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Jon Steele


Jon Steele

Jon Steel was one of the members of Attention to Detail and has also worked for Argonaut. He is an industry veteran who has been heavily involved in the Sony PlayStation through most of its iterations.

This interview is more than a couple of years in the making (to say the least)... But I’m happy to finally be able to share this interview with Jon and we explore the fascinating creation of the Multisystem as it would have been.

Some of the interview enquires about his work on Last Ninja 2 and now of course, we are lucky enough to have a copy of the code and have emulated it (although of course – unfortunately we can’t share it without System3's permission ), so the questions can be answered by watching of the emulated game in action.

Interview:


Slipstream
Can you tell me about the early days, at what point in the evolution of the hardware from the Flare One prototype did you guys get involved? Did you have a Flare One prototype to work on before you got the Slipstream

Jon Steele
We started off with a Z80 based Flare One and the early demos and games such as Head Invaders were written on that. When they decided to switch to an Intel processor we initially ported software onto PC before we got any Intel based development hardware. Robert Gill wrote a small blitter emulator for PC so that we could run things on our 286 PCs. Head Invaders running with this blitter emulator looked terrible as all it could draw was weirdly coloured rectangles, but it allowed us to start porting code before the new hardware arrived. I might be wrong about this, it was more than 30 years ago, but I think the first Intel based hardware we got used an 8088 with an 8-bit data bus that matched the other chips (blitter & DSP) data bus sizes before we got any 8086 based hardware with 16 bit blitter &DSP.

Slipstream
Once the Konix Multisystem was at its most likely to be produced stage of development, what had you produced? SDK, Art and Music tools, some demos (presumably as samples for other developers to learn from). Some example “games” used for promotional purposes – e.g.,. Invaders, the 3 modes demo, hitchhiker etc. And finally at least one port of a full game – Last Ninja.
Have I missed anything?

Jon Steele
I guess you could say we provided an SDK, though we didn't provide any code libraries for the Konix Multisystem that I can remember. We provided the art package and the sound package and PDS supplied the assembler/editor/debugger. I don't recall if we gave the source code to the demos etc. to developers or not. Most of those were for the Flare One, but they would have provided some guidance as to how to programme the DSP and blitter. The demos were intended to show what the Flare One/Konix could do. For example, the cube demo had digitised speech (Chris' voice if I recall correctly) playing while it's spinning the 3D wireframe cube with the mini-games on 3 sides. The reason for that was that some developers had said that because the DSP was used for sound and 3D maths they'd only be able to do one or the other i.e. they could do a 2D game with sound or a 3D game without sound, but not a 3D game with sound. The cube demo with sound was made to make clear you could do both. The other major thing we did was the port of Last Ninja II. We also did some work on the floppy disk protection and the BIOS. There was an amusing story about the BIOS. Martin Green had been working on that and came to me one day and said that nobody had remembered to actually have the BIOS show a logo on booting, it just had a black screen. I had to put together some sort of boot logo with a little over 100 bytes to work with. It got done, but only having that tiny amount of space for code and data is why the boot up logo is quite simple.

Slipstream
What can you tell me of Last Ninja, there's still, to this day, a strong fan base for that game series – what was special about the Konix version of the game that you felt would have made it stand out? Was there anything special, or was it a straight port? Was it based on another machine's version – the Amiga, ST or C64/Spectrum...?

Jon Steele
The port of Last Ninja II was planned to be a launch title, so it had to be developed in a relatively short amount of time. It was graphically based in part on the Spectrum version given the similar screen resolutions the Spectrum and Konix had. Chris started off with the Spectrum graphics and coloured them and modified them as needed and added other new graphics as required. An example of that would be the game winning sequence, that was completely new as far as I recall. I believe I had access to some or all of the source code for the Spectrum version and that gave me access to data about floor plans, where objects were and so on. The state of the game when everything fell apart for Konix was that it was close to an Alpha version of the game. It had most of the intended features and they were functional, but hadn't been tweaked or tuned. The game hadn't really been tested by anyone other than me and so the version you've seen isn't very close to showing what the final gameplay should have been.

Slipstream
I’ve seen a few static screen shots and an early video, but I’ve never heard the audio, was it anything special? I’m hoping for 20 channels of beautiful music – but I expect that as is common with the machine (predominately because of the small amount of available RAM) that it could probably only run around 4 to 8 channels AND play a game at the same time.

