Meet the Devs: John Pritchett (2015.05.19)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   Did you notice your shirt has three of like the new Fantastic 4? I did not know that. There was a time at like for comic book reasons the Fantastic 4 were gone or whatever and it was those three plus um uh Ghost Rider. Bonite. Oh, Ghost Rider. Yes. Thank you. Uh Ghost Rider. So there you go. All right. [Music] Hey guys, thanks for joining us in the doz. I'm here with physics programmer John Bridgetette. How you doing buddy? Doing great. Thanks again for coming on. Thank you. So when did you get started with the project? Well, I guess it's

2. 00:00:47

   been about a year and a half. I think November 2013 actually if I put a date on it. Mhm. How did you get into the industry? Well, let's see. Um, right out of college, uh, I took a job, uh, writing Fuel Credit Card Systems for a company in Kansas City, uh, which was boring as heck. That does sound very boring. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I always wanted to do video games, but decided I wanted, you know, I needed to get a real job, right? Yeah. Um, and one day when I was driving into work, I rearended uh some guy's minivan at a stoplight. And it turned out he was a co-orker and I'd never met him before, but you know, I started talking to him. It turns out he um ran a bulletin board system out of the basement of this business and uh it was called Metropolis PBS. And he was the author of a game called Trade Wars,

3. 00:01:34

   2002. and uh you know after a while working with him uh he gave me the opportunity to take over working on his game and so uh I became kind of co-author of trade wars and and uh actually left that job probably a few months after that and moved back in with my mom to write the new version of Trade Wars. That was a that seems like a pretty rash decision. Yeah. Well, I never regretted it. Seems to have paid off, right? Yes. So, how'd you get from there to Star Citizen? Well, a lot of time in between, I guess, um, but, uh, in, you know, just before I came to work here, uh, I was working on a project, actually a u a remake of Trade Wars, uh, with another company

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   that I worked with in the past and, um, I got an email from someone who's in the Trade Wars community saying that, um, Pete Mackey, who was a designer here, had mentioned it the game as an influence for him in the you know the development of the economy. Uh and so you know I had never heard of the game. I didn't know anything about it. It was Star Citizen. So I went out and started looking into it and I was like wow this is a Chris Roberts game. This is amazing. You know and uh actually got into contact with with Pete and was talking to him a little bit and found out that they were looking for a physics programmer and so I just had a crazy idea. You know why don't I apply and see what happens. So, so you played like Chris's old games? I did. Uh, I definitely remember in u college about 1991ish. Uh, you know, right after Wink

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   Commander came out. Um, sitting there, you know, playing that game. I played the heck out of that game and uh, you know, just dreaming about what it'd be like to work on a game like this. And I actually, I think, um, thought about, you know, possibly applying at Origin, you know, because this is something I really wanted to do. And obviously I didn't pursue that, but it never occurred to me that one day I might have that opportunity. You had a second chance and you took it. Yeah. So what besides the Chris Roberts effect, what drew you to Star Citizen? Well, mostly uh I think it was the opportunity to work with Mark Aent. You being physicious? Yes, of course. Okay, good. I was like, Mark's all right. I mean, you know. No, I actually didn't know he's no John until he came back, but uh he's he's a great programmer. Yeah, no John Pritchette. So no um for me you know just the challenge

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   and the opportunity to actually create you know the next generation of space simulator that's that's something it's just an amazing opportunity. So you've been here for a little over a year and a half. Yeah. Uh from when you started to where it is now what has been the biggest change? Well the size of the company definitely you know I mean when I first came here I think there were like 20 people in this office and maybe 40 total in the company. I mean, I don't even know what we're up to now, but insane, right? Um, in terms of the project, I mean, those early days were nuts. I mean, we we just had insane deadlines to meet to try to get the original Dog Fighter demo out, you know, and u the crunch times were crazy. They're bad now, but not like that. Yeah, we're pretty big now. I mean, we even hired Disco, so we're kind of

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   scraping the bottom of the barrel. So, yeah. All right, before I get you out of here, let's get some rapid fire questions. You ready? Sure. This is the important one. Favorite movie. Favorite movie? Uh Star Wars. Have seen it. Have seen it. Favorite video game. Uh Cyber Slide. H. Never played that. Where's It's an arcade game. Oh, that makes sense. I like I I don't remember the arcades that I remember going to like Chuck-E-Cheese when I was a kid, but that was like the closest I ever got to arcades. Yeah. Uh favorite ship in Star Citizen. Uh Constellation. Why Constellation? Well, it was the first kind of big ship that we did. And um I think it was Ryan Church who did the design for it and that was really impressive to me that we were able to to work with him on that. And um I was the

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   first person who got to fly the ship. So that was exciting. When did you get to fly it? I think I think you just heard thousands of fans really upset or jealous that you got to fly it first. Well, I mean, you know, the the U Constellation was in the game and uh Dan Tracy was was trying to tune it up and and get the the thrusters ready to go and and there was a bug because the mass or I think it was the moment of inertia was just too large for this ship. Uh and so I was asked to debug that and he ran out to get a burger and uh while he was gone I fixed it and just started tooling around in the ship. So that's awesome. Well, thank you again for coming once again. I'm James Pew. This is John Pritchette and the dev's been met. Point the camera. Nailed it. What are you talking about?

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   It's the best one we've done so far. Credits. All right.