Interviews// Rare Senior Programmer, Nick Burton

Nick Burton

It's... rare that you get to sit down for an interview with Rare (I've done it, rare puns over), but that's what I did recently. Specifically, I spoke to Nick Burton, a Rare veteran of ten years - yes, he's been there since the the Nintendo days.

Over the course of the interview we covered the nuts and bolts of working at the studio (OK, Rare pun number two, sorry), the development challenges involved with new hardware, why he really doesn't want to talk about the game he's working on and how developers are apparently incapable of killing a 360.



SPOnG: Firstly, can you tell us exactly what you do at Rare?

Nick Burton: What do they say? 'Chief Pot Washer'...

'Senior software engineer' is my position. That is my day job, if you like. I'm also sometimes referred to as Rare's academic liaison manager and 'general video maker' and I get "Can you do this? Great!"

My main job's senior software engineer, I've been doing that for about 10 years. But, there's so many variations on what that really means.


SPOnG: So, what does a typical day involve? Is there a 'typical day'?

The studio

Nick Burton: Well, for me less than most. If you're talking about a development day (which I need to get more of, because I'm very busy and should be in the office now) it's the usual get into work, there's the obligatory coffee – Starbucks of course, because it's Microsoft, Seattle – to wake me up, because I have two children.

Then it varies a lot between projects, because if you look at where I am now, there's a lot of coding. It's not the massive coding you would have had of old, where you're churning out reams and reams of code, because we have a lot of technology already.

So, first thing would be the typical – answer all my e-mails, which might be anything from recruitment stuff to looking at audio software which I'm doing at the moment with Audiokinetic. Then, because I'm doing some audio work I might go talk to some of our musicians, talk to them about the bones of the creativity side of it – but I try not to take too long with that kind of thing because they can take hours.

Then I get down to it and start doing some production in software terms. So, a lot of the stuff I've been doing at the moment was plumbing in some third-party software. Then I might be talking to our shared technology group; that could be for any number of things.

I got loaned to a project the other week to do some particle systems because I'm good at that kind of thing. That was almost like, I came in on a Monday morning and someone said, "Can you do this for a week?" and I had to go talk to our PM (Project Manager) and say, "Look, they really need me to do this". So, it's a desk job, but there's also a lot of moving around.

I probably move around more than most of the software guys at Rare; not from team to team, I'm in with the core team, the core of Kameo, if you like, but there are so many other bits and pieces

Like, last week I found myself helping the audio guys out with their presentation for today and then I was also doing these particle systems, and then I was researching audio software as well and I'm also doing academic e-mails and it's like "Oh, God!" Our PM's saying, "You are going to do some work on our project, aren't you?" and I'm saying "Yes".

SPOnG: But this is all for the same team?

Nick Burton: This is all for the one team. I have one desk, I have one... three computers on one desk, two dev kits. It's like the Starship Enterprise at the moment. Hopefully one of those will be going soon. But yes, it's all within one team. I have worked with the same guys now for, well, a couple of the guys I've worked with since I started at Rare... and that's been with the Kameo team as is. But, the teams at Rare kind of inflate and deflate. It works well for us.

So, Banjo at the moment – massively inflated, because it's coming up to completion. Piñata's done, effectively, so that's starting to deflate a bit now. Our team's quite small, (it's) made up of very senior people so, (with) what we're working on at the moment, we don't need a lot of people to inflate it, probably. We might, it just depends on how the project goes. So, in five, six months time, we might start to inflate because they've done with Banjo.

SPOnG: And you're on 'secret project'?

Nick Burton: Yes, enigmatically! (Grins)

SPOnG: Care to say anything about that?

Nick Burton: Nope! I would love to, because it's very exciting, it's a kind of... 'genre' of game is the wrong word. It's a sort of game I really like, and it's something different, as well, which is quite exciting.

I'm doing some things that are different on it, too. It's quite a trade-off. I'm a graphics effects programmer, but I'm doing the audio stuff. It's not just the audio in terms of software, it's all other kinds of things that are going on with the software. It's quite interesting.

It almost feels like you've got a new job. I've just passed my tenth anniversary at Rare, but it's still like, "Monday morning, it's work, what am I going to do?" So, something's right!


SPOnG: So, it's a bit of departure for Rare, too then, 'Secret Project'?

Nick Burton: I'll say this – all of the stuff that we're working on, when things come out people always seem to be surprised. People are like, "Oh, they've done that!" And they were like "Oh! Banjo 3! I thought they weren't going to do that because it didn't come out after Banjo 2 straight away."

Well, you don't have to make sequel after sequel after sequel. You can have a hiatus.

So, you're going to see some new IP from us, you're going to see some old IP from us.

I'm really excited about what we're doing, I'd love to talk more about it, but the thing that you learn when you've been in the industry a long time is, there really, truly is a time and a place.

If you talk about something too early, everybody's like "Oh, it's that again. Oh, I've seen this the last four years. Oh, it's finally coming out." It's better to say, "Let's get it into a shape where it's not finished as in we're happy with it and Microsoft's happy", but say "Even though it's not finished, now we're going to tell you about it."

SPOnG: OK, so you can't say what it is. But can you say when you'll be able to say?

Nick Burton: I'm not going to put a date on it. Sooner rather than later. You're not going to be waiting a looong time, but I'm not going to put a time on it.

SPOnG: Does it get frustrating, not being able to tell people what you're working on?

Nick Burton: It used to, when I was sort of junior and more inexperienced I wanted to tell the world about it. It's like, "I'm doing this really cool stuff, I want to scream it from the rooftops!" But as you get on a bit you think "No".