Jon Steele
I don't recall what the sound system was, but I'm thinking your 4 to 8 channels guess is probably about right. As the game wasn't doing any 3D maths the DSP would have had more time for doing sound. We'd previously worked with Dave Lowe a.k.a. Uncle Art on earlier games and I think he was doing some sound stuff on the Konix with us, though I'm not sure. You'd really have to ask him about that. The only sound I can recall is the scream of the big baddie in the game winning sequence at the end of the game.

Slipstream
Did it have a Konix specific intro or attract mode?

Jon Steele
I don't believe so, but as I said I do believe the game winning sequence was unique to the Konix.

Slipstream
Regarding porting games for System 3 – Last Ninja, Vendetta. Was Vendetta ever actually started on the Multisystem? Do you know if other successful System 3 games were considered for the Konix, International Karate, Myth for example? Finally, have you any idea why you were charged with porting the game and not System 3 themselves?

Jon Steele
I don't know about the status of any other System 3 games on the Konix. Certainly the only one we worked on was Last Ninja II, but I don't recall if there had been any conversations about doing any other games after that. The reason we got asked to do the port of Last Ninja II was quite simple. There was a limited time to develop the game and we already had experience working with the hardware.

Slipstream
Can you tell me any more from your understanding about how Jon Dean / Konix sought to get major games written / ported to the Konix system?

Jon Steele
Well, I think that Jon could better explain that to you. As far as I can recall, Jon, in his own inimitable style, would convince game companies that the Konix was a brilliant piece of hardware and would make them a lot of money.

Slipstream
And so everything comes to an end – did you see it coming for the Konix system? When you started it must have been a great project to work on – it must have been very satisfying to be responsible for building the software side of a new machine and being the first to have a good crack at developing games for a machine.

Jon Steele
I can't speak for other people, but after a while it became apparent that Konix was struggling to get the Multisystem to market. There was optimism that they'd get it done, but in the end that optimism was dashed. At the start it was quite an exciting project, working on a new system, dealing with the prototype hardware, showing the system off to potential game developers and convincing them of its potential. Speaking of prototype hardware, I remember one day when a new prototype arrived. We took it out of the box and hooked it up and powered it on, but nothing happened. Then there were phone calls with the Flare guys and after a while they told us to get a sharp knife and cut the reset line on the circuit board. We did that and “hey presto” it came to life. With all the hardware development kits I've ever dealt with I'm pretty sure that's the only time anyone has had to attack their hardware with a knife.

Slipstream
Did it all fizzle out, was there a dramatic show down, did you have to resort to any drastic measures to get paid?

Jon Steele
I don't recall any dramatic showdown, it was more like a gradual decline. I do recall thinking “oh this is bad” when I heard Konix had used the rights to the Multisystem to secure a very small loan from the bank, a few hundred pounds I believe. The idea that what could have been a multi-million pound property could have been lost over such a small loan told me that things were going seriously wrong. I believe we got all the money we were owed, though Chris might now more about that. I gather that towards the end the Konix engineers needed to get electrical components, but I heard that their account with RS Electronics had been suspended. Consequently they'd ask us to get the parts for them and we'd get the money up front including anything else we were owed.

Slipstream
ATD and Bellfruit. So, ATD was an established company and was proven to be very competent by the end of the Konix – although the project was a failure, I’m sure your reputations weren’t harmed. ATD kept working with Flare through developing for Panther and Jaguar as well as other mainstream machines at the time. Can you tell me any more about this period?

Jon Steele
No I can't. ATD and I parted company in early 1991. Prior to that and after the demise of Konix I was working primarily on Amiga and Atari ST games, so I didn't have a lot to do with the Bellfruit work.

Slipstream
Can you sum up the mood and attitude of the time pertaining to the Konix project, of your team, of Konix, of friends outside of the project.

Jon Steele
Initially, it was very positive and quite exciting working on this new games system. However, as time moved on it gradually appeared that there were problems and there was nothing we could do about them. I vaguely remember discussions about how to fix these problems, but even if we had solutions, and I'm not saying we did, we didn't have the authority to make changes.

