The History of the Future, page 6
START-UP #1: SONIC FUSION
Brendan Iribe and Mike Antonov first met in the fall of 1998, as freshmen at the University of Maryland. Housed in same dorm—their rooms across the hall—and both computer-obsessed coders, it might have seemed like they were destined for fast friendship. At the time, though, Iribe was already moving too fast for something as trivial as friendship. Because in addition to carrying a full load of classes, he was also juggling a full-time job.
“At Quatrefoil,” he explained to Antonov, during one of their earliest interactions. “I’m the lead programmer and product designer on this project to build this tech museum in San Jose.”
“You’re a programmer?” Michael Antonov asked, revealing a thick-but-cheerful Russian accent. “Me too! So cool.”
Iribe looked up, getting a better look at the gawky, bespectacled neighbor who would occasionally stroll into and out of his room. “Nice!” he replied, and then disappeared Antonov from his mind and returned to his work.
Instead of taking the hint, Antonov continued to linger around the room. Although he had a gentle presence and frequently flashed a bubbly Muppet-like smile, there was something unnervingly tentative about the way Antonov moved: he lurched instead of walked and his arms swung with the rigidness of a robot. These mannerisms were likely a by-product of Antonov moving to the US when he was fourteen years old, coming to a country he didn’t know and struggling to befriend kids whose social circles had already been sewn years earlier. Instead of trifling with that, Antonov found solace in programming.
“I started getting into computers a tiny, tiny bit in Russia,” Antonov said. “Because a friend of the family brought this . . . it’s called ‘Spectrum.’”
“I know the Spectrum!” Iribe said, nodding along without looking up. “Good computer.”
“Yes! But you had to boot up with a cassette player. Do you remember?”
Iribe chuckled in agreement.
“So I played some games and did a little bit of basic programming. But that was taken away because it wasn’t ours. So it was really in high school here where I learned for real.”
First, on a TI-85 calculator. Where, amazingly, Antonov built for himself a falling puzzle game like Tetris. And then later honing those skills on a computer of his own—a Packard Bell—that Antonov had been able to get a great deal on at Montgomery Ward (discounted so deeply “just because it had been the store’s floor model!”).
Although Iribe didn’t seem to share Antonov’s enthusiasm, Antonov felt that perhaps a small bond had been forged. They both knew Spectrum for Chrissake! So before returning to his room, Antonov boldly exclaimed, “Hey! I have an idea: let’s make a game together!”
“Look,” Iribe replied. “You seem like an awesome, supersmart guy. But I gotta get this thing done for Quatrefoil and I’m superstressed. We need to ship it soon and—look, I just can’t make a game right now. Why don’t I come by in a couple weeks?”
But by the time he did, the gawky Russian kid no longer lived across the hall.
On a campus of thirty-five thousand students, it seemed unlikely they’d ever cross paths again. But a few months later, while driving down Route 1, Iribe thought he spotted Antonov walking along the side of the road. So he pulled over and rolled down the window to see if it was indeed his long-lost neighbor. “Mike?” Iribe asked. “Is that you, Mike?”
Antonov nodded, recognizing Iribe immediately. “Hello, Brendan!”
“What happened to you?” Iribe asked, excitedly waving him over.
“I was in a double,” Antonov explained, “but there were three people in it. So they moved me to different dorm. I wanted to stay, but they made me get moved.”
Iribe nodded. “Where are you headed?”
“I’m going up to the bank. The SECU bank.”
“That’s pretty far. Why don’t you get in and let’s talk? I’ll give you a ride.”
As the two caught up, and Antonov talked about a job he’d recently taken—which involved UI (user interface) design and computer vision for handwriting recognition—Iribe realized that Antonov must actually be pretty great with computers.
“I’m still working for that company Quatrefoil,” Iribe explained. “It’s a tech museum project and I could really use some help.”
Antonov remained relatively neutral on the idea until Iribe started talking about graphics. Mike really liked graphics. But between school and his current job, he wasn’t necessarily looking for anything else to do. “I’ll think about it.”
