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Interesting article from USGamer. How many of you heard about the Net Yaroze or played its games?
Over 15 years ago the seeds were sown by a strange and brilliant enterprise on the original PlayStation with Net Yaroze. The offbeat, rough-around-the-edges and weirdly compelling games that resulted represented the first time Sony fostered a community of emerging talent and helped launch a generation of game development careers.
Sony launched the Net Yaroze project in 1997. It made available to hobbyist coders a basic version of the PlayStation dev kit housed in an attractive black casing for the princely sum of £550 (about $836 at today's exchange rate), though this was later cut in half. Around a thousand units were sold in Europe, which effectively created a ready-made community of budding developers working independently on the PlayStation platform.
TimeSlip, inspired by an episode of Dr Who, was the one of the first games to use the idea of one player co-op, where people played with past echoes of themselves. It was also super-difficult. Robot Ron was an early revival of the twin-stick shooter; its name a pun on the genre's originator Robotron 2084. Decaying Orbit was a compulsive planet-lander with impressive physics. Other games included stylish retro-shooter Samsaric Asymptote, top-down football game Total Soccer (which went on to play a crucial role in development of the engine for several handheld FIFA games), and Rocks 'n' Gems, which developed a cult following in the pages of the magazine.
Alongside the hardware Sony also provided private forums for Yaroze creators. "Every creator had a page," recalls Johnston. "I remember feeling at home there. I spent hours looking through pages of other users and trying out their games." It gave creators the opportunity to seek help not only from their peers, but directly from Sony.
"The private newsgroups were the best place to get help because you could talk to both users and dev support," says Cartier. Sony essentially created a potted indie community and nurtured it with technical help, as well as holding events and competitions. Matt James was late to the party, but he remembers that even toward the end Sony was still engaged. "I think the Sony people were active and helping because they liked Net Yaroze. They weren't even officially assigned to work on it."
The lack of distribution meant many games were never seen outside of this community. This made it even more special when a game was selected for the Official PlayStation Magazine cover disc. "It felt amazing!" says Johnston. "It felt like an awful lot of people would end up with a copy of my game." Cartier, who lives in the US, bought a new PC monitor just so that he could play the PAL discs ("It was my first officially published game!").
This small community became very Euro-centric. Although each region had its own newsgroups, SCEA did not offer much support and Japan was isolated by the language barrier. The latter developed an air of mystery. It could be quiet for months, only for an incredibly accomplished game to emerge, such as the WipEout-inspired Hover Racing or the 3D adventure Terra Incognita. Lead developer of the latter Mitsuru Kamiyama now works at Square-Enix, while the game is available on iOS.
The support in Europe did not just represent a significant advancement for hobbyist developers. Now prevalent across the globe, games technology courses simply didn't exist in the '90s. Professor Ian Marshall helped set up what was arguably the world's first at the University of Abertay in Dundee, Scotland.
"[The Net Yaroze] was incredibly important," he says. "We had a whole range of developers in Dundee who wanted students for 3D console programming. Students from a traditional computer science background could do C++ but not programs that worked in 3D. Access to a Net Yaroze meant we could put them in a console environment and we could actually host target programming which is basically how most of the games industry worked at that time."
Sony was generous in its support of the course. "Sony was giving a few people in universities one [Yaroze]. We got two rooms full of them - around 40 Yaroze platforms - free of charge." This presented a steep learning curve for all involved, but, like the private newsgroups, Sony was keen for Abertay to get the best out of the hardware. "We got support from their technical people, their educational people," says Marshall. "Sometimes we had to go back to Sony Europe and say 'Help!' They were always there."
The importance of Sony's support on both an individual and academic level should not be underestimated. Graduates from Abertay emerged equipped with skills relevant to the rapidly evolving console market and were quickly snatched up. Similarly, a huge number of Yaroze creators went on to work in game development - several of them at Sony.
Some independent developers remain wary of working on consoles. Horror stories still circulate (although it must be said, rarely about Sony). Professor Ian Marshall believes the Net Yaroze can act as a blueprint for winning trust and nurturing new talent. "Make it easy for indies to jump from developing on a PC to developing in whatever they want. The Yaroze communities were classic social networking. Continue that and provide support materials so that developers can get that first step, that first little game together."
Shahid Ahmad agrees. "PlayStation as a company works hard to build and retain trust across the board. Our willingness to engage across social media, at events, in person, and on forums with a mandate to support developers and other partners the best we can means we don't put up an artificial front. Real passionate people at PlayStation and in the development community get to talk about the work they love and to build a business around that." It's a strategy that will look altogether familiar to anyone who was part of the fertile Net Yaroze community.
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-story-of-net-yaroze-sonys-first-indie-push
Also a Gamasutra article
Some Net Yaroze games
Total Soccer:
TimeSlip
Hover Racing
Terra Incognita
a Lets play:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDxBPc9MwWE
Fatal Fantasy VII
Psychon, dope soundtrack, more Yaroze games in this vid