere, but, yeah, Amiga World magazine had an animation contest, and so since I was working at the time a lot with computer graphics, I entered the contest, and I made a short little animation that was like a Doctor Frankenstein bringing his creation to life. And it was all 3D computer graphics and it got second place in the animation contest. So then it was prominently in the Amiga World magazine. I believe it was an issue of Amiga world, and it had, I can’t remember now, but anyway, it was in that magazine, and Amiga World was something that a lot of the guys at FTL read, particularly David Simon, and so David saw it, and he’s like, “Hey, we should hire this guy!”. And Doug was like, “Oh, that’s my cousin!” and so Doug, he didn’t want people to think that I was going to get hired just because we were related. So he, as I understand it, he put it to the team, and the team agreed to hire me, but when I felt like, when I first got hired, that the pressure was on me to prove myself, to prove that I was worth being there.

Jiří Mataj 00:14:40 That you are not part of some family mafia plot of Doug Bell, yeah, that you really deserve your position at FTL, yeah, okay, thank you for mentioning this. So maybe this animation of yours maybe you can find it even in some of your archives, and then post it to Internet, because we have these Amiga emulators nowadays. So it shouldn’t be so big problem to run it, probably, but I remember that Amiga was not so like strong for 3D graphics. So this 3D animation, it was something like exceptional back then, it was not so common, no?

Bert Huntsinger 00:15:31 Yeah, well, back then there was almost no 3D computer graphics at all. I mean, most people didn’t know what 3D computer graphics were. It was always interesting trying to explain to people what 3D graphics was. A lot of the Amiga World animations weren’t 3D, they were 2D, but I was using, I think, if I remember right, I think the program was called Turbo Silver, which was a 3D computer graphic program for for the Amiga. And I used that to to to create my animation.

Jiří Mataj 00:16:23 Yeah, and this was like, in 1990 or 1989, or something. Yeah, I believe it was 1990.

Bert Huntsinger 00:16:37 Yeah, must have been around there. Let me just see something real quick. Let me do a quick check. Yeah, I guess there’s not a lot talking about it, but let’s see. Here’s what I found on Turbo Silver.

Jiří Mataj 00:17:17 Yeah, I can place it to the links. This is the software which you used to create this 3D animation.

Bert Huntsinger 00:17:25 Yeah. But then the neat part about creating that animation, though, is I made an analog measuring device that measured things in 3D space. It was just this combination of sliders and stuff, where I could put a wire hanger that went down and wherever it touched a 3D object, then I was set up so that I had rulers where I could measure in three different axes where a given point was in 3D space. So I could put an object in my little analog measuring device, and I would draw grid lines on it and then I would go to each of the grid points and measure to get the 3D coordinates. And then I’d put those coordinates into the 3D program, and in that way, I created a pretty realistic 3D face.

Jiří Mataj 00:19:04 So was it yours? Your face? You were like lying on the table and scanning your face?

Bert Huntsinger 00:19:09 No, no, it was a friend of mine’s face. And what I did was, I used dental alginate, like, you know, like when they take impressions of your teeth, I use that stuff and I put it over my friend’s face, and then I put plaster bandages over the top of that, and then I got a negative impression of their face, and then I filled that with plaster, and then I had a plaster positive of their face, and then that’s what I drew the grid lines on and then put into the program.

Jiří Mataj 00:19:56 So basically you created an in-house 3D scanner. We can say, with this device you created, like, by yourself this scanning device.

Bert Huntsinger 00:20:11 Yeah an analog 3D scanner

Jiří Mataj 00:20:14 Yeah, and was it something like, where did you get idea for this in some kind of magazine, or you just discovered it by yourself?

Bert Huntsinger 00:20:25 Yeah, I just, I just tried to think of a way that I could measure 3D points in a relatively accurate way, and so that’s what I came up with. It was a series of sliders where I had something that could slide, let’s say, in the X direction, and then on that slider, on the slider that moved in the X direction, I had another slider that moved in the Y direction. And then, the slider that moved in the Y direction. I drilled the hole for the piece of hanger wire, a stiff wire, and that moved in the Z direction. So I had, you know, one thing moving in X, and then attached to that, I had a thing moving in Y, and then attached to that, I had a thing moving in Z. So in that way I could, I could measure all three axes and get the 3D coordinates.

Jiří Mataj 00:21:38 Yeah, this sounds brilliant. It sounds like a inverse 3D printer. Actually, you could have patented this interesting device. Okay, yes, so let’s move on. So basically, prior joining to FTL, did you create some kind of video games on your own, or you just did some graphical experiments?

Bert Huntsinger 00:22:10 Yeah, mostly. For me, it kind of started when my dad told me he bought a computer and, of course back then, there weren’t computers everywhere. Nobody had computers. And so my dad told me he bought a computer and he wanted to show it to me. And so in my head, I was thinking Star Trek, you know, I was thinking something big with lots of lights, you know, and then he brings me to his desk, and it’s just this black and white monitor with a keyboard, and he’s like “This is the computer”. And I’m like “This is the computer?”. But I was still pretty excited. And I’m like “Well, how do I work it? What can I do with it?” And so he took the instruction manual and just threw it down on the desk, and he’s like, well, you figure it out. So that’s what I did.

Jiří Mataj 00:23:15 So was it Apple II? What was the computer? The first computer you had?

Bert Huntsinger 00:23:24 It was one that was made by Radio Shack. It was called the TRS 80. So I started making computer graphics and animations with it, but I had to program them all in basic because at the time there wasn’t any software. There wasn’t any off the shelf software. At least there wasn’t any off the shelf software for graphics. There was off the shelf software for, like, spreadsheets and stuff.

Jiří Mataj 00:24:06 Yeah, so this is early 80s, basically. I don’t know the history so well of this TSR 80, but maybe it even came around the same time as Apple II or something, I believe.

Bert Huntsinger 00:24:22 Probably, yeah, I remember, I remember seeing the Apple II and in computer stores.

Jiří Mataj 00:24:30 Yeah, and so on this TSR 80, you began your, let’s say, programming journey. So we were using Basic for for some basic graphical work. So did you get, then some upgrade after this, TSR 80? Did you get some Commodore 64 or Amiga?

Bert Huntsinger 00:24:52 Yeah, I saved up my money and bought an Amiga 400, and then I upgraded from there to, I think it was an Amiga 800 and then, by the time I worked for FTL, I had an Amiga, I think it was, I can’t remember exactly. It might have been something called a 1200 ST or something like that. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but when I started at FTL, they didn’t have a computer for me, so I had to bring my own Amiga in to do my work. And so my Amiga was, you know, was probably at FTL for probably the first three months I was working there, and then Doug basically told me, look, if you want the company to buy you a computer, you’re going to have to bug Wayne about it. And so that’s what I did. And finally, they got me one.

Jiří Mataj 00:26:16 Okay, so basically, when you started at FTL in June of 1990 you brought your own Amiga and you worked, you start working on it, and so I believe in 1990 they were still porting Chaos Strikes Back, which was some kind of a data disk for Dungeon Master, and it was for Amiga this port, did you have something to do with it?

Bert Huntsinger 00:26:49 I think I did do, I vaguely remember that I did do a little bit of work on that, because you’re right, that is what they were working on when I came in. They were working on various ports of that game. And I think they did have me work on some of the graphics for that. But I can’t remember specifically. Mostly what I remember is that the first thing they had me do was they had the idea that they wanted to have story animations. And I don’t remember whether it was story animations for Skullkeep or whether it was story animations for some version of Chaos Strikes Back, but they had me try to do story animations. And we were trying to come up with a quick way of doing it, something that wasn’t like painstakingly drawing every frame by hand. So we were experimenting with filming, or using a primitive digital camera and taking still pictures of people acting things out, and then painting over that, painting over the frames of that, to get the animation and it just wasn’t working out super well.

Jiří Mataj 00:28:37 Yeah, this technique, I believe Jordan Mechner, the author of Prince of Persia. He later used this in his game Last Express he like was photoshooting real actors and then additionally coloring them. But it was in 1994 or something. So we were still in 1990s so it was probably technologically not feasible back then.

Bert Huntsinger 00:29:08 I was just gonna say it was a combination of technological feasibility and also, that was the beginning of my career, so my art skills were not the greatest at the time. Particularly, I could draw things and have them look pretty good, but animation was a whole different thing. You know, trying to actually take what I’ve drawn and actually animate it and make it look good. I wasn’t super experienced at hand drawn animation.

Jiří Mataj 00:29:52 Okay, and when you joined FTL, can you describe what was the atmosphere there? Was the company already transforming into some kind of bigger company because of the success of the first Dungeon Master? How was it there?