Slipstream
Putting aside the obvious fact that the machine died despite all your best efforts, how do you feel ATD’s involvement in the project went as a whole, are you happy with what you and your team did and produced.

Looking back would you have liked to have done anything differently?

Jon Steele
Well as the saying goes, hindsight is 20-20. Overall I'm happy with what we produced, though there were a few things here and there we could have done better.

Slipstream
Do you have any Regrets relating to Konix? Was there any negativity that you experienced as a result of being involved.

Jon Steele
No regrets, just a sad feeling of what might have been. I've not experienced any negativity that I can recall. Whenever people have talked to me about it then it becomes pretty clear to them that ATD as a tools, demos and game developer wasn't responsible for the collapse of the Konix Multisystem.

Slipstream
Did you have any other plans or projects lined up that you’d have liked to have had a go at on the Konix system? Tunnels of Doom for example? Tunnels is a tantalizing glimpse into what could have been. Can you tell me more about it? Would it be fair to say it was a forerunner to Wipeout?

Jon Steele
Tunnels of Doom was something that Robert Gill was doing, but the very early demo did show potential for a pretty fast racing game. As far as comparisons with Wipeout go, well they're both fast, futuristic racing games. Beyond that it's hard to say. I would hope that the controls in Tunnels of Doom would have been tuned in such a way that I wouldn't crash into walls as much as I did playing Wipeout. Only joking, Wipeout is a great game that I'm terrible at playing :-)

Slipstream
Imagine for a moment We’re in an alternate time line and the Konix Multisystem DID get released. Tell me about the world of video games and how it would have been then and now if the machine was released.

Jon Steele
I'm not sure that it would be that much different to how it is now. I imagine that we'd still be living in a world where video games are dominated by giant American and Japanese corporations.

Slipstream
As a suggestion, do you think we’d be in a situation where the Konix controls would have spawned copycats like the Wii / Move or would we be where we were after the Jaguar where only a couple of really good original games were written and the machine unfortunately didn’t really set the world alight or leave a particularly lasting legacy.

Jon Steele
Possibly, it really depends if the multiple controller setups proved popular and games were created to make good use of them. If they were successful then they'd get copied and hopefully improved upon. Last Ninja II for example used the standard joystick you could buy as an add-on, so that game wouldn't really do anything to promote the other controller setups. There have been a number of controllers through the years that have come and gone such as the PlayStation Flight Stick, NeGcon and the Jogcon and I seem to recall a couple of Sega controllers that didn't change the world either.

Slipstream
How much of an influence over your day to day development did Wyn’s desires to ensure his machine was the best effect you? Is it fair to say that although Wyn seemed to be suffering from feature creep (probably born from desperation) is this typical only of Wyn, or is it true that this sort of desperate chopping and changing of specs is prevalent in most hardware manufacturers?
We've just seen in the PS4 unveiling that they boosted the RAM over initial reports of system specs to probably steal some of Microsoft’s thunder before it's launch no doubt surprising developers with existing dev-kits and projects well under way.

Jon Steele
I don't recall Wyn having much of an influence over our day to day work, mostly we'd deal with Jon Dean and the two Konix engineers and Jon Dean would deal with Wyn. I'm not sure I know what Wyn's motivations were. Certainly he wanted to keep the manufacturing costs down, hence the issues over the amount of RAM. I seem to recall at one point it was suggested that the machine might have 64K instead of the 128K it had at the time as that would be cheaper, but I recall someone pointing out that you couldn't even have a double buffered screen if that was the case. As you know, it eventually went to 256K after developers pointed out that any less than that was impractical. From what I recall the switch to an Intel 8086 was in part to allow the machine to be considered a 16 bit machine. Given that the Sega Genesis was already 16-bit and the 16-bit SNES was coming out soon I guess it would have been a real marketing problem if the Konix had come out as an 8-bit machine. As for other hardware manufacturers, I only really have experience of what Sony did developing the PS2, PSP and PS3. Of course there were changes that happened as the hardware was developed, but I never saw anything that I would consider to be “desperate chopping and changing of specs”. For the most part I saw they had objectives (such as a DVD player in the PS2) and a price point they wanted to stick to and that's what they seemed to work to. I'm sure there were other factors involved, but I likely wouldn't have been privy to them.

Slipstream
Please tell me what you thought of the Konix machine, it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses. What you liked, what you didn’t. What could have been improved?

