Courier Crisis
Courier Crisis was one of the big New Level Software projects: a PlayStation and Sega Saturn game about bike courier chaos, city shortcuts, traffic, attitude, and motion. The game was fictional, but a lot of the energy around it came from real people doing real things outside, on different kinds of bikes, and whatever weird adventures were happening around the team at the time.
I started sketching Courier Crisis in my living room in Ocean Beach during a crisis, right around the time I was working on Road Rash Sega CD for Electronic Arts in 1995, probably. I was thinking about bike couriers I had met while I was attending film school at San Francisco State and living in San Francisco. I was deep into bikes myself, and I had almost been recruited into becoming a bike courier because the whole thing sounded tempting. The stories those couriers told were so crazy, dangerous, fast, and alive that I thought there had to be a video game in it: delivery missions, city navigation, risk, shortcuts, and the feeling of discovering a new world by moving through it.
We sketched it out, pitched it to publishers, and somehow got BMG interested. It became my first game published on two platforms at once, in five languages, with a more international release than anything I had shipped before. That marked a real step up from the previous games I had published. It was a super fun project, a creative high point, and a stretch of my life when I was 100% focused on work and loved the process: the ideas, the office, the team, and the adventures we had together both inside and outside New Level Software. It was a good time making video games when we were young.
One of the fun business-development parts was the bike placement. I had Schwinn and GT both interested in getting their bikes into the game, and GT ended up doing an exclusive deal. That meant we got to use GT’s bike line throughout the product, plus bikes for trade-show giveaways and magazine contests. We also got to work with Hans Rey, the famous trials rider from Germany. I had seen his videos, so getting to meet him and talk with him was amazing. On top of that, I was able to get bikes at cost for people at New Level Software who wanted them, and I ended up with a couple of GT bikes myself. It was a fun example of that project being more than programming and production: I was also setting up deals, partnerships, and the whole world around the game.
These photos are from a desert trip with Bill Kelly, Kirk Baker, and me, pre-running a desert race in Anza-Borrego. It was a roughly 30-mile loop, and somewhere out there we found an abandoned-looking structure that seemed like an oil rig at first. It turned out to be some kind of astronaut trainer. We nicknamed it the Gyrofetish and explored it in a dusty, Mad Max kind of way.
Anza-Borrego Pre-Run
Out in the Anza-Borrego Desert during a desert-race pre-run.
Pre-running the loop, with that open desert feeling that made the whole day stick in memory.
Me out there in my Park Place Productions T-shirt, big hair, hat, and leather jacket. Park Place was famous for early EA Sports work like Madden and NHL Hockey on Genesis, so there is definitely some young Mr. Cool Guy energy in this one.
The abandoned-looking astronaut trainer we found and nicknamed the Gyrofetish.
Inside the trainer, exploring it like a strange piece of desert machinery from another era. I was standing on top of a giant motor that would spin astronauts at the end of a big crane with a cable. There was a silicone-weighted torso dummy they used to test the spin, and it seemed like a nightmare being flung around on that thing by scientists while trying to become an astronaut.