Bert Huntsinger 00:30:22 My understanding of FTL as it started as I think it started as, and I could be wrong about this. I think it started as just Doug, Wayne and Andy Jaros and then, you know, they were slowly adding people, and I think that myself and David Simon were probably the most recent additions to the company, but they didn’t really want to grow the company. I know that Wayne told me once that he really didn’t like having a company with employees. But, you know, it just was, I guess, a necessity of what he was doing. That’s my daughter in the background.

Jiří Mataj 00:31:26 Yeah, nice. She’s also a gamer. She’s playing maybe something on TV?

Bert Huntsinger 00:31:34 She’s she’s currently playing Starfield.

Jiří Mataj 00:31:38 Oh, good taste. Good taste. So you mentioned that Wayne Holder didn’t want the company to grow, that he wanted to somehow keep it probably manageable, keep the numbers low, so it will not be a big, big beast to handle. Okay, so when you joined in June of 1990 was there already some work on Dungeon Master II being done or not yet?

Bert Huntsinger 00:32:16 I remember we had a whiteboard, and we put a bunch of words on the whiteboard, and we were trying to come up with a title for Dungeon Master II, and that’s so we put a bunch of words like dungeon, castle, keep, you know, skull, that kind of thing. And that’s how we came up with Skullkeep was we were just combining different words. So I don’t think any work was being done on the second game when I arrived, or very little, just very preliminary work because, there really wasn’t anybody doing much work on it. I think David Simon was doing a little bit of work on it, but there wasn’t a lot of work being done on it, because everybody was working on other things.

Jiří Mataj 00:33:32 Like porting the Chaos Strikes Back on Amiga and other platforms.

Bert Huntsinger 00:33:39 Yeah, they were doing all the various ports, including, the ports for various Japanese versions and stuff like that. In fact, I know while I was there, Doug and Wayne took at least one trip to Japan.

Jiří Mataj 00:34:00 Yeah, this Japan connection is quite interesting, because we will come to this. Dungeon Master II was released two years prior to its release in US, it was released in Japan. We will come to this. But I also have in my notes that there is this Dungeon Master Theron’s Quest, some Japanese exclusive game. So you were also developing this game in house, at FTL ?

Bert Huntsinger 00:34:31 I actually don’t remember that one, so that might have been something that happened, kind of away from the main FTL because, yeah, I mean the name Theron’s Quest, that’s familiar. But other than that, I don’t remember a lot about that one.

Jiří Mataj 00:35:06 Yeah, this game is like, it’s supposed to have basically levels from Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back. And it is for some Japanese specific console, I believe it’s TurboGrafx or something like this. It was released on CD. So it’s possible that you had this game outsourced to some Japanese studio, yeah?

Bert Huntsinger 00:35:35 That’s what I would guess happened.

Jiří Mataj 00:35:39 And so, so we can, we can start digging into this Dungeon Master II game. So you mentioned that you were part of this brainstorming about the name for this game. So do you remember when, like, some serious work started on Dungeon Master II?

Bert Huntsinger 00:36:03 I think, basically right, roughly right around the time that I arrived, they showed me. They kind of gave me a brief introduction on how to use the, I don’t remember exactly what it was called, the dungeon creator toolkit, and they had me start playing with that and seeing what I could do and that was pretty fun. And that’s where it was kind of like with Dungeon Master II. It’s like you had, I was playing around with the dungeon and learning how the whole game was made going through and learning how the art was done, and all of that.

Jiří Mataj 00:37:14 You mean, for Dungeon Master 1, for the original Dungeon Master, you were like revisiting it, how it was made. Okay.

Bert Huntsinger 00:37:23 Yeah, so, because the example they had was they were showing me the folder with the art in it, and how it was put together, and the different dungeon wall, and the different distances for the dungeon wall, and how it would kind of pixelate to black in the distance, and all of that. So I was learning how to do all of that, and then I was creating because early on, it’s like I’d be trying to create artwork, and then I would have to wait for somebody to put it in the game for me before I could look at it. And then I would look at it and go, Oh, that looks terrible. And so then I’d change it, and then I’d have to wait for a while for somebody to put it in the game again. So eventually I’m like, “Well, just show me how to do this myself. Show me how to put it in the game.” So that’s when they showed me how to do, how to use the dungeon maker. And so then things went a lot faster. And that’s where I learned, okay, I can do this, and I can do this, and this is how I can make this piece of art and get it in the game and see what it looks like right away. So that’s when I started experimenting with doing the artwork, and making different dungeons and puzzles on my own, and that’s where I really started seeing how I could exploit their game engine to do interesting things. And so that’s what I did, probably the first several months I was there. I just kept trying to exploit the game engine and figure out. Okay, well, what if I do this? What happens then? And and so I was just trying out a whole bunch of different ideas. And meanwhile, while I was doing that, David Simon was kind of doing a lot of, I guess he was doing a lot of what you might call concept art. But it was all, you know, in in kind of the pixelated game fashion. So he was making different creatures. Like you mentioned, Dru Tan, you know, that was one of the creatures he made. So he was making different creatures and putting them in the game engine and experimenting with, okay, let’s see what this creature looks like. And so both of us were kind of experimenting on our own and then we would put stuff together and see how it looked, and a lot of the work early on was just him and me doing that kind of stuff. And then later on, the programmers started getting more involved, particularly Bill and Kirk, mostly Bill, though.

Jiří Mataj 00:41:19 So if I understand it correctly at the beginning, basically, you were experimenting with the previous technology, with the Dungeon Master I engine, let’s say you were trying to modify it little bit, and David Simon was creating monsters, and then placing the monsters into your levels. And you were trying to guess what would be the best approach, how the monster should behave?

Bert Huntsinger 00:41:51 Yeah, because the original thought was that the game engine didn’t need to be changed, that we would just, create a new dungeon and make new art, and then that would be it. And so that’s how we initially approached everything from that standpoint, and that took us pretty far. But then the idea of having merchants that that buy and sell stuff came into play, and to get the merchants to work, we needed Bill. And then when Bill started work, from the way I remember it, when Bill started working on the merchants, that’s when he started working, generally on a new character, AI, to get the characters to do more than what they could in the first game.

Jiří Mataj 00:42:55 Yeah, so basically, it sounds like some kind of evolution of the original engine, like when you mentioned you were doing the artwork. So you were basically doing some kind of what we now call textures, like what we see on the wall in the dungeon. You were, like, doing these things?

Bert Huntsinger 00:43:15 Yeah, though it wasn’t it. I mean, the thing about Dungeon Master is it was all 2D, it was kind of pseudo 3D but it was all 2D graphics. And it’s like everything in the game, you do an image of it, you’d start drawing what it looked like up close when you’re right in front of it. And then you’d make it a little smaller and turn it into the drawing the next distance away. And then you’d make it a little smaller, and then you’d put all that in the game and then walk around and see how it looked. I think one of the other Dungeon Master II innovations if I remember right, I think in Dungeon Master II, we added the ability to move furniture around

Jiří Mataj 00:44:23 Yeah, correct.

Bert Huntsinger 00:44:38 So when Bill added the new AI for the creatures, then that opened up interesting… I don’t remember the details, but I remember being excited because that opened up possibilities for doing different things with the creatures, and making the creatures more part of the puzzles than they were in the first game.

Jiří Mataj 00:45:09 Yeah, I read somewhere. Maybe it was interview with Doug Bell, basically in Dungeon Master II, you wanted the creature to be the puzzles, that the player should not only face the typical puzzles, like how to unlock some door through some combination or through searching for some keys, but that the challenge should be also conquering these intelligent monsters. Remember this? And so basically, you are credited as a world creator that in Dungeon Master II. So you were the main man responsible for the level design?

Bert Huntsinger 00:45:58 Yeah, I did, I did almost all the level design. But towards the end the when the rest of the team came in, they added some levels and made some changes and stuff like that. But I did most of the levels.

Jiří Mataj 00:46:20 Okay. And so, basically, at some point of development, I think you somehow decided that you will also have not only this enclosed space, like a dungeon, but you will also have these outside regions in the game. Am I correct? Maybe this was probably not at the beginning. You somehow arrived at this idea, so we were also designing these outside areas. And one of my friends, he had a question regarding these open areas, was there some kind of pressure to have also some NPCs, with exception of these traders, I don’t know, some kind of non playable characters just moving around in these areas, and maybe so the player will be able to speak with them or something. Was this on the plate or not?

Bert Huntsinger 00:47:14 No, that, no, as far as I remember, that wasn’t on the plate at all. The you know, they definitely wouldn’t have wanted a character you could speak to, because any character you’d be able to speak to, you’d have to do localization for everything they said, you’d have to translate everything they said into whatever other languages that the game, whatever other countries the game would go to, so they didn’t want any speaking characters and so it’s like when they made, for example, when they made the merchant character, they had to be very Careful. They were trying to be very careful about making the merchant in such a way that you could interact with it in an intelligent way, without having to talk to it or anything, without having to have any text bubbles or anything like that.