Jon Steele
Well, I'd say the blitter and the DSP were its main strengths. There were a lot of possibilities for programming them and I don't think we ever got to see their potential. Maybe if the Multisystem had been launched and programmers had a couple of years to really delve into what they could do then we might have seen some pretty impressive stuff. The lack of multiple graphic planes and sprites such as those the Genesis had probably put the Multisystem at a disadvantage, but it's 3D capabilities gave it an advantage. Well, it would have had an advantage until the SNES SuperFX chip came along. Given the connection to Flare, I wonder if the SuperFX chip would have ever been developed if the Multisystem had been a success. A world without StarFox? Sounds unthinkable to me :-)

Slipstream
In your opinion was it actually a good games machine? It was supposed to be designed to be better than the Amiga 500, was it? The SS chip had bugs, CPU choice seemed subject to daily change (if Wyn could have his way), It had limited memory. How was the elegance of design of the Konix system from your point of view?

Jon Steele
I think it had the potential to be a good games machine. At that time the industry was in the early days of a shift to 3D and the Multisystem was probably the first machine to demonstrate the possibilities. In terms of 2D gaming it was probably at a disadvantage compared with the Genesis and the SNES, but, again, as programmers got to grips with the hardware that disadvantage may have become less significant or may have eventually become an advantage.

Slipstream
In the face of the competition – just possibly eking out in front of the Playstation 1, but competing with the Megadrive and the SNES, how do you think this quirky British floppy disk based machine would have have fared?

Jon Steele
If all had gone well then I guess the Multisystem would have launched around 1991, so three years ahead of the Playstation which seems like a pretty good head start. If they could have made good use of the three controller modes to differentiate it from the Megadrive and SNES then it might have fared well. If too many games just used a joystick then I imagine consumers would start to wonder why they were paying for the fancy controllers.

Slipstream
Power chairs, peripherals etc. Without a shadow of a doubt, they were certainly a talking point. In reality, who knows how many Power chairs would have actually sold, but the promise of these additional peripherals and controllers was brave and fairly unique – what did you think of them? Let’s concentrate on the Power chair and the light gun with recoil as I think anything else (ski controller, HUD helmet) were just pie in the sky ideas.

Jon Steele
I certainly like the idea of the light gun and have played and enjoyed quite a few NAMCO light gun games on the PlayStation. I don't recall ever seeing a functioning light gun for the Konix, so I can't say if it would have any features that would have set it apart from light guns for other consoles. The Power Chair was certainly an exciting idea. These days you see plenty of arcade chairs being sold for use with games like Gran Turismo and Forza, so it was certainly ahead of its time. I don't think they'd got the hardware design right at that point and I seem to recall someone complaining about the “Black & Decker drill motors” burning out after some guy who was too heavy sat in the chair and tried to use it. I don't know if they were actually using drill motors or if that was just someone's expression of exasperation at the Power Chair failing during a demonstration. If the Konix had come out then I imagine they would have eventually developed more robust hardware for the chair.

Slipstream
There was talk of compatibility with the peripherals in the silliest of situations – quite why you'd need a power chair to play chess I'm not sure. What were your thoughts on this – were you asked to implement features that were simply naive or maybe even weird by Konix?

Jon Steele
Hmmm... Power Chair Chess is definitely a new one on me. I never really had much to do with the Power Chair as I spent my time writing the demos and then writing Last Ninja II. I don't recall being asked to implement any strange use of peripherals.

Slipstream
Is there anything you know that we don't that was being discussed, or worked on by anyone – any potential partnerships, and triple A developers not commonly reported about that could have come on-board that you could share with us?

Jon Steele
I vaguely remember Jon Dean talking about working on deals with some American game publishers and also with UbiSoft, but other than that I don't recall much.

Slipstream
Remnants – Have you got any floppies our source code still?

Jon Steele
Other than the ones I've already sent you I'm not sure. However, I did recently find a bunch of PC backup tapes, so if I can get the tape drive working then there might be something hiding away on those tapes.

Slipstream
This is a bit mercenary of me, and you’ll have to excuse me for that – but do you have ANYTHING that you could share with the world? Photos, documents, source code, floppies – anything? As you may have seen, we’ve been gifted some early demos and our Crack Programmer Lee has been able to get his teeth into emulating (sometimes from just the source alone) these demos. Any kind of photograph or document will help preserve the memory of this machine and all of your teams efforts.

