Futurescape Productions

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Futurescape Productions
Founded: 1992-10-01
Defunct: 1994-08
Headquarters: 3130 La Selva Drive, Suite 104, San Mateo, California 94403, United States

Futurescape Productions was an American video game development studio most known for providing software for dedicated peripherals, such as the Sega VR game Nuclear Rush and the Menacer game Monster Hunter. Founded in October 1992 by two former Electronic Arts programmers and based in San Mateo, California, it exclusively developed games for Sega of America, and served as one of the company's dedicated hardware developers. Unfortunately, a number of complications both within Futurescape and the larger game industry resulted in the studio's closure in August 1994, leaving nearly half a dozen Sega games entirely unreleased.

Company

Beginning

“	Ken and I didn't have a project when we left EA, but we knew that we could develop Genesis titles and we had some ins at SEGA of America, so we hoped we could get a development contract for a couple games with either SEGA or EA. We got the SEGA of America deals first worked out of a garage converted to office space. After signing development contracts with SEGA, we started proper development in earnest, leased some real office space between EA HQ and SEGA of America HQ and started hiring artists, programmers and some business management help.	„
— Kevin McGrath

Co-founded by former Electronic Arts technical director Kevin McGrath and programmer Kenneth Hurley in October 1992, Futurescape Productions was brought into existence to utilize the pair's combined development experience on their own terms. The company consisted of about 9 people, including four artists, three programmers, one business manager, and a CEO, with up to four additional contracted employees, often handling audio and music production. Importantly, the company was located just a few minutes' drive from Sega of America's headquarters.

To support its game development capabilities, Futurescape produced the Romulus, a Genesis emulator board designed to expedite the game creation process. McGrath recalls "Ken and I both agreed that we couldn't afford the standard development kits from SEGA, I think they were around $5K each and the artist stations were not much cheaper. Instead, mostly Ken (I did a little, but mostly Ken did the hardware and I did the firmware work) developed a really slick cartridge emulator with a 9 volt battery backup." According to Hurley, his (and likely most of Futurescape's games) were coded in C, C++, and assembly language.

Operation

McGrath and Hurley used their connections at both Electronic Arts and Sega to enter into a number of Genesis game development contracts through Sega of America. The most notable of these projects, Nuclear Rush, was to be the launch title for the unreleased Sega VR headset, featuring 360° head tracking in a limited 3D world, while another project Monster Hunter, was to be used with the Sega Menacer light gun. The company also created some lesser-known Genesis titles, such as the film noir-inspired platformer Relentless, a port of the IBM PC puzzle game Sid & Al's Incredible Toons, and the sci-fi action game Carnage.

Futurescape was almost exclusively set up around development of Genesis titles; in particular, utilizing traditional memory sizes and workflows. The recently introduced Sega CD offered much larger memory sizes, but to utilize that larger storage in any meaningful way would require both the hiring of more staff and extending the development schedule to accommodate the increase in content. While the company investigated the potential of CD-ROM technology and Sega's expensive Sega CD, it was ultimately decided early on that Futurescape would stick to Genesis development. However, Carnage was reportedly scheduled for the Sega CD by an external publisher, Crystal Dynamics. Further, Sid & Al's Incredible Toons is known to have been ported to the Genesis by Futurescape, while gaming magazines of the day advertised it as being an upcoming Dynamix-published Sega CD title. While CD features may have been planned for later addition by their respective publishers, it does not appear any CD development actually took place at Futurescape.