Jiří Mataj 00:48:25 Yeah, I think the trading system in Dungeon Master II is one of its highlights. I liked it very much, the fact that you can buy something just by placing the gold coins on the table. Then that merchant will just rotate the table and you will get the thing which you wanted. It’s very interesting approach, and it’s interesting to hear that basically this was caused by necessity that FTL, you basically didn’t want to create these localizations, so we wanted to keep the game somehow simple, but it created this interesting, I can say, complicated system for traders, for trading.

Bert Huntsinger 00:49:12 And I remember Bill spent a good amount of time trying to make sure that you couldn’t trick the merchant. In other words, he was trying to make sure that you couldn’t put your coins on the table, and then, as the table was being turned, grab your coins off the table again. So he was, he was trying every possible iteration to make sure that you couldn’t cheat the trader out of his money.

Jiří Mataj 00:49:50 Yeah, I think he succeeded. I’m aware of only one exploit, but I never even tried this. I didn’t find it by myself, it’s on internet somewhere. Yes, this was quite successful initiative to prevent cheating when trading. So then when you were designing these levels, I guess you were interacting a lot with Simon and with Kelly. How was your collaboration looking like?

Bert Huntsinger 00:50:26 It was good. We all collaborated really well. In a sense, we were kind of a found family. I mean, we spent a lot of time together, both on the job and when we weren’t working. We spent a lot of time together too. We kind of did a lot of stuff together. Even to the point of, there were times where we took snow trips and went skiing together. In fact, that’s how I learned how to snowboard. Kirk Baker taught me how to snowboard.

Jiří Mataj 00:51:19 But you didn’t bring this to the game like snowboarding is not in Dungeon Master II! When you were designing these levels, I guess you draw the inspiration from original Dungeon Master. But were there any other sources of inspiration when you were creating this world?

Bert Huntsinger 00:51:42 No, not really. It was mostly just me just trying different things out. Like I said, a lot of my early time at FTL, I was learning how, I was playing with the dungeon making program and going, “Okay, well, how can I do things with it that haven’t been done before?” In other words, how can I come up with a new game mechanic that wasn’t in the first game. What can I do interesting, how can I think out of the box, so to speak.

Jiří Mataj 00:52:33 And is there some particular map or puzzle you are proud of?

Bert Huntsinger 00:52:43 It’s been a long time, so I don’t remember, but my vague memory is that I think the thing that I like, the best that I came up with was the idea of the trees that moved when you weren’t facing them. The idea that the trees would surround you and attack you. You’d be facing one direction, and the trees, whatever direction you’re facing, those trees wouldn’t move, but the ones behind you would be moving closer, until they got right up to you, and then when they’re right up to you, then they attack you.

Jiří Mataj 00:53:41 Yeah, I remember this. It was quite scary. It worked. Yeah, nice. And also, there is one thing that is probably one unfinished puzzle on the roof of the Skullkeep: there is some kind of electrical or storm device. I wonder if you remember this. Probably it had some meaning.

Bert Huntsinger 00:54:06 I vaguely remember it. I remember the point when we first started being able to go outside of the dungeon, I remember one of the cool things we put in was “Let’s have storms and let’s have lightning, and have a random chance that lightning will strike either the player or one of the creatures” and I remember that we wanted to exploit that for puzzles. But then I don’t remember what happened at that point. I don’t know why that got abandoned.

Jiří Mataj 00:55:03 So basically, this electrical device on the rooftop of Skullkeep remains there with some hidden meaning. Probably it was not finished in the end, this puzzle. Do you remember some ideas which, in the end, didn’t make it into the final game?

Bert Huntsinger 00:55:29 No, unfortunately, I can’t remember anything. I know, though, that we came up with a lot of ideas, mostly me and David Simon. He especially was coming up with all kinds of ideas. There was all kinds of things we wanted to do, but we just didn’t have time for ultimately. If I had been asked right at the end, then I probably would have had a whole list of things, but I can’t remember.

Jiří Mataj 00:56:17 You already mentioned this level with Dru Tan, which is some kind of, let’s say, mid boss. It’s some kind of huge orc, we can say. And I was quite surprised that when I played this game, Dungeon Master II, I played it first time, maybe in 1998 or something. It was already out for three years, and I was quite struck by the level of detail and by the artificial intelligence of the opponents, and that in this cavern where this Dru Tan, where this boss is, you can basically lure this boss into into his own trap. This, for example, was somehow your idea, or was it again, collaboration with David or with Bill Kelly?

Bert Huntsinger 00:57:15 Yeah, well, it was all three of us. Luring him into his own trap, that was definitely a collaboration between me, David and Bill. David did a lot of the graphics. He made Dru Tan and at the time, he had also done a lot of the new graphics for the castle walls, the cavern walls, and stuff like that. When I did my graphics, I was still trying to do a lot of stuff where what I’d do is I’d initially render something in 3D you know, like a pillar or something, and then I’d touch it up in in a 2D paint program, and then put that into the game. But because we were trying to exploit 3D rendering as a way to create graphics for the game faster. But ultimately it didn’t work out to be faster. The Dru Tan puzzle was something, I was the one who made the environment, the dungeon and the trap and everything. Then David did the artwork. And, of course, Bill did the AI for the character.

Jiří Mataj 00:59:26 Yeah, thank you that you did this. Generally, of course, I like Dungeon Master II very, very much. Do you by any chance know why Dungeon Master II was first released in Japan on 23rd of December 1993 for PC-98. It was basically almost IBM compatible PC in Japan. Why was it released like first in Japan, and then for two years, nothing and in 1995 released on for PC?

Bert Huntsinger 01:00:12 That may have been related to Interplay. I’m not entirely sure. There were a number of games that were kind of similar, but had made improvements over what Dungeon Master was doing. So I know that when we gave the game to Interplay, they wanted to make sure that our game was competitive with those games, so they were trying to do at least a small amount of work to add a certain amount of quality to our game.

Jiří Mataj 01:01:10 So it was probably Interplay who requested this animation of movement where there is some kind of intermediary frames inserted, or it’s probably zooming even, I don’t know, but the movement is semi fluent in Dungeon Master II version for PC.

Bert Huntsinger 01:01:34 I know that basically our animation was: we drew the character and then to animate it, we just flipped the image to the other direction, and we tried to make it so that it looked relatively good doing that. That was our animation, just flipping one frame back and forth and Interplay definitely wanted more than just that, because other games were doing more than that.

Jiří Mataj 01:02:08 So it was Interplay, or somebody from Interplay who was creating this additional or new version of animation?

Bert Huntsinger 01:02:20 I believe, yeah, that it was the people at Interplay. I remember, I was still at FTL when they sent us a version of the game that had the animation in it, and being amazed at how much better it looked with the animated characters so I’m pretty sure it was them doing that, that animation.

Jiří Mataj 01:02:51 But unfortunately, it delayed the game for two years. And also, in the version for these Japanese computers, also for Sega CD, the movement is like a jumping: you are standing at some point, and then the camera just jumps to the point. But in PC version, it goes like, semi fluently. This was also their invention, probably.

Bert Huntsinger 01:03:20 Yes I think that was also Interplay. I’m not 100% sure on that one, but yeah, I think that was also Interplay.

Jiří Mataj 01:03:36 Okay, so basically, I know that you left FTL in June 1994 which was basically prior to release of Dungeon Master II for PC, but you were probably like observing how the game did in magazines or something. So how were you seeing it back then, the success, or not success of Dungeon Master II, the reception?

Bert Huntsinger 01:04:13 Well, at the time, once I finished Dungeon Master II, in essence, for us there was a point after delivering it to Interplay that for us the work was done, and there wasn’t really a lot to do. At that point, of course, I knew the game backwards and forwards in my sleep. I mean, I actually remember a point where I was asleep at my house and somebody was play testing the game, and they called me up because they were stuck with a puzzle. And they asked me, “Okay, what do I do?” I knew the whole game, backwards and forwards, and I explained to them what to do. But so by the point that we let go of the game, and it was kind of released and Interplay was doing their part, for me the game was done and over with. I’d gotten at that point an offer to go work for Sony, and it was kind of the sort of offer that I couldn’t refuse. It was a great opportunity for me. Once I left for Sony, I was purely focused on proving myself at Sony. And so I wasn’t really focused much on what was happening with Dungeon Master II.

Jiří Mataj 01:06:16 Okay, yeah, but at least you were still around when it was released in Japan. And it, I believe it was somehow successful. It was number one seller in one week of December 1993 and so you got some, some positive feedback back then, I believe, or not?

