St. John was working with Activision to port Pitfall Harry to Windows 3.1 for Christmas ’94. One of the problems they encountered involved the 320 x 200 graphics standard called ModeX, which was used by many DOS games at the time, including DOOM and Pitfall Harry. Simply scaling the artwork to a higher resolution would have been a visual disaster, so they needed another solution.
St. John gives major credit to another engineer named Todd Laney, who he describes as “one of those brilliant Microsoft giants” on the one hand, and also, “an unassuming nerd who just happens to be a huge influence in making it all work.” Laney was helping Hecker with WinG, and he also helped St. John develop the Autoplay feature that ultimately became ubiquitous on removable media like CD-ROMs.
While Activision was trying to figure out how to port Pitfall Harry and still access ModeX, Laney saved the day by introducing St. John to a secret, undocumented Windows API called KillGDI. KillGDI literally killed the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI), which managed all the flow of graphics in Windows, and which imposed, from the game’s point of view, unwanted overhead and other limitations to developers who wanted to use ModeX and who wanted to work directly “to the metal.” KillGDI turned out to be the solution for Pitfall Harry. Later, KillGDI became part of DirectX, and so St. John refers to Pitfall Harry as “a proto-DirectX game that was done in the shadows, before DirectX really became a project.”
What’s the Opposite of Hakuna Matata?
“Ah the Lion King. To this day, I can’t look at anything related to that product without getting sick.”
-Rick Segal
“What started DirectX was the Disney Lion King disaster under WinG.”
-Alex St. John
One of the most high profile Windows games coming out in Christmas of 1994 was Disney’s The Lion King, which was also one of the early games using WinG. In theory, this should have been a big feather in the cap of both Microsoft and Chris Hecker, but instead it turned out to be a major FUBAR.
What happened is that Compaq shipped brand-new Presario computers for Christmas—a million of them—with The Lion King pre-installed on each one. Each of these computers had a new video chip and driver from Cirrus, which had never been tested with WinG. Say it again. Nobody had tested The Lion King on the new Presarios, even though it was pre-installed on the system. Nobody had noticed that when you launched the game it blue screened the system. Kaput!
And so it wasn’t a very good Christmas for Compaq, Microsoft and Disney, not to mention thousands of children and their parents around the country. It was a disaster, and a very public one, at that. St. John remembers seeing a Wall Street Journal article about how Disney had spoiled Christmas for children everywhere.
According to Rick Segal, “As it turns out, this boiled down to a complete fuck-up of QA on the install process. In short, nobody took an Average Joe machine and tried a naked, out of the box, install. Surprise. It was a disaster of epic proportions. Drivers were missing, the install didn’t properly catch missing drivers and adjust for it, and on and on. Disaster. Kids crying, parents screaming, just off’ the charts bad.”
St. John adds, “Oh, it was a train wreck. It went Boom across Microsoft and everywhere. Because, think about the confluence. One, Windows 95 is about to ship. Two, for the first time ever Microsoft has somebody other than themselves making… big names making multimedia titles. And suddenly Disney is supporting you, and a number of other companies are supporting you and making games for Windows. And then you get this press disaster. I mean, that shook Microsoft to its core.”
St John’s role in all this wasn’t trivial. After all, he was the one getting companies like Disney to use WinG. Once again, he expected to take the blame and, finally, get fired. “The funny thing is, that it was my fault in the sense that I made WinG happen,” he says. “I talked Disney into it. Craig and I were the ones responsible for executing it. That was our disaster, baby.” And the very real possibility of getting fired got even more real when a small army of Disney executives and lawyers descended on Microsoft in the aftermath.
St. John was never invited or required to attend any of the Disney meetings, but Segal was not so lucky. “Brad Chase on our side was chief punching bag with yours truly taking hits for Alex and the developers. After the yelling and legal threats, and swearing and such, we got down to the business of making it right for the customers. Nobody ever got fired or threatened with being fired simply because it was software. You couldn’t pin any one thing on any one person to the extent that it was willful or incompetent. For instance, somebody would say St. John talked us into this crap, and the response would be, ‘Yeah, he was supposed to be trying to help you find a kick ass solution for the Christmas season. He didn’t code it, didn’t test it; get off his back.’ Then we’d move on to the next target and go through the same thing.”
St. John was not-so-blissfully ignorant of what was going on. “Rick was in these meetings all the time, and he’d come back red-faced and perspiring. Nobody said a word to me. I remember sitting in my office going, ‘OK. I’m fired, or I’m in trouble, or somebody’s going to ask me what I did at some point, and I’ll have to answer for it.’ And nothing.
Even though nobody got fired, the humiliation and frustration he experienced caused St. John to seek a better solution, which included far more rigorous testing standards and a more foolproof solution to Windows game development.