“	[It was] the scale of the CD projects that was the problem for us. For the Atari 2600 or Apple ][, all you needed was one programmer who could do the coding, "art" and music all alone, which is fine for a 4KB ROM or a 140KB floppy disc. But by the time of the fourth generation of game consoles, you needed a couple artists per project just to be able to complete all of the art asset work (sprites, animations, backgrounds, fonts, etc.) that fit in a 1MB ROM cartridge. So now look at the fifth generation consoles, all of a sudden you go from 1MB ROM to ~650MB CD and the console has a primitive 3D accelerator in it so all of those assets are expected to be rendered in 3D. 3D modeling and animation is a very different skill set than what 2D sprite/background artists trained for, so you probably can't even use the same artists you already have without retraining.	„
— Kevin McGrath

In addition to both its main game development projects and its attempts to monetize its Romulus emulator development board, it assisted fellow American developer PF Magic in the production of Ballz 3D, and appears to have served a role in the development of an IBM PC release titled QuizQuest. "We did have some contracts in the works, but they were mostly for porting existing games or for technical help."

Decline

The Sega VR's cancellation marked the beginning of the end for Futurescape.

“	After the VR Headset never shipped, and thus we never got any royalties from Nuclear Rush, we only managed to pick up a few short term projects and failed to land any long term original title development contracts. We had done very well financially, in my opinion, and never missed a payroll, but it was looking likely that we would have to shut down or start missing payroll. So Ken and I decided to part ways, we helped the artists find new jobs and I went off to Microsoft...	„
— Kevin McGrath

Following the failure and cancellation of Sega of America's virtual reality project, and the subsequent cancellation of Nuclear Rush, Futurescape's prospects looked grim. Despite fully completing the game (and even receiving a completion bonus from Sega for doing so), the cancellation of the platform meant the company could no longer gather royalties from future sales, in addition to losing out on exposing their name to a greater audience. "The projects we tried to line up after it became obvious that neither game would get royalties, didn't provide enough income to cover salaries for the long term. The future of Futurescape did not look very bright, and I didn't want to cut staff to just Ken and I and continue to try getting larger development contracts while we did small piecemeal contracts to keep afloat. So we helped everyone find new employment and closed shop."

In August 1994, Futurescape officially closed its doors, with co-founder Kevin McGrath winding down the company willingly as to not miss a payroll for his employees. He even stuck around to ensure his staff acquired new employment before Futurescape closed down. McGrath went on to become one of the first programmers hired by Microsoft's newly-founded internal game development division, while Kenneth Hurley returned to a similar position at Electronic Arts as senior software engineer.

Development software

Futurescape utilized a number of computer programs to facilitate development of the company's Genesis games, with the software primarily intended for use with the proprietary Romulus cartridge emulator board. These programs were programmed by either Kevin McGrath or Kenneth Hurley, company co-founders.

Name	System	Date	Description	Images
AnimToPCX	IBM PC	199x	AnimToPCX converts Deluxe Paint Animator's ANIM file format to the commonly-used PCX standard.
ANM2FPA	IBM PC	1993	ANM2FPA converts Deluxe Paint Animator's ANIM file format to Futurescape's proprietary FPA image format, and is used for scale-ready sprites and animations with optional run length encoding. It was first created in 1993, and was updated as late as August 9, 1993.
DUMPFPA	IBM PC	1993	DUMPFPA prints basic debugging information regarding a selected FPA file block to the console. It was first created in 1993, and was updated as late as January 26, 1993.
CVTSCE	IBM PC	1993	CVTSCE converts Sega Character Editor image files, like static backgrounds and user interface graphics, to a more usable format. It was first created in late 1992, it was updated as late as August 4, 1993.
LZSSC	IBM PC	199x	LZSSC compresses the output of CVTSCE to LZSS.

Softography

Mega Drive

• Ballz 3D (1994) (some programming)
• Chameleon (unreleased)
• Monster Hunter (unreleased)
• Relentless (unreleased)
• Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (unreleased)
• Nuclear Rush (unreleased)

Mega-CD

• Carnage (unreleased)
• Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (unreleased)

List of staff

• Kevin McGrath
• Kenneth Hurley
• Tom Collie
• Jeff Sturgeon
• Tom DeBry
• Matthew Hubbard
• Rick Lucey
• Tara Packard
• Bill