Bert Huntsinger 01:06:38 Yeah, I remember that Wayne took us all out to celebrate, and he took us to a place in San Diego that had kind of very complex 3D simulated games and that were networked, which was unusual at the time. So we celebrated by playing more video games. But like I said, the place he took us, it wasn’t just normal video games, it was very high end video games where they were networked together, and it was full 3D simulation in real time, but yeah, I remember we were celebrating the release of, in essence, the success of Dungeon Master II.

Jiří Mataj 01:07:46 So it’s good to hear that you have this, like some kind of successful conclusion of your career in FTL. This is nice to hear. You mentioned that you got this interesting offer from Sony to work on their games. But prior to that, I just maybe wanted to revisit some of my question which I forgot to ask, regarding Dungeon Master II and maybe you described it probably already quite well, that the atmosphere was almost like a family in FTL. But did you remember also some kind of stressful time or, I don’t know, I can imagine that you also had some deadlines, like maybe for this Japanese release, or the worry, for example, working 24 hours per day, like this crunch or something. Did you experience it with FTL?

Bert Huntsinger 01:08:57 Well, yeah, we definitely had a crunch time, and a lot of it was the typical game development experience where you’re coming up against the deadline, and there’s a certain point where you have to stop putting new things in, and then just test what you have, and then from that point, you’re just working on bug fixes, basically until you send it off. And we had a lot of points where we had to send the game off to somebody even before the game was ready to be released. There was a lot of points where we were sending versions of the game to places in Japan and to Interplay and trying to convince people to help us sell our product and so there were multiple points where we had to do crunch time and make sure the game was as good as it could be before it was released, or even before, we would release a demo of it. And in my case, since I did almost all of the dungeon creation and the puzzle creation, I had to be there for all of the debugging, because probably about a third of the bugs were caused by me. But the most stressful time for me was when I first started working for FTL, because that was my first real professional job. I had done a small amount of freelance work before that, but that was my first professional job. So I was trying really hard to do well and to make sure I did a good job.

Jiří Mataj 01:11:44 You mentioned a lot of testing. I must admit that the version of Dungeon Master II which I was playing back then, and I recently revisited this through emulator, I found zero bugs. It was like this version for PC. There were no bugs, and I believe, since it also was released for Mega CD, which was like this CD attachment to Sega Genesis or Sega Mega Drive, I think there are also zero bugs because these consoles, they were not admitting anything with bugs on them.

Bert Huntsinger 01:12:26 Back then, the whole idea of releasing the game that had bugs in it was just totally unacceptable. I mean, now you see games release all the time with lots of bugs, and then they fix the bugs after release, but back then you had to get rid of all the bugs before if you could. You had to get rid of all the bugs before you released the game, especially if it was gonna go out on a CD or something like that, where they have to burn all those CDs. It’s not like now where you can just download an update to a game to fix bugs. They were putting these games on some type of media that was expensive and it couldn’t be changed. So if it goes onto that media, it has to be bug free, because it would be far too expensive to run off a whole other set. I mean whether it was on a cartridge or whether it was on a CD, it would have been very expensive to put out a bug fix, and release a whole bunch of new CDs, and make sure everybody that bought the CDs got them. Nowadays, like I said, they don’t care as much because you can just download a new version of the game. So it’s much easier now to release a game that has bugs in it and then fix the bugs after release. But back then, we couldn’t do that. And frankly, I don’t think they should do it now, but they do.

Jiří Mataj 01:14:40 Maybe it’s making the lives of programmers a little bit easier that they don’t have to release bug free product, but since we mentioned this Mega CD version, like this console Sega Genesis was targeting some teenagers. Let’s say was there also some pressure to make Dungeon Master II more accessible for younger audience of players, like make it more easier, Let’s say?

Bert Huntsinger 01:15:15 No, not that I’m aware of. I don’t think that ever crossed anybody’s mind, as far as I know.

Jiří Mataj 01:15:22 And how did you manage to strike some kind of balanced difficulty? Was it thanks to the beta testing? Lot of people were playing it during the development. Or, how did you achieve this?

Bert Huntsinger 01:15:38 Well, mostly, you know, the beta testing was just done by all of us who work there, you know, all the programmers and artists and, you know, we just played it over and over and over and over again and just kept making small improvements until it was right.

Jiří Mataj 01:16:02 Was there some external play testing involved during development?

Bert Huntsinger 01:16:10 As far as I know, there was no external play testing. It was just inside of the company,

Jiří Mataj 01:16:20 I think this is quite interesting.

Bert Huntsinger 01:16:27 Oh, there’s one story. I don’t know if you know this story, but there’s one story where all of us went out to lunch together one day. And apparently, this is what we were told, while we were out at lunch, the comedian Robin Williams came to the company and bought a copy of the game, I think the first game. It was just the secretary and the shipping people who were at the company at that point, so they got to meet Robin Williams and but we were all out to lunch, so we missed him.

Jiří Mataj 01:17:32 But he didn’t contribute to play testing. He only bought Dungeon Master.

Bert Huntsinger 01:17:41 No, no, he just came to buy a copy of the game.

Jiří Mataj 01:17:45 So basically, you had some kind of office where you were working, but at the same time you were selling the products there, like because you were connected with this Software Heaven company, FTL, was like somehow connected. So it was like possible to visit you and buy your games physically there?

Bert Huntsinger 01:18:08 Yeah, because in essence, there was it was one company, and it was a small area where we were making the games upstairs, and then downstairs, they were packaging and shipping the games out to game stores.

Jiří Mataj 01:18:31 But it was possible to come to your shipping place and buy there also something in person?

Bert Huntsinger 01:18:40 Yeah, most people didn’t do it that way, but…

Jiří Mataj 01:18:49 Robin Williams was probably your fan, a fan of the game.

Bert Huntsinger 01:18:54 Yeah, well, I’m assuming he went through the trouble to actually come to the company because he probably wanted to meet the development team, but unfortunately we weren’t there at the time. Oh, so that was too bad. It was a missed opportunity for everybody.

Jiří Mataj 01:19:12 Maybe he would have been in Dungeon Master II somehow, instead of Dru Tan, there could be some some scanned Robin Williams, interesting. I believe I went through all the questions regarding Dungeon Master II, and let’s jump to your post FTL era. So you joined Sony Interactive in 1994 and you first participated in the development of arcade sport titles using ESPN license. It was NBA Baseballn, Speed World, which was some kind of racing game and everything was released for 16 bit consoles, either for Sega Genesis or for Nintendo, for this Super Nintendo Entertainment System. So how was it like jumping from FTL to Sony and working on completely different genre of games.

Bert Huntsinger 01:20:27 Well, it was very, very different. Because, at FTL I had a really large amount of creative control, and I was relatively important within the company. I mean, everybody was relatively important because everybody did a lot at that company. So when I went to Sony, they started me out on touching up sprites for basketball players, and touching up the animations for basketball players, and then they put me on doing two dimensional baseball stadiums. And the two dimensional baseball stadiums they had, the way they were doing it is they had these little tiles and the whole background was made up of these tiles, these repeatable tiles. And so I was making those and making the different 2D baseball stadiums. And it was the sort of thing where it was very, very inefficient, where, they’d have me do a bunch of basketball player sprites, and then they go, and then they see it in the game, and they go, “I want to see that basketball player with blue shorts instead of white shorts”. So then you’d have to go through every frame of every animation, and change the shorts, the pixels on the shorts from from white to blue. But eventually they were teaching us to use 3D computer graphics. So then eventually, they had me building the 3D arenas for the games and then finally, we got to the point where it was time to make the Sony launch titles for PlayStation One, and that’s when I got put on the X Games. The street luge, where you’re racing through a city, and it’s like it was street luge and roller skating and skateboarding, if I remember right.

Jiří Mataj 01:23:45 Yeah, it was this ESPN Extreme Games launch title. It was basically a race. We can say it was basically racing game, but you could have inlines or skateboard or bike, and you would race through this 3D area.

Bert Huntsinger 01:24:09 And that was interesting, because that was more 3D than Dungeon Master, but it was not full 3D. It was still kind of pseudo 3D in a different way than Dungeon Master that we did for that game. It was three dimensional polygons moving through three dimensional world. It was just very simple polygons with very simple textures on them, and that was much more real 3D but it still had a lot of kind of fake sort of things, where they were doing some parallax and other things to make it feel more 3D than it actually was.

Jiří Mataj 01:25:06 Some characters, or maybe even the player character, was consisting of sprites. No, maybe it was not even 3D back then, similar to, like in Doom.