Whenever Iribe needed to wait for someone to “think about it,” he always tried to be there for as much of the thinking process as he could. This is why Iribe ended up continuing the conversation back at Antonov’s dorm room.
“Tell me more about you,” Iribe asked. “What have you programmed before?”
“I’ve made some games,” Antonov replied and then walked his new friend over to the computer to show him what he had made.
It was a shoot-’em-up spaceship game. The graphics were crude and the game itself wasn’t too original (it was basically a clone of Galaga), but after Antonov showed off a few more games, Iribe realized that was the point. Antonov wasn’t trying to make something to commercialize; he was simply making his own versions of classic games for himself to play.
“You made all these?” Iribe asked, particularly impressed by Antonov’s Tetris.
“There are more,” Antonov replied. “I can show you.”
“Wait. Hold up. Who else worked on these with you? Who did the art?”
“Oh, I did everything by myself,” Antonov replied with a mixture of pride and defiance. “I built the tools to do the art by myself. I laid down each pixel by myself.”
As Antonov showed off some of the tools he had built, Iribe became incredulous. Antonov hadn’t even used Photoshop, or DirectX, or any of the Microsoft libraries that would have made the process so much easier. Instead, Antonov had literally built every tool from scratch.
“Mike,” Iribe said. “This is crazy. How’d you learn to do all this?”
“I taught myself. I have these books.” Antonov picked up a black-and-white composition notebook from the floor and handed it to Iribe.
Expecting a computer book, Iribe was confused. Even after opening the notebook—filled with row after row of really small, fine print—it took him a few seconds to figure it out: Antonov had transcribed an entire computer book. “Why didn’t you just get the actual book?”
“It’s expensive!” Antonov explained. “But at the library, I can copy assembly instruction set details line-for-line for free. Plus anything else I need.”
Antonov then pointed across the room to an entire stack of notebooks and, right away, Iribe had three thoughts:
This guy’s a genius!
I’ve hit a gold mine here.
Maybe we should do something much bigger than the tech museum.
“Mike,” Iribe eventually said. “I think we should start a company together.”
Iribe didn’t launch into a full-fledged pitch right then and there, but over the next few months it became clear that not only was Iribe serious about starting a company with Antonov, but he also already knew what their start-up should do.
“Do you know the company Maxis?” Iribe asked.
Of course Antonov knew Maxis. They made SimCity and a bunch of other cool Sim-related games. And they had just been acquired by Electronic Arts for $125 million. They were a big deal! Did Iribe think they should do a company that made simulation games? Did he think that one day their company might actually make them rich? Rich enough to one day have a million dollars . . . each?
Iribe laughed. It was funny and endearing, the way that Antonov said “million dollars.” His tone hushed and his face scrunched as if just uttering the possibility would jinx any chance they had at riches. This wasn’t totally shocking since Antonov had grown up poor. But then again it wasn’t like Iribe had been raised with a silver spoon. He was an only child, the son of a single mother, and though they always managed to get by, it was never without an uphill battle. And so, befitting his world-class ability to weave optimism into confidence (and noticeably in direct contradiction to Antonov’s sensibilities), Iribe could talk about millions—hundreds of millions, even billions—with a straight face. Because why the hell not? That money was out there, just waiting for someone to take. Why not him? Why not us? Why not Brendan Iribe and Michael Antonov?
Iribe’s idea for a business was not quite what Antonov expected. It wasn’t a game studio like Maxis, but rather an idea that had come to Iribe while listening to a Maxis engineer talk at the 1998 Computer Game Developers Conference.1 That engineer was talking about an in-house tool he had created at Maxis—a graphics-based windowing system that was used to build games like SimCity—and as Iribe listened to this engineer talk, he started thinking about how great it would be if such a tool existed for all game developers.
“That’s what we should build,” Iribe explained to Antonov. “A windowing system to compete against Windows and Mac. Initially, we’ll make it for developers, but eventually it’ll be for everything and everyone.”
