Talk:Jon Burton

To do

• Pre-Traveller's Tales history.
• Section about both his prototype releases and his sharing of behind-the-scenes development and production information. Also technical explanations and guides to the more tricky stuff like Sonic R's transparent fading.
• AntStream stuff.
• Sonic 3D Blast DX, romhacks, similar projects.
• From that PeoplePill reference: "He wrote the original story for, and produced and directed Lego Batman: The Movie – DC Super Heroes Unite. In 2014, he is the co-executive producer for Warner Bros. 2014 film The Lego Movie. He has received five British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards." Look into these, get the original refs for them, write them into the article.

CartridgeCulture (talk) 06:25, 4 October 2021 (EDT)

History outline

• Upon a visit to his Uncle, experienced his first computer: the VIC-20. After typing in one of the BASIC programs on the back page of the computer's manual, and seeing a small UFO move across the screen with accompanying sound effects, Burton was hooked.
• Later acquired his first computer, a ZX Spectrum. From here he decided to become a game developer, and dedicated a significant amount of his free time to coding various games (first in BASIC, then FORTH, then assembler, etc)
• Finished a few assembler games for the ZX Spectrum and sent them to Firebird for possible publishing, but all were denied.
• Bought an Amiga in the mid 1980s and had his first exposure to the demoscene and its advanced graphical effects, especially hacked intros and their displays.
• After a few months dabbling in the demoscene, met freelance artist Andy Ingram, began development of the Amiga game Leander, and took it to Psygnosis (mostly for development guidance). To their surprise, the company wanted to publish it, so the two formed Traveller's Tales, and 18 months of development later, the game was released for the Amiga in 1991.
• Burton coded much of Leander while attending Liverpool Polytechnic.
• The success of the Amiga release of Leander led to the eventual Mega Drive port, both first exposing Traveller's Tales to the Mega Drive, and establishing the company as a "developer of note" in the demoscene community, as it was one of few demoscene entities to develop and publish a game for a non-computer game system.
• The success also started a fruitful relationship with Psygnosis, with Traveller's Tales benefitting greatly from it: gaining access to experience, advanced development PCs/hardware, and the company's established business and reputation.
• Around the same time, Psygnosis had received a demo from a group named Dionysus titled Puggs in Space, featuring the predecessor to the character Puggsy. Psygnosis was impressed and contracted Dionysus for a full game, but when the group was unable to deliver, Psygnosis turned to Traveller's Tales to create an entirely new game around the character.
• Puggsy was inspired by Burton's love of Super Mario World, and with an added emphasis on physics-based puzzles. It received mostly positive reviews but sold poorly, something Burton ascribed to the publisher's insistence on both marketing the game as a platform game (when it really has an emphasis on puzzle-platforming), and forcing the last-minute inclusion of "training levels" prefacing the actual gameplay which make the game appear as, again, a simple platform game, which the market was saturated with at the time.
• Their third game was Dracula, through Sony Imagesoft (who was in the process of acquiring Psygnosis) (for the eventual launch of the PlayStation?). While Dracula received okay reviews, the professionalism and quality of the company and game impressed Sony enough to be awarded with the rights to develop the next Mickey Mouse game, and this is were things really took off and allowed Traveller's Tales to expand to larger properties, notably Sega.