Bert Huntsinger 01:25:18 Yeah the player character was sprites, and the player characters were made by Emmanuel Valdez and he actually made everything in 3D first and then rendered it into sprites.

Jiří Mataj 01:25:44 By the way, since we are in this 3D area when Dungeon Master II was released in 1993 I think few days prior to this Japanese release of Dungeon Master II, Doom was released. Was this release of Doom somehow impactful on you back then?

Bert Huntsinger 01:26:10 Yes, on it was for me, and that was one of the games that I showed to Wayne, and I’m like, “Look, they’re doing better 3D, can we do 3D like this?” And his answer was “Oh, that’s just, that’s nothing. Don’t worry about that”. But I’m like, “No, look, this is more 3D than Dungeon Master. We need to make Dungeon Master more like this.” And in essence, he said that it just wasn’t possible to do. And now that I have a better understanding of how this game engine worked, I understand why it couldn’t be done. It would have meant completely rewriting the game engine, which would have been a lot more work than they wanted to do.

Jiří Mataj 01:27:10 Yeah, I don’t know if you are aware back then, also Ultima Underworld from Looking Glass Studio was released. Did you play it? Or have you seen it, this game back then?

Bert Huntsinger 01:27:26 Yes, I remember seeing that game when I was at FTL. And I also remember seeing Wolfenstein 3D or Wolfenstein, when I was at FTL. Now Doom, I remember playing a lot right after I started at Sony, I remember after work we would, since all the computers were networked together, we would play Doom after the workday was over, which was a lot of fun, but when I was at FTL, what I remember is showing Wayne Wolfenstein, and I think we showed him Ultima as well. But these games that were starting to come out were more 3D than Dungeon Master.

Jiří Mataj 01:28:24 I think still it was like a good decision not to go this way. Yeah. In retrospect, I think Interplay maybe if they released Dungeon Master II, also in 1993 they would have done better job than postponing it for two years because the train was already running and maybe the fans of Dungeon Master, they knew what they were expecting. So maybe all hustle with making the game more appealing was just not necessary. Yeah, not to say that Interplay, basically, they had their own Dungeon Master clone in making back then they were doing the Stonekeep game. I don’t know if you are aware that like right after the release of Dungeon Master II in 1995 they released a game which was called Stonekeep and it was also dungeon. It was by Interplay and they wanted it to be like a movie. There were some, like the intro was played by actual people. You are not aware about this game, about Stonekeep or did you know about it?

Bert Huntsinger 01:29:41 I remember we were looking at Stonekeep when I was still at FTL. I know that we were also looking at, I can’t remember the games, but there were two or three games that were very, very similar to Dungeon Master. But Wayne just felt, well, sure I could try to sue these people, but ultimately it’s not worth it, it costs money and it’s not a positive thing to do in the world so he just didn’t think.

Jiří Mataj 01:30:39 Yeah, I think it was not even feasible or possible to sue them. I was just thinking that like maybe Interplay was delaying Dungeon Master II, in order to release it later and then hop on the popularity and after releasing this, your game Skullkeep, releasing Stonekeep, which really sounded similar. But in the end, Stonekeep didn’t sell well, so it didn’t work. What they maybe were trying to achieve by like postponing the release of Dungeon Master II. Yeah, but back to your Sony days. So basically on this ESPN Extreme Games, you already did the 3D graphics, like the area where the player is going on skateboard or bike, you were responsible for this.

Bert Huntsinger 01:31:38 On the Extreme Games, mostly what I did was the backgrounds, we did San Francisco, so I built San Francisco. In fact, San Francisco, if I remember right, was the first environment that I built for that game. And as I said, Manuel Valdez was the one who did the actual character sprites of the skateboarder and the luge person and whatnot.

But I did the backgrounds. So I did the background of San Francisco and the other levels, and it was kind of like the first level took a really long time to do because we were trying to figure out how to do it. And then each successive level took about half the time of the prior level.

Jiří Mataj 01:32:55 And these backgrounds, you mean the backgrounds which the players see when you are driving and they are like scrolling, like this parallax scrolling background, basically. You did this.

Bert Huntsinger 01:33:08 Yeah, I mean, it was an actual 3D track where you’ve got a bunch of polygons going down this way for the buildings or what have you, and then you’ve got the road. And then you’ve got the background background, if I remember right.

Jiří Mataj 01:33:32 Okay, by background, you mean the actual track, like the 3D space.

Bert Huntsinger 01:33:40 Yes. Yeah, the actual track.

Jiří Mataj 01:33:43 Okay.

Bert Huntsinger 01:33:44 Yeah, the actual track is what I mean.

Jiří Mataj 01:33:47 Okay, thank you. Yeah. And basically, yeah, I wanted to ask at this moment in Sony, were you considering yourself already as some kind of a professional game maker, or was it still just like fun?

Bert Huntsinger 01:34:12 Oh, sure.

Jiří Mataj 01:34:12 Yeah, yeah.

Bert Huntsinger 01:34:14 No, no, I, at that point, yeah, at the point I got hired by Sony, I definitely considered myself a professional game maker. It was kind of like, it was one of those things where it was like, when I worked for FTL, FTL was well known in the gaming community, but not outside of it. So my mom didn’t know who FTL was, even though my cousin worked for FTL.

But when I went to work for Sony, my mom’s like, “Oh, you’re working for Sony!”. It’s like she knew who Sony was. So in a way, working for Sony felt like, yeah, okay.

Now I’m working for my second game company. And so I’m definitely a professional game maker now.

Jiří Mataj 01:35:15 Yeah, good, good. And after Sony, you went to Midway in 1995, and you worked there on this ambitious Mortal Kombat-like fighting game, which was named BioFreaks. But unfortunately, this game, it was intended for arcades, but it was not released for arcades. And it was released, I believe, only for PC. I don’t know, maybe PlayStation. But it was…

Bert Huntsinger 01:35:47 Nintendo 64.

Jiří Mataj 01:35:48 Okay, Nintendo 64.

Jiří Mataj 01:35:51 But this game was not successful. The reception was not well. But still, you mentioned this in your LinkedIn, that something which was quite significant for you.

Bert Huntsinger 01:36:06 Yeah, and BioFreaks was interesting, because we did a really large amount of work on it. And I created and designed both characters and levels for that. And one of the interesting things about, even though BioFreaks itself was not successful, I left the team once BioFreaks was over. But the rest of the team took the same, all the same technology they developed for BioFreaks and made a game called Ready to Rumble. And that one, I think, was more successful.

Jiří Mataj 01:37:01 Yeah, it was also a 3D fighting game. And then in this Midway, like, how was it in Midway in comparison with Sony? Was it similar?

Bert Huntsinger 01:37:19 No, Midway was… It didn’t quite have, at least for me, it didn’t quite have the same kind of family feeling. You go to Midway, and each team was isolated from the other teams at the company, where you had your team area that you’d go to, and you had a key card, and you needed the key card to get into your team area and to your office.

And so you knew what was going on with your game, but you didn’t really know anything about what anybody else was working on. And that was by design. And I will say one of the good… Midway, I’d say, was a much, much more serious atmosphere compared to FTL.

Jiří Mataj 01:38:34 And even compared to Sony?

Bert Huntsinger 01:38:37 Yeah, even compared to Sony. Sony was much more friendly. But yeah, Midway was much more serious. And it’s funny because there’s a lot of things that I actually can’t say about Midway.

Jiří Mataj 01:39:10 You still have confidentiality agreement?

Bert Huntsinger 01:39:17 Well, that, well, yeah, but let’s just, we’ll leave it at that. But there’s just a lot of things I can’t say about Midway, for various reasons. One of the fun things about Midway that I enjoyed is in the lunchroom, they had a bunch of pinball machines and arcade games. So that was the great thing is when you would take your lunch, you could play a whole bunch of video games for free, that you’d normally have to pay for. So that was a lot of fun.

Jiří Mataj 01:40:03 And you still like the games? Although you already were like a professional game developer, you still like to play it?

Bert Huntsinger 01:40:13 Oh yeah, I love playing video games.

Jiří Mataj 01:40:18 And even now, you still like playing to this day?

Bert Huntsinger 01:40:23 Yeah, right now I’m playing a lot of Starfield along with my daughter. And I’m also trying to work on my own video game. I’m trying to make an open world game. But it’s still got a long ways to go.

Jiří Mataj 01:40:49 Yeah, we will come to that.

Bert Huntsinger 01:40:54 It is nice to have Unreal Engine. With Unreal Engine, anybody can use it. There’s no fee to use it. There’s only a fee if you make a successful game. So it’s nice because you can use Unreal Engine and try your luck at making your own game. And if it goes well, that’s great. And if it doesn’t, well, you’re not out any money. You’re just out some time.