When asked the obvious question—how can a pair of college freshmen compete against the likes of Apple and Microsoft?—Iribe would say, “Microsoft was started by two guys; Apple was started by two guys; and here’s the two of us. If they can do it, we can do it. And the reason ours is going to be better is that it’ll offer more functionality and cross-platform play.”
In retrospect, Iribe would concede that his vision was “way too ambitious.” But even so, he never regretted the size of his reach. And at the time, Iribe genuinely believed that he and Antonov—together coding a high-end, vector graphics engine they dubbed “GFC”—would be able to outduel any and all Goliaths that stood in their way. A start-up, Sonic Fusion, was born.
Yet even with things coming together, there was still too much work for Iribe and Antonov to handle by themselves. As it turned out, Antonov’s roommate, Andrew Reisse, poked his head into the conversation. “You know . . .” Reisse said in a drawl. “I could . . . help.”
Given that Reisse’s coding skills rivaled those of Antonov, the founders of Sonic Fusion were thrilled to bring him on. And they were also thrilled to recruit a raw-but-talented pixel artist named Sven Dixon, whom Iribe had worked with during a teenage internship at Alien Software.
After receiving a small seed of financing from Iribe’s mother and uncle, the quartet found a small basement office in Laurel, Maryland. To anyone who stepped into that office—past the building’s trash compactor and into the dank light—the place was atrocious. But to the guys, it was something else. It was their office, for their own business; and to have all that at such a young age was just kind of magical.
To fully embrace the magic, Iribe decided to drop out of school, and then tried to persuade Antonov to do the same.
“My parents would never let me!” Antonov protested. “My family is all scientists. They all have PhDs. To them, education is everything.”
“You don’t need their permission,” Iribe replied.
Maybe that was true, technically speaking. But Antonov felt that he owed his parents a piece of the decision. Especially his mother. His mother the biologist. Ever since he was a boy, she had put him above herself and always prioritized his education.
“She would take me to the lab whenever they would let her,” he recalled. “And she’s the one who taught me English. Not to say she knew it very well herself, but she got me studying English very early and then made all this effort to have me go into a special school in which they taught English. She always gave everything to me.”
Iribe understood. His mom, who at times had raised him on her own, had also tried to give him everything. But grateful as he was, that didn’t entitle her to his decisions. And soon enough, he was able to convince Antonov to see things his way (though, as a compromise to his parents, Antonov agreed to enroll in some evening classes).
To keep costs down, Iribe and Antonov moved into Iribe’s childhood home and lived with Iribe’s mother as they tried to get Sonic Fusion off the ground. Needless to say, it wasn’t an easy time. Nothing embodied this struggle—this quest that always felt just out of reach, just one break away—more than the pile of uncashed employee paychecks that mounted ever upward on Iribe’s desk.
Each check—made out to either Iribe, Antonov, or Dixon—represented a week that one of three had not taken a salary because there just wasn’t enough money in the bank.
What made the struggle even more difficult for Iribe and Antonov was that, throughout this entire time, they were receiving almost unanimous praise for what they were doing. “It’s really a case of having the right idea at the right time,” explained tech analyst Laura DiDio to the Baltimore Sun in a 2003 article about Sonic Fusion. And yet, still they struggled.
Until 2005, when Iribe struck a deal with Firaxis Games to license GFC for the latest iteration of their flagship series Civilization. This was it! That big break had come! So Antonov made some tweaks to the core system and Iribe was “lent” to Firaxis “to integrate GFC and program the UI on Civ4.” That fall, Civilization 4 shipped on time to rave reviews; but instead of celebrating this milestone, Iribe pulled Antonov aside and said the hardest thing he’d ever had to say: “We need to kill our baby and start over.”
“We just can’t continue in this direction,” Iribe explained, almost in disbelief at his own words. He loved GFC and thought it was a beautiful piece of code. “I’m extremely proud of it. But it’s just too big. It requires way too much support. There’s just no way we can scale it.”