Jon Steele
As I said above, you have most of the stuff I've got such as the demos and Last Ninja II, but there may be other stuff lying around somewhere.

Slipstream
When you look at it, PDS is only really an IDE with a way of downloading code to the Konix. I’ve read a few comments in the Konix source code of some of the demos which show a healthy annoyance at the way PDS did some things and complaints about bugs.

Jon Steele
Oh, I hope none of those source code complaints were written by me. Mind you, in those days I was often operating on very little sleep and might have been quite grumpy at times :-)

Slipstream
Would you have preferred to have written your own fully integrated development system including the graphics and sound tools, a source code editor, monitor and assembler?

Jon Steele
Not necessarily, while I think the original PDS was a bit strange with its 7 (or perhaps 8) source code files limited to 32KBytes each or something like that, the later versions made considerable progress in a positive direction.

Slipstream
What was your aim with the SDK – how much hand holding were you aiming to do for developers new to the Konix system?

Jon Steele
Initially we were trying to demonstrate the power of the Konix, both for developers and for the public and I think we largely achieved that. Beyond that, we had the art and sound tools, along with the assembler/editor/debugger from PDS and combined with the demo source code we'd be able to provide that would hopefully give the developers a decent base to work from. Most of the demos were Z80 based and wouldn't have been much use to developers, other than to help them understand the functioning of the blitter & DSP. I think Head Invaders was (mostly?) ported to the Intel version of the hardware, so that should have given developers something to use as a reference. I don't know how we'd have been involved with supporting developers if the hardware had been launched. I don't know that discussions about that were ever completed.

Slipstream
Were there lessons learnt that helped in the rest of your career? Did you have fun? I presume there were pressures and challenges, there are in every job, but I also assume that because of the very small nature of the companies involved, it was all very personal.

Jon Steele
Some lessons I learnt were don't over-complicate things and listen to developers about what THEY need in tools. Don't assume that the features you like are what other developers will want. Yes, it was fun for the most part until things started falling apart for Konix and then it became a lot of very long work hours (who needs sleep?) and concerns about how things were going to end up.

Slipstream
About the MSU Multisystem 2. A lot of people dodged the bullet when it came to the attempted further development and re-launch of the Konix system under the auspices of MSU.

Were you approached, and if so, how did you manage to dodge the draft?

Jon Steele
I don't recall anything about that, perhaps I'd left ATD by the time that happened.

Slipstream
Can you tell me anything of the Trade shows and the reaction to the Multisystem? Were you specifically tasked with producing something to show on the machine at the last minute?

Jon Steele
I didn't go to any of the trade shows as far as I recall and to be honest if I had been tasked with anything I'd have been working like mad to get them done. I really don't recall any specifics, but I imagine there were mad rushes to get stuff done for trade shows, that's how things generally seem to be in the video game industry. Some people who attended the shows said things went pretty well, except for the Power Chair “drill motor” failure.

Slipstream
Were you able to attend any shows and gauge the mood by standing back and looking at the Konix stand and the flow of people on and off the stand.

Jon Steele
I didn't get to go to the shows, but I heard positive things about how the Konix Multisystem was received.

Slipstream
Do you feel that you guys (ATD) had a reputation as being a go-to team for getting things done? That’s what it looks like to me from the outside – you seemed to be a very capable team which could be considered a safe pair of hands. I’d go as far as to say you were the Rockstars of development…

Jon Steele
I think we got a pretty decent reputation from doing the Konix work. There was nothing we could do to prevent its demise, so I don't think that counted against us. I don't know that I'd call us rock stars as there wasn't any drug use that I recall. Well, except for all that caffeine in the coffee to help us get through the long working nights :-)

Slipstream
What are you doing now? (I know roughly – but for the benefit of our readers…)

Jon Steele
After I left ATD I worked freelance for Jon Dean making a game for Lucasfilm. After that, I went to work at Argonaut Software for a few years (by coincidence, I had met Jez San while demonstrating the Konix a couple of years earlier) and after that I moved to California to work for Sony Computer Entertainment America. What happened after that is a story for another day, to be told over a few pints :-)