Jiří Mataj 01:41:31 Yeah, it’s certainly like all these engines like Unity, Godot, Unreal. It’s very, very nice. We are basically standing on the shoulders of giants because a lot of work was already done. And thanks to this competition, these game engines are very, very accessible. And you don’t need to pay for anything. Yeah, good. During your midway year, you also worked on Nintendo 64 conversions of Quake. You did some kind of texture work.

Bert Huntsinger 01:42:13 Yeah, that’s right. I forgot about that. But yeah, we converted Quake to Nintendo 64. I actually did a lot of that myself. I don’t remember who else worked on that. But I know I did a lot of that work myself. In essence, it amounted to taking a lot of detail out of the various levels, trying to make sure that you kept the core of the game itself, but just removing a lot of the detail out of the levels and vastly simplifying them.

Jiří Mataj 01:42:53 Yeah. So you were like programming also, like doing some engine modifications of this Quake game for Nintendo 64 or just removing some levels?

Bert Huntsinger 01:43:09 Yeah, any programming would have been done by somebody else for that. My part of it was just going through the levels and removing detail from the levels to simplify them.

Jiří Mataj 01:43:27 Good. Okay. And in 1998, you joined Angel Studios. And in 2002, this studio was bought by Take-Two and merged with Rockstar. So this is how you get into Rockstar, too. And prior to this merge, you worked on this arcade racing games, Smugglers Run 1 and Smugglers Run 2. And Smugglers Run 1 was a launch title for PlayStation 2. And you are credited as the lead artist there.

Bert Huntsinger 01:44:06 So yeah, Angel Studios was the first company that I actually sought out. And it was mostly because I knew a lot of the people that worked there already. And things weren’t going well for me at Midway. So I got the job there. And at the time, what Angel Studios was doing was they weren’t really making their own games. What they were doing is they were making games for other people, other publishers. So they were making games for Microsoft, Nintendo, and Take-Two, or Rockstar, also Capcom, and Disney. In fact, Angel Studios did a simulated Jungle Cruise for Disney.

Jiří Mataj 01:45:36 Like for Disneyland? Or for Disney as a video game? Or for Disney?

Bert Huntsinger 01:45:41 Yeah, what it was a kind of a real-time interactive thing where you were on a pretend raft and you had these visuals all around you. I never played it myself. But, and there were dinosaurs in it and stuff like that. And so it was sort of, kind of, sort of virtual reality, but without glasses, where you felt like you were going down this river, but it was all virtual reality. But anyway, yeah, so when I got hired at Angel, that’s what Angel was doing, was they were making games for other companies.

They initially put me on a golf game that Nintendo was developing. I think, ultimately it was a pretty good golf game. But it basically got cancelled. And really, I don’t know for sure, but I think Nintendo took a lot of the ideas from what we were working on and just took it directly to somewhere else in Nintendo and made the same game just somewhere else. But in any case, the golf game didn’t work out. So then I worked on a few other games.

Ultimately, I got put on Smuggler’s Run. Well, Smuggler’s Run actually might have been right after the golf game. But on Smuggler’s Run, yeah, they made me lead artist. And I felt like I did pretty well on that. Because one of my complaints, generally at the time, about the video game industry, was that they weren’t very well organized. That they kind of made stuff up as they went along, that they didn’t plan things out in advance. They didn’t do scheduling or any sort of serious organization. And so that’s why there was always a lot of crunch time and a lot of overtime. And so when I became lead artist, I really wanted to say, “Okay, I’m going to do this my way”. And so I very carefully scheduled the first game. And it worked out really well. I knew that things always go wrong somewhere. I knew that there’s always going to be delays. So I actually scheduled for a certain amount of problems to occur. And it worked really well. So nobody had to work overtime. And the first game, I think, turned out pretty well. We started working on the second game, if I remember. And that’s where Rockstar kind of had a problem.

Because, see, Rockstar, we had a number of games that were being done for Rockstar. And little did I know that at that time, they were already kind of, I think, in negotiations to buy the company. And so the people at Rockstar, they’d walk through, and they’d see everybody working long hours and working overtime. And then our team wasn’t there because they’d gone home for the night. And so they’re like, “Well, what’s with this game team? Why are they not here working late hours?” And the answer was, well, they did all the work they were scheduled to do for the day. And they’re on track to finish the game on time. So there’s no need for them to work extra hours. And so from their standpoint, we were being lazy. Because it’s like, well, everybody else is working long hours. Why aren’t these guys? And the answer was, well, we scheduled really well. And so we didn’t need to. So what ended up happening is that our producer came to us and said, well, you got to work overtime. Just because this is what Rockstar wants. So we started doing our scheduled work, staying longer, longer days and doing our scheduled work. And so we ended up going, “Oay, well, we’re going to have a lot of extra time. What are we going to do with our extra time?” Because, they’re making us work overtime, which creates more time than we need. So what are we going to do with the extra time? So we actually made a whole another level that wasn’t originally planned for. And it wasn’t originally part of the deal. But, we made an extra level for the game.

Jiří Mataj 01:52:07 And basically, you as a lead artist, you were responsible for like all the assets, like 3D graphics in the game and these things, basically.

Bert Huntsinger 01:52:23 So as lead artist, I scheduled the project. I hired the artists. In other words, it started with just the management for that game, which I was a part of. So I had to hire all the artists that were going to work with me. So we went through all the interviews and I hired the artists that I wanted, which was very nice to be able to actually choose the people that I wanted to work with. And yeah, I mean, I was responsible. If anything wasn’t done on the game or if it looked bad, ultimately it was my fault. So I had to make sure it all worked and it all looked good and it all worked well. Like if the frame rate was slow, that was me too. Because I had to say, okay, you need to cut a hundred trees out of this level because it’s running too slow.

Jiří Mataj 01:53:45 And like both of these games, they were, I think, quite successful. Smuggler’s Run 1 as a launch title for PlayStation 2. I think it was quite well received. And I noticed that, I don’t know about the 1, but the number 2, there are even video sequences with actual actors in Smuggler’s Run 2.

Bert Huntsinger 01:54:08 Oh yeah.

Jiří Mataj 01:54:09 Also involved somehow in this, like shooting. Yeah.

Bert Huntsinger 01:54:15 So, well, Rockstar was responsible for that part. They made the video parts with the actual actors and we made the game. And then we obviously inserted their video into the game.

Jiří Mataj 01:54:35 Yeah. I just played it for the purpose of this interview. And I felt that the video is maybe a little bit disjointed from the game, that it’s not like, yeah, it’s not fitting into the game. Maybe it could be better even without these video sequences.

Bert Huntsinger 01:54:56 I think the real star of Smuggler’s Run was a guy, his first name was Alex. Funny, I can’t remember his last name, but Alex programmed the cars for the game. He programmed like the, he set the cars up so that they would do all the physics correctly and all of that. That really made the game a lot better, made it a lot very fun.

Jiří Mataj 01:55:38 After these games, after Smuggler’s Runs, you ended as a 2D slash 3D artist on Red Dead Revolver, which is a game, which is considered to be a spiritual precursor to Red Dead Redemption, which is quite a famous game even nowadays. So how was your experience?

Bert Huntsinger 01:56:05 Red Dead Redemption was, I guess, in a sense, the reboot of the sort of Red Dead series. But originally, but yeah, Red Dead Revolver went on for a long time at Angel Studios. It was originally not a Rockstar game. It was originally, I don’t know if I can say the name of the publisher, but it was originally being made by a different publisher, it was being made by a different game company. And so for a long time, we were working on Red Dead Revolver with that game company. And they had various ideas on how they wanted the game to be. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but somewhere along the way they gave up on it. And I guess Rockstar took it over and it became a Rockstar game. But it was a really good game at the time. And I worked on a number of the game levels for Red Dead Revolver. One of the interesting things about Red Dead Revolver was, if I remember right, I think the shadows for the landscape, or the shadows for the environment were done with vertex coloring. So, in essence, you had to actually make vertices in the 3D geometry to create the shadows.

Jiří Mataj 01:58:29 It was not dynamically related.

Bert Huntsinger 01:58:33 Yeah, not definitely not dynamic, no. And at least for the environment, it was not dynamic. It may have been dynamic, I’m not sure, but it may have been dynamic for the characters, actual characters. But not for the environment. So, I worked on a few of the environments for that game. I worked particularly on the mansion environment. And then they also, at one point, they decided that they wanted to have a kind of a two-player arena mode. Where you and another player could play against each other in one of the environments. So then they had me go through the environments and do kind of what I did on Doom. Where I paired the environment down and removed a lot of the detail to simplify it so that it could be used for two players.

Jiří Mataj 01:59:44 It would be split-screen probably on consoles.

