The story behind Midnight Run - Road Fighter 2 PS1 port

[Ghegs]

I talked a bit about Midnight Run - Road Fighter 2 in the Developer Showcase: Konami article and how its lack of analogue controls do not do the arcade original justice.

While researching for the article I came across a person who apparently coded the port! He was kind enough to answer my questions about the project and the information certainly explains some things, as well as give insight as to how these things can happen.

My questions in blue, his answers in the quotes.

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The best I can tell Midnight Run was ported by KCGA (Konami Computer Games Aoyama, the company listed on the game's cover), is this correct or were you with another company that handled the porting?

The game was ported entirely by me with some additional art asset conversion done by the owner of the company I worked for, which was Soar Software (USA). So the answer would be Soar Software.

The lack of analogue controls in the PS1 port is a bit odd. The Dual Shock came out the same year as the port, in 1997, so the controller's specifications must've been around at about the same time and I can't imagine a big third-party developer like Konami hadn't been given access to those.

Also, Speed King (which used the same hardware in the arcades) was ported a year before Midnight Run and it has analog controls provided by the neGcon controller. I'm guessing it was ported by a different company/branch of Konami, but didn't the possibility of using neGcon ever come up or wasn't there just time for it?

As hard to believe as it may be, we did not have any analog control support requested by Konami. Understand though that Konami was in Japan, Soar Software in San Francisco, CA. and we had very little contact with Konami during the port. In fact we didn't even get the full arcade machine to test against. We had the main board, the original source code (documented in Japanese) and a video of the game being played for hours. The gas pedal, brake, steering wheel and other controls were wired up to simple pots. So it was basically impossible to play the game. Since I couldn't play the real game my strategy was to basically convert all the art asset to a lower resolution and then write a Scorpion GL (the 3D engine used by the real arcade version) emulator for the PS1. That way I wouldn't have to worry about my version being different, aside from input controllers and reduced resolution artwork.

Due to lack of communication, it was never known by myself that there was another port going on with the same board. This is the first time I'd heard about it.

Did forcing in digital-only controls for a game that originally had analogue controls result in any problems?

It makes me cringe to even think about it, but the entire 3rd race track had it's controllers code modified to turn faster. The car physics were the same but the amount of steering was increased to handle the tighter corners. Terrible, I know.

Was there anything cut from the port? It seems pretty bare-bones, though that might be accurate to the arcade original.

It is entirely the same code except the input controller code was modified to work with the PS1 controller. I had to learn MIPS R3000 assembly in order to optimize my port of ScorpionGL to the PS1. I was proud of that part, well that and the fact that the thing actually shipped. You have to understand, this was my very first full-time programming gig. When I went for an interview the owner of Soar showed me the video of Midnight Run and asked "Can you make this on the Playstation?". With fear in my heart I answered "Yeah no problem". I had no clue how I was going to pull it off, but knew I had to figure it out. So it was an accomplishment for me even though the game didn't turn out being as great as it could have been.

Anything else memorable about the project?

All of the art assets including all 3D models, texture maps, texture map coordinates and sounds had to be optimized by myself in order for the game to work on the low amount of resources available on the PS1. I had no tools given to me. So I had to write custom tools from scratch, along with tons of command-line utilities to convert and optimize the art. That took a long time and eventually the owner of Soar jumped in and helped with that work load. Konami was getting anxious about the schedule and thought it would be helpful to send someone from Japan to the US to supervise the final stage of development. They sent a non-English speaking guy who would just sit there and watch me work or sit in the owner's office and watch him work. It is probably some traditional Japanese business practice meant to gently apply pressure, but at the time it just seemed weird.

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I also asked him if there were ever any plans to release the port in the US, or how a USA-based developer got the job of porting a Japanese title, but he didn't know the answers to these.

For accuracy's sake I must state that I was unable to find a connecting link between Soar Software and Konami or KCGA (there's very little information about Soar Software available online), but companies hiring other developers to do the work and then not crediting them is certainly not an unheard practice, just look at the most famous ghost developer Tose. Personally I believe the information is authentic, but keep in mind it is, at the moment, unverified.