Jack Nichols

From The Great Machine

Into the Fire Memoir
This article is protected to preserve the words of the former developer of Into the Fire.

I have always been here...

For me, the story of B5 ITF goes back some time before the game project even got off the ground at Sierra.

I started in November of 1991 at Sierra Online, Inc. as a Tech Support Rep on phones for the first 2 years of my time at Sierra. I had applied there 2 years prior to that and turned down a position in the duplication department, because I had the feeling I'd never get out of it. Dan Foy (Lead Programmer and Designer for B5 ITF) took a position at that time. We were acquaintances through some Amiga groups in Fresno at the time.

When I took on the position of Tech Support Rep, I was inducted into the Alternate Platforms group which consisted of some programmers, a few artists, and a couple other gentlemen in Tech Support for Amiga, Atari, and Macintosh games. I believe John Trauger was either also in Tech Support or in QA at this point, although he can answer better for that.

At this time in my life, the Amiga was everything to me, and this new pilot TV movie was coming out called Babylon 5. I, of course, latched onto it like an Alabama Tick, as did many other Amiga users, because it was the first show we knew of that used the Video Toaster (and Lightwave of course) to produce the effects.

Around 1993-1994, Sierra was going through a change. The kind of change that precedes painful times to come. It was going from a Mom and Pop company to a IPO corporation who answered to shareholders. It was the time that Ken and Roberta Williams decided that Oakhurst and Bass Lake were no longer that hip little village in the mountains, and were basically bored with the place. This meant that Ken and Roberta were moving the corp headquarters to the Seattle area. Along with it went a few departments such as Fulfillment, Tech Support, and Customer Support.

It was the first of the "move to Seattle or die" decisions. I lucked out, because I had applied for a cross job placement in Systems Support (what the IT dept was called back then). I got the position, and subsequently worked 4 more years at the Oakhurst division as a Systems Support Technician.

It was during this time that I would perfect my 3D Artistic work on the side. I had always had this second side to my abilities, but the advent of supporting Amiga's, the Video Toaster system we had at our blue screen video studio, and the fact that Lightwave was heading to the point where it was a stand alone product, gave me the ability to do my own things at home. Lightwave and Photoshop became my staple every day for almost 2 years when I'd get home from work. The wife had to put up with a minimum of 2 hours of isolation in my computer room, learning some new technique. I ran a PR campaign from my tech position. Every new machine I installed had one of my graphics as a background.

It was also during this time that the idea of a Babylon 5 game came about in a discussion on the general forums in the internal system of Sierra's bulletin boards. I remember being one of the first to suggest it, and I quite remember John Trauger and Dan Foy being right there in the fray as well. This was still a couple years before anything serious got started.

As I went around supporting various groups and development teams, I was focusing on the exotic setups. SGI Irix machines with their Alias Wavefront, Soft Image, and the DOS version of 3D Studio to name a few, and a couple DEC Alpha Raptors with Lightwave 4.0. I eventually became close friends with Dan Peters, an artist on the Realm who also had a passion for Amiga's. I also got to know Marc Hudgins, and it was here that I would finally get to do 3D modelling for a project for the first time.

Marc was pitching a new game called Echoes, and had received some startup funding for it. He would be using Lightwave for the work. At this time I was offered the chance to be an unofficial member of the team while I still performed my Tech duties. I began modeling a space ship according to a few of Marc's drawings, and was supposed to eventually do some props as well. Dan Peters had been doing some really nice work of his own on this project.

As often happens, a very personal event happened to my wife and I when her father had a severe stroke. He would last a year before passing on. This really prevented me from having any hope of committing to both the REAL job I had, as well as off time work on the modeling. So, reluctantly I told Marc the situation and backed out of the project.

Echoes was coming along nicely for a while and then got cancelled. It was around this time that B5 ITF started to come into being. The idea was pitched as a B5 game, but it was hard for Ken Williams to get with the idea I guess, and so the project became Starsiege for a while. I'm a bit foggy on the events here (Marc can answer better), but it became B5 SCS again. It would be a team designer effort with Marc Hudgins, Christy Marx, Randy Littlejohn, and Dan Foy, with Ken Prugh as producer/project manager. Marc offered me a 3D Game Artist position and fought for me to make the cross department move (something that was balked at by several people above me). I'll always remember that Marc...

Thanks!

So now we're around 1997-1998. We have the above mentioned people, as well as Dan Peters, Robin Phanco, and I for the initial Art team, and Keith Landes as our Data Wrangler and general "GLUE MAN" between programmers and artists. John Trauger would become THE Vorlon of Vorlons in our group. Programming-wise, we started with Dan Foy of course, Dave Artis (Chewbacca or Cousin It), Benito, and a host of other programmers who pulled off one of the great engines that will never see the light of day. John Walker would bring to us the AI genius and general friendship that I have come to respect for so long.

My very first job as an Artist was to convert the Babylon 5 Station into something the early version of the game engine could handle. Boy was that fun... There was the constant battle between Dave's insistance that the rotating section should be rounder, and my rebuttal of the fact that I need more polygons to do it... Things got better though, and the team actually came together in a way that I have only seen twice in my life, and have had the pleasure to be a part of...

Things went on, conventions with the demo came and went, and in February the 22nd of 1999, Black Monday struck at 10:00 am. After 7.5 loyal years to a company and 1.5 years of devotion to something I loved, this French company comes along and slams the door on hundreds of workers in Oakhurst.

This was the time when I really stopped lurking on FirstOnes and became active. I met Lorien Newman then and had been interviewed about the Oakhurst closing.

The game would survive the YE division closing, but not for too much longer; after luring and displacing people in the Seattle area, B5 ITF would be cancelled toward the end of the year 1999.

I was not initially offered relocation, and Marc at one time offered to get me up there, but I declined, because I was already burned by that whole thing. I am glad, since months later, when I was working at Foundation Imaging, we would hear the awful news about the cancelation of not just B5 ITF, but several other projects that were being looked forward too.