Bert Huntsinger 01:59:49 Yes, yes. And then one of the other things I did was I did a number of… The 3D program Maya has a scripting feature where you can script things in Maya. You can make little tools in Maya. And so I made a tool in Maya that would actually automatically cut the geometry to make the shadows and stuff. I don’t remember exactly how it worked, but it was something along the lines of that you could shine, you could take a virtual light in Maya and then use the shadow that the light created to actually cut out the area for the vertex shading. But anyway, it was a while ago, so I don’t remember exactly how I did that. But that was one of the things I did is I made little tools to make it easier to do the environment modeling for that game.

Jiří Mataj 02:01:06 And after Red Dead Revolver, you left Rockstar, I believe. It was 2006.

Bert Huntsinger 02:01:16 While I was making Red Dead Revolver, I… Well, first of all, the reason I was brought onto Red Dead Revolver is that one of my friends had been working on Red Dead Revolver, and he passed away. And so I was put on to replace him. But while I was working on Red Dead Revolver, my father got lung cancer and he was dying. So while he was in that situation, he moved in with me and I was taking care of him. And so… Oh, sorry. Okay. No, I got things mixed up. Okay. Sorry.

Jiří Mataj 02:02:47 No problem.

Bert Huntsinger 02:02:51 So my friend did die on Red Dead Revolver and I did replace him. Okay. My father’s death though, there were actually two games I worked on after Red Dead Revolver while I was at Rockstar. One of them was a game called The Agent Game, which was never released. The Agent Game was like a 1960s James Bond style game. We made a demo of it and it was really fun and it was really good. But ultimately, for whatever reason, it was a game that never got made. So it was actually when I was working on The Agent Game that I was taking care of my dad and that my dad was dying. And a good chunk of the team on that game actually got to go to various countries. They went to Egypt and took some photos in Egypt. They went to Washington, D.C. and took a bunch of photos in Washington, D.C. Then they brought them back to us. On that game, I was in charge of… I was not the lead artist, but I was a sub-lead in charge of the environmental artists. And I made almost all of Washington, D.C. for that game. And it worked well for the initial proof-of-concept demo that we did for Rockstar. But ultimately, I got moved off of that game and they were going to have me as lead artist on another game. And that’s about the time that I left because at that point, my dad had passed away. And I decided that it was time for me to go freelance.

And that was the time when I left San Diego and I moved to South Dakota. Because my dad’s death basically made me realize that life is short or it can be short. And that you should do what you can to enjoy your life while you have it. So that’s when I moved out here and then started just working freelance.

Jiří Mataj 02:06:05 I think you did a great decision. I think this crunching and it sounds like you are quite capable project manager that you manage this team on Smuggler’s Run quite nicely. If you were the only team which was not crunching, this is quite an achievement, I believe.

Bert Huntsinger 02:06:31 Yeah, and that was one of those situations that was interesting because prior to the game being made, we presented them with what we were going to do when. We gave them the schedules. Rockstar signed off on everything. They were like, this is fine. But then when they saw we were all not working overtime, that’s when they got distressed because they thought, oh, what are they trying to do here? The way they saw it is that we were somehow taking advantage of them.

Jiří Mataj 02:07:15 Unfortunately, you somehow stepped outside of the norm. You were not behaving like a normal development team.

Bert Huntsinger 02:07:28 Yeah, and in one sense, I should have anticipated that and been smarter about it and had the team work a certain amount of overtime. The nice thing is when we did work overtime to make Rockstar feel better, there was no point in the game where we were not stressed because we knew that we’d finish everything on time. But I do look at that point and I’m really happy with the job I did on those games that I was the lead artist on.

Jiří Mataj 02:08:21 And do you have some secret recipe? Were you using some agile methodology to be able to project these timelines accurately or was it just experience?

Bert Huntsinger 02:08:34 It was mostly just experience of knowing how long things would take. The other big thing is I didn’t just create one schedule and call it done. I was constantly working and reworking the schedule dynamically as the project went on and shifting things around to take into account how things were going. I certainly didn’t have a perfect vision of exactly how things would go. I had a pretty good idea because of my experience. But mostly it was me going, “Okay, well, we were going to work on this this week, but we can’t work on this because the programmers don’t have something done yet, so we’ll shift this to later in the month and we’ll work on this other thing instead. And, okay, this took a little longer than I said, so we’ll have to see if we can make up time somewhere over here.” It was a very dynamic scheduling process that constantly changed and adapted depending on what happened.

Jiří Mataj 02:10:01 After you moved to South Dakota and stopped being this professional game developer, but you switched to being a freelance developer, let’s say, what projects were you working on or what were you doing?

Bert Huntsinger 02:10:30 Mostly, early on, I was doing some computer graphics for some of my friends that I’d worked with at Rockstar who’d moved on to other things but needed graphics. And then a little later on, somebody who knew of my work hired me to do VR stuff. The first VR job I got was where somebody wanted to make a VR police training application where police would put on a VR headset and then they’d be in different scenarios and they’d learn to be better policemen. That was the goal, but unfortunately, that project didn’t work out because that was a project where the programmer just decided to leave the project for no apparent reason. He decided to leave the project, and so that project didn’t work out. But that was the case where I started focusing on learning Unreal Engine and learning to program in Unreal Engine.

So I started just doing all the VR development myself. And so I worked for several years for this one company that generally a lot of what my work ended up being was you have, let’s say, an entrepreneur that wants to get funding for an idea. And it’s an idea that’s hard to just verbally explain to somebody. And if you make a little 2D video of the idea, it doesn’t really convey how the idea works. So they wanted VR. They wanted the feeling that you’re there and that you’re actually seeing the finished product in front of you and interacting with it. So a lot of the VR jobs I did was that, was making kind of the finished product before it was finished.

Jiří Mataj 02:13:39 It’s like some tangible PowerPoint presentation in full 3D so they can really see the product.

Bert Huntsinger 02:13:51 Yes, exactly. So that the money people, the people who were going to invest in the project, so that you could put them in front of the product before it even existed and let them play with it.

Jiří Mataj 02:14:13 Interesting thing. And maybe do you remember some kind of interesting product which you presented this way?

Bert Huntsinger 02:14:24 There’s a spot off of the coast of Florida, which is one of the few spots where the current there goes very fast. So it’s a great place for putting turbines in the water and generating electricity. And this one company wanted to do that. But one of the troubles they came across was people worried because what they imagined, what people imagined in their head, they imagined like a blender, right? Something spinning very fast, and they didn’t want to see fish going into this thing and getting blended up.

Jiří Mataj 02:15:15 Like a fish soup product.

Bert Huntsinger 02:15:19 Right. So they were trying to explain to them that no, you don’t understand, these turbines are very large and they’re turning very slowly. So it’s no problem for the fish. So that’s one of the things that they had me make a 3D interactive environment of, was where you actually, I put you under the water where you can see these turbines turning slowly and they’re very large in your view. And I had schools of fish swimming around and the schools of fish would swim in and around the turbines. And it was very easy to see that, okay, the fish are not going to have a problem with these turbines, that they’re very safe because they move so slowly.

Jiří Mataj 02:16:24 Yeah, it sounds quite interesting. Now in Czech Republic, in one of the cities, we have a problem that the inhabitants there, they don’t want to have elderly house, like house for elderly people built next to the school. So I immediately imagined that maybe some kind of 3D presentation would help to like convince them that it will not cause any troubles because they have some stereotypes about this elderly houses, house for elderly people, that there will be like death every day, that they will be dying and that it will look bad. So I see that this visualization can really help alleviate some kind of prejudices or some wrong reasoning.

Bert Huntsinger 02:17:21 Yeah, well, it definitely, in the right circumstance, it can help a lot because, when you see something in front of you in 3D and it’s like you’re there, it immediately makes clear a lot of things that are hard to explain.

Jiří Mataj 02:17:45 Yeah, interesting. Like it’s basically some kind of visual storytelling or like visual fact transmission, fact explanation.

Bert Huntsinger 02:17:58 Yeah, exactly.

Jiří Mataj 02:17:59 Yeah. And okay, so these projects, you are still doing these projects, these VR projects, like up to this day or?

Bert Huntsinger 02:18:12 Not as much lately, because I’m trying to take time to make my own game. But I am still active and talking to the people who typically hire me to do these projects. And I would, depending on circumstances, I’ll still do some of them.

