Marty Franz

Blast Processing stuff

From what I remember, the whole Blast Processing story happened roughly like this: SoA's marketing team was like "frick, SNES can do hardware rotation and mode 7 and stuff, we have to have something which can counter this from a marketing level." And the MD didn't really have something that visibly like "next gen" when compared to that kind of rotation. So they go to the Franz, SoA's most approachable technical advisor/director on this stuff, and ask him what they can use. He basically says "look the big thing is that the genesis is still faster, I know that's not easy to sell but that's the genuine reason that we should roll with." Marketing says "yeah we get it but we need to give it a name." And then he mentions something about the DMA "blasting" stuff onto-- scanlines? From what I understand, he just used a "racing the beam" analogy combined with "sega's fast so we can- race the beam faster and do slightly more complex stuff because of it."? Either way, it's something like that.

Also from what I remember (and this seems to be a theme with SoA), the technical guys (Franz+others) said "hey this is cool but its not massive and you probably shouldn't treat it like such." only for marketing to ignore them and lean full-ham on it. Exact same thing happened with the Sega CD: A good amount of SoA's technical folks were like "yeah CDs are cool but watch your excitement here", and got ignored and dumped tens of millions into FMV and multimedia etcetc. Why even have your technical advisors then? And that's with the understanding of "hey, marketing sometimes looks at things from a big picture and can see angles maybe the on-the-ground employees can't", but thats for marketing and profit trends and ish like that, not technical stuff. You can overcome bad marketing, that's subjective, but if the Sega CD only has so much RAM, no amount of wishful thinking or fancy marketing catchphrases is ever going to change that. And that's kiiiiinda what blast processing is. Now obv the heart of blast processing is rooted in truth (from a certain perspective), but I- there's an analogy one of the old SoA guys used that's awesome, can't remember it but find it. Also obv the overwhelming majority of whatever can be picked out of this rambling will be migrated to the Blast Processing article, but this being here is also to assist in contextualizing Franz vs. the legacy of Blast Processing. Cause it's not- its not an unflattering legacy, but it's not a flattering one either, and I think Franz needs to be separated for that. There's a quote from Ken Horiwitz' history book that's basically Franz using that analogy, and it clearly communicates the whole "I don't think this is a good idea, but if you're forcing something from me.... uhh this I guess."

Also more history here. CartridgeCulture (talk) 00:20, 19 November 2021 (EST)