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Old School Gamer Magazine Exclusive: Jared Hardy Talks Spyro the Dragon
Old School Gamer Magazine chats with game developer Jared Hardy, who discusses his role in the original Spyro the Dragon on PlayStation.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Were you a gamer growing up?
Jared Hardy: My sister and I had an Atari 2600 as little kids, and a few friends with a Nintendo (NES). I spent most of my tween allowance and chore money on arcade games, a Sega Genesis, and a small collection of cartridges. I exchanged some of these and early PC games (Wing Commander and Doom mods to mind) with friends in High School, and played Super Nintendo at their places. I played a couple of games on the Prodigy service and my dad’s BBS before the Internet reached any homes.
Old School Gamer Magazine: How did you get involved in the industry?
Hardy: I got a scholarship and some grants to go to USC, which I chose over UC Berkeley because they had better Arts and Cognitive Science minor programs available that I could balance with my Computer Science major, and animation cross-over curriculum with their prominent Cinema School. I went in with the intent of learning 3D art and AI programming to take into the video game industry, and by my Junior year in ’97 I wanted to go into IBM Research or any similar position. My Fine Art Minor credit load pushed me into an extra winter semester, so I was looking for a summer job and a school friend introduced me to this little known studio called Insomniac Games. I was employee ~13 at their Los Angeles office starting in May that summer, I interned there my last winter semester ’98. I remained in a mix of IT and Software Engineering positions there for 7 years, including orchestrating their entire IT infrastructure move and several expansions into their offices in Burbank, where they still operate today.
Old School Gamer Magazine: What was your role on Spyro?
Hardy: Information Technology and Network (IT) support, sorting and occlusion flagging (all necessary because they didn’t have any Z-buffer memory available on PlayStation 1), occasional Moby (our internal term for “mobile game objects” or characters) Level of Detail (LOD) model editing, and some Quality Assurance (QA) playthroughs. I helped with developing some more automatic occlusion and sorting tools in later games based on my experience using the manual 3D flagging tools on the first Spyro the Dragon game.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Any fun stories or lessons learned?
Hardy: Transparent polygons were the bane of my existence until Z-buffers and OpenGL-CPU shared memory pathways improved. I should have been more willing to throw away old work, because new technologies often superseded their need. The industry on average doesn’t re-use technology enough, because they tend to have high turn-over rates.
Old School Gamer Magazine: How did this cycle help you become the developer you are today?
Hardy: I learned a lot, including what not to do, and which development technologies would last longer, which is why I’m an online developer and DevOps Manager now.
Old School Gamer Magazine: Any other things not widely known about the game that’ll connect fans with it in a new way?
Hardy: The Spyro Reignited Trilogy reboot was completed by people working for or contracting with Toys for Bob that were part of the original Spyro team, especially the great Game Designer: Mike Stout. They had the memories of what made the game great outside the limits of then-current technology, and made sure the higher resolution version kept all those special details.
Old School Gamer Magazine: How do you want the game to be remembered?
Hardy: As a fun childhood memory, including by children today.
Old School Gamer Magazine: What would you tell the Spyro version of yourself, if you could?
Hardy: I can be a dragon?! Oh you mean the Spyro developer age version of myself? I would tell him:
“Don’t get too caught up in this. It’s fun now, but corporations are ultimately about profit not people, so they’ll all eventually sell you out, or get bought by an entity that will do it for them. Organize your fellow workers democratically, early and often. Don’t resent SAG-AFTRA members for learning that lesson well before your own cohort, and thus are getting better pay for better preparation.”
Old School Gamer Magazine: What was it like to be a part of Insomniac back then?
Hardy: A lot of fun! We had a lot of good support from Universal and Sony early on, which soured from Universal during the transition to PlayStation 2, and made business considerations less fun later. Thankfully Sony remained a great supporter during the tumultuous PS2 and PS3 eras. It was definitely a smaller and tighter-knit team of friendly people until the Ratchet and Clank series took off, before the team expanded (possibly too rapidly) during the early PS3 era
Old School Gamer Magazine: Anything else you’d like to add?
Hardy: I think everyone still in the game industry should Unionize, and form democratic worker owned and operated Cooperatives. The industry is bigger than Hollywood, yet they are much farther behind on basic worker rights and diversity. They should all have a greater share of the wealth they’re creating.
The post Old School Gamer Magazine Exclusive: Jared Hardy Talks Spyro the Dragon appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
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