But for now, I’m trying to spend most of my time working on my own game. Currently, it’s a third person open world game. And the general premise is that you’re on a colony planet. It’s a bunch of people who decided to go to another planet, another Earth-like planet and start a colony. And what the big thing that happens is that in traveling to this, it’s kind of like the thing where nobody knows how to make a pencil, right? Because to make a pencil, you need somebody who knows how to make the rubber for the eraser on the pencil and you need somebody who knows how to make the graphite that’s inside the pencil and you need somebody who knows how to carve the wood to make the pencil. And so something as simple as a pencil is made by a lot of different people with a lot of different expertise. So, on this colony planet, part of the idea is, well, they traveled to this other planet, but they lost a lot of technological progress because they took a lot of the technological progress for granted. And they didn’t realize that they didn’t have all the information to, say, for example, make microchips.

So, it starts where there’s a certain technological regression, and they have to figure out how to do things over again. The other part of it is that the idea is that they wanted to have a colony where the government was run by artificial intelligence and robots. And so, in the story for the game, certain things go wrong with that idea, but that’s kind of the general kind of core ideas behind the story for the game.

Jiří Mataj 02:21:42 And the game will be a third-person action game, or will it be about crafting, or will it be RPG?

Bert Huntsinger 02:21:52 Kind of RPG. There will definitely be crafting involved. I want it to have kind of a lot of things where you’re putting modular pieces together to create machines. And one of the things I want for it is I want to have kind of a very super simple logic-based language so that you can actually program the machines to do things. So, that’s kind of the big game mechanic that would be sort of different, because the idea is that I want people to be exposed to a very simple form of programming.

Jiří Mataj 02:22:57 So, there will be this educational aspect in the game.

Bert Huntsinger 02:23:04 But it’ll also have plenty of action and dungeon crawling and that sort of thing.

Jiří Mataj 02:23:13 It sounds quite ambitious for a single developer. You’re doing it in Unreal Engine, I suppose?

Bert Huntsinger 02:23:22 It is. I have to admit that that is one thing I tend to do, is jump into very ambitious personal projects. So, we’ll see how it goes, but I think I’m pretty sure I can pull it off. But, yeah, it is ambitious and it has been a big challenge so far.

Jiří Mataj 02:23:53 How long are you working on it?

Bert Huntsinger 02:23:57 Well, I’ve already been working on it for a couple of years now and I’m probably going to work on it for at least a couple more years.

Jiří Mataj 02:24:10 Yeah. So, it sounds like it’s your passionate project, like something you probably had this long time in your head already when you were working for the other companies.

Bert Huntsinger 02:24:25 Yeah, it’s something that’s been slowly developing over a long period of time and I’ve kind of generated a lot of documents and artwork for it. I’m constantly working with the ideas of the story in the game, what I’m going to do in it.

Jiří Mataj 02:24:49 Yeah, yeah. It’s really sounded quite complex and ambitious. And is there some, like, or what is the current state? Do you have, I don’t know, some levels or some areas modeled already in Unreal Engine or some character models? What is the status?

Bert Huntsinger 02:25:16 At various points I’ve had different, it’s been in different states. For a while it was going to be a VR game. I currently have a very, very simple level. Because I switched from VR to third person, I had to start a lot of things over again because a VR character is designed very, very differently from a third person character. But right now I’ve got a third person character that has all of its locomotion. At various points I’ve had various designs for the character. And I’ve made some, let’s see, I’ve made some environments or environmental things. Let’s see. Let me see if I can find something that I can show you. Let’s see. Check real quick here. Okay, let’s try. Yeah, let’s try that. So, oh, and the other thing is, is there’s going to be, like, on this planet that the humans go to to start a colony, it’s a planet that was previously had an alien species living on it. So this is a, let’s see, sending me a picture. This is one of the buildings from the previous alien species.

Here is the image that Bert shared:

Jiří Mataj 02:27:39 Yeah, I will add this to the, because I will produce some accompanying article for this interview. So I will. Can I use it?

Bert Huntsinger 02:28:00 Oh, sure. Yeah, you can use it. And it’s made up of several modular pieces, so they can be put together in different ways.

Jiří Mataj 02:28:07 It looks like some kind of alien shrine or something like this. Yeah, okay, so you are like modeling these things, like these 3D models and these buildings and placing it into your world somehow.

Bert Huntsinger 02:28:28 Yeah, and this picture that I sent you, the idea behind it, this particular building is that it’s got several doors and depending on which door you go into, you’re in a different level. So all the doors don’t lead to the same place.

Jiří Mataj 02:28:51 And so it’s like a portal then, like a portal leading to some other levels or locations. Yeah, and during the development, did you consider maybe like recruiting or inviting some of your former colleagues to help you with this project?

Bert Huntsinger 02:29:19 Yeah, for a while Doug was considering working on it with me, but then he decided not to. And the opposite has also happened. At one point, Wayne is, I think, working on a game of his own and he asked me to help him with it. And I started helping him with it, but then I was busy with my own project, so I just focused more on my own project.

Jiří Mataj 02:29:58 Yeah, so it sounds like the former FTL guys, you had your own projects now. Everybody got his own project. Interesting. So it looks like it’s still in the early phase, your project. It’s like you are estimating that it will take some more years still, it will be completed. And maybe are you aiming for some kind of a minimal viable product, some kind of this, how is it called, a vertical slice or horizontal slice? I don’t know these terms.

Bert Huntsinger 02:30:39 Yeah, I mean, I’m hoping that it won’t be too much longer before I’ll have something like that. I mean, I do have a test level that I run around with my character. But yeah, currently I’m working on the user interface for the game. And then once that’s done, I’m going to give the character weapons and then I’m going to work on the AI. And I’m actually hoping that a lot of that will come along fairly quickly. Because I’m leveraging the fact that there’s a lot of people who make tools and assets for Unreal Engine that you can just buy. So I’m hoping to leverage that and buy a lot of the systems that I intend to use. And I’ve already done that a certain amount. But yeah, I’m hoping to have something much closer to an actual playable game by the end of this year.

Jiří Mataj 02:32:17 Wow.

Bert Huntsinger 02:32:21 And when I say that, I’m not talking about everything’s done. I’m just talking about the very basics. The very basics where you have NPCs and AI characters and you can do most of the sorts of gameplay that’ll be in the game. That’s what I’m hoping for.

Jiří Mataj 02:32:51 And are you considering opening a Steam page for this game or even crowdfunding, like placing it on Kickstarter or something?

Bert Huntsinger 02:33:05 Well, I don’t know if I’ll try to crowdfund, but when it’s done, I’ll definitely try to sell it through Steam and learn how to work with Steam to promote and sell my game. But right now, obviously, my focus is get the game made. And then when I have the game, I’ll figure out how to distribute it.

Jiří Mataj 02:33:31 Well, I’m really eager to see the game, especially if you mentioned that there will be also dungeon crawling. I guess this time it will be free roaming. It will not be the step system. So it sounds interesting and really ambitious. Yeah. Good. Good. Okay. So I think we addressed every topic which we prepared. So is there something you wanted maybe to mention still?

Bert Huntsinger 02:34:14 No, I think we covered all of it.

Jiří Mataj 02:34:17 Yeah. So I’m very, very grateful that I have this opportunity to speak with you. Of course, I’m mostly interested in Dungeon Master II, but your later career or the later games, it was quite interesting for me too, especially when you were speaking about your days in Angel Studio, that you were a very efficient lead artist. This is quite interesting. Yeah. So I hope you will be successful in this next project.

I kind of like to see some kind of Dungeon Master 3 or something. Yeah. But of course, the days of dungeon crawlers are a bit past. Have you seen this game’s Legend of Grimrock and Legend of Grimrock 2? These dungeon crawler games, they were like…

Bert Huntsinger 02:35:18 Sounds familiar, but I don’t know that I’ve seen it.

Jiří Mataj 02:35:23 Basically, I think developers from Finland, this game came out maybe, I don’t know, five, number two came out five years ago or something like this. They were basically trying to recreate or revive this dungeon crawlers genre. And it was quite popular, these games. And the first game is like a Dungeon Master and the second game is a little bit like a Dungeon Master II because they have open environments there.

Bert Huntsinger 02:35:55 Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Jiří Mataj 02:35:57 And then also I forgot to mention that there was this Dungeon Master Nexus. It was a licensed game probably made for Sega Saturn in 1998. Are you aware of it, this game?

Bert Huntsinger 02:36:12 No, it doesn’t sound familiar.

Jiří Mataj 02:36:15 Yeah. I think it was made by a Japanese studio and only the name was licensed. And it has this free movement, something like Ultima Underworld, but it’s very true to Dungeon Master formula, this Dungeon Master Nexus game. It’s playable through emulation nowadays.

So, Bert, thank you. Thank you very much. Also, I thank listeners that they were listening. I think it was quite long, but interesting interview. So, I wish you a lot of luck and I will certainly reach to you again and ask you about progress in your current game.

Bert Huntsinger 02:37:06 Well, thank you. It was good to talk to you.