“But . . .”
“I know. Believe me, I know. But I’m out there, trying to sell and support this thing and all the developers think it’s too complicated. They all just wish they could use Flash.”
By Flash, Iribe meant Macromedia Flash, a graphics-based animation platform that became very popular around this time because of how smoothly and speedily it worked on the internet. And with internet usage drastically rising during this period, betting on Flash seemed like a pretty good gamble. That’s why, as much as Antonov wanted to fight Iribe on this, he knew that his partner was right. And so, after six years and over three hundred thousand lines of code, they decided it was time to restart their start-up.
START-UP #1.5: SCALEFORM
Back to the drawing board, Iribe found an open-source Flash project online. Over the next six months, Antonov and Reisse used that as a starting point to build what Iribe had envisioned; a high-performance middleware package that could play Flash in 3-D video games. They named this new product “GFx” and, ready to scale their business, they renamed their company too: Scaleform.
The risk soon paid off, beginning with a call from Cevat Yerli, the CEO of Crytek. “We’ve been playing with your product,” Yerli told Iribe, “and we’re finally at a point where we’re ready to use it.”
Not only was this incredible news—Scaleform’s first customer!—but, oh, what a customer it was. Crytek, a German-based studio, had only published one game to date; but that game, Far Cry, was one of the best games of 2004. And they were already at work on a second called Crysis.
“Wonderful,” Iribe replied with an even voice. “This would be for Crysis?”
“Not just Crysis,” Yerli replied. “We’ll use it for everything going forward. For ten years.”
Iribe could hardly believe his ears. Ten years? That was unprecedented for a middleware licensing agreement.
“For ten years,” Yerli continued. “But we want it for free.”
Iribe quickly gamed this out in his head—no revenue versus the value of partnering with a hot studio—and after a long pause, he agreed to the proposition. “But only if you promise not to tell anybody.”
“Okay,” Yerli replied.
“And you’ll need to pay us for annual support.”
“Sure.”
Yerli also agreed to issue a press release and talk to the press about this ten-year licensing agreement. “Scaleform shares Crytek’s commitment to delivering cutting edge experiences to gamers,” said in an interview with Gamasutra. “Using our new state of the art CryENGINE 2 and Scaleform GFx, Crysis will deliver an unrivaled cinematic experience.”2
Within days of the PR blitz, Iribe received a call from Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk at BioWare. Not only did they want to use GFx for their big-budget sci-fi shooter Mass Effect; but they also wanted to lock down a license for the next nine games after that.
After Crytek and BioWare, other developers followed. Within a year, Scaleform had about twenty licensees. Within two years, they were over fifty. And by 2008, they’d hurdled past a hundred. As a result, Scaleform became a top-tier middleware company and Iribe was now, in June 2012, able to enjoy some of the finer things in life. Like $150,000 cars, $50,000 watches, and weekends like this one—“West Hollywood Weekends” Greg Castle called them—where Iribe and his old Scaleform friends would check into a pricey hotel (usually the Mondrian) and for either twenty-four or forty-eight hours, they’d enjoy the spoils of what they’d accomplished together.
“What about Mike?” Sven Dixon asked. “Is he gonna join us?”
“Nah,” Iribe replied. This wasn’t really Antonov’s scene.
“But he’ll probably be joining us for dinner,” Nate Mitchell added. Then just to Iribe: “Assuming you’re able to confirm with the kid.”
Nate Mitchell had joined Scaleform in the summer of 2008. Before that, he and Brendan Iribe had been hearing about the other for years from Paul Iribe—Brendan’s cousin and Nate’s childhood friend—who would constantly point out how similar the two of them were and suggest that they work on something together. But both being busy and not really having anything in common except computers, they didn’t meet. Not until Mitchell’s junior year at Dickinson College when, with summer approaching, he was searching for an internship in the video game industry. After striking out with all the big companies, Paul Iribe once again suggested, “Dude, my cousin!”