Because if you do that sometimes it hurts, because everyone gets preconceptions then about "What it's going to be like this when it's finished", especially with the Internet and forums and how people discuss things endlessly. They get quite convinced "Oh, it's definitely going to be like this.' Then they're only going to be disappointed, because they've invented probably their ideal thing.

So, it's better to say, "Look, here's something that's nearly finished. There's going to be a few checks and balances and tweaks, but this is pretty much what we wanted to do." I've seen that a few times.

SPOnG: With Banjo at the moment, for a long time it was just a game that people knew existed but didn't know anything about. Then when details started coming out, people were a bit surprised.

Nick Burton: Banjo's a good example, because even internally people were going "Banjo are doing something interesting, aren't they? What are the Banjo guys up to? It's a different direction, what's this?"

Because you don't get over to the teams every day, even though you've got friends on all the teams. Unless you've got reason to, you tend to stay away. So, it's "Hit me with your best shot when you've got something good". Then it was a few weeks before the first press day, we knew what it was by that time, and someone said "Come over and give it a go" with the vehicle designer.

First few minutes with it you're like "What's this?" Then half an hour later I've got a flying gunship made out of God knows how many jet engines and guns bristling all over the place, and it still feels like Banjo! And you're looking at Greg going "That's amazing Greg (Mayles, creative director of the Banjo series), how have you managed to do that?"

So, it's going to be surprising what happens. Taking it in that new direction, the community ... they'll have had that thing of "Oooh, it's not Banjo", because they see some screen shots and obviously they infer a lot from that. They've only got what you guys write to go on as their guide, and you can't describe it completely, it's impossible. You can only impart your impressions. So, they then make some snap decisions, and they've got to come to terms with the fact that it's not what they had in their head it's going to be.

Then it's a double-edged sword. What would have happened had it been 'Banjo 3' as everyone was going to imagine. If it was like Tooie was but it was HD. Everyone would have gone, "It's just Banjo 3, they could have done something new with it". So, it's kind of, you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. It's not the fault of anybody who feels like that, it's just that they've got their ideal that they're hoping for.


SPOnG: People are wary, too, because you do get disappointments, especially with platformers, which some games producers have struggled to translate into the next-gen. You get things like the next-gen Sonic, which wasn't well-received.

Nick Burton: Yeah, I played that. I used to have Sonic on the Mega Drive and you're wanting that moment back, almost, from when you first played Sonic. You're wanting to feel those kinds of emotions you were feeling again. You've got the memory of that there, which makes it more difficult sometimes. They tried to do something new, and if it's slightly off-kilter because they've not hit what the fan base wanted... it's difficult. That's the (problem with) Banjo, I guess.

But you've got to take that sort of risk, sometimes, and see if you've gone in the right direction.

SPOnG: Then on the flipside you've got the success stories, like Mario Galaxy from Nintendo.

Nick Burton: The great one I always quote to people has to be Wii Fit. I would have loved to have been in the initial pitch meeting for that; especially if it hadn't have been Miyamoto.

"So, we've got these scales, right, and you stand on them, and it weighs you, but it's got two scales, so it can detect your balance a bit, and you kind of do callisthenics and Yoga on it."

You can just see some publisher going "Right, you know where the door is." But then, that's sometimes where that true greatness comes from, as we've seen.

Even I was like "Wii Fit... what? Actually, it's quite good, isn't it?" It's so out of left field, but Miyamoto's brilliant at doing that anyway. It's almost their modus operandi now, isn't it? "What weird thing are Nintendo going to do next?"

Then everyone starts speculating, "Oh, it's mind control". They'll probably come up with something that looks like a bunch of flowers and everyone will go, "That's so stupid" then three years later – "That was a genius thing to do!"

SPOnG: We'd forget there was ever a time that we gamed without a bunch of flowers.

Nick Burton: And everyone suddenly sees it as completely normal and natural. But that's what's great about the games industry in general, you just get this mad innovation, which is why I love it!


SPOnG: Would you like to work on the Wii? Obviously that's not likely any time soon with Rare being a Microsoft studio, but does it appeal to you as a programmer?

Nick Burton: I like working with Nintendo – I have done in the past, obviously – I don't necessarily know from a technical point of view whether I'd like to work on the Wii. I worked on the GameCube for a long time...

Time has passed and I still love the 360 (and I'm not saying that because Chris Satchell might be in the room). Just from a programmer's point of view it's a really well thought out machine. It's so easy to programme. Power-wise the PS3, the 360, there's always the endless arguments on that. Realistically, if you're a programmer and you know lots of other programmers in the industry, we all know they're about the same in terms of raw power, but the 360's just really easy to program. So, I'm kind of glad I'm working on it.


SPOnG: Was it a big shift, moving to Microsoft hardware?

Nick Burton: No, everyone always thinks there's going to be this massive shift in hardware (but) as programmers you just get on with it. You've got to expect different architectures; purposed CPUs in the 360s, and it is (different). But those kinds of hard, technical challenges are something that one or two people (who) are the system architecture guys... they do that.

These days it's much more about how you make changes to the game quickly, being very agile and being able to change and react to change very quickly. It's not necessarily about any one technology. I see consoles as a means to an end; the game.

So, yeah. If I was working on the Wii I'd probably be enjoying working on the Wii, probably using the controller and things like that. But, technically, I enjoy what I programme with Rare. We can change. Going from, say, the GameCube to the Xbox 1, everybody thinks it's massively different. It took our shared technology group about a month to actually do it.

It's not what people expect. Perhaps it's a programmer's thing, "Ah, just get on with it." It's exciting sometimes, as well. It's like, "Oooh, new hardware".

The GameCube was powerful, compared to the N64, then you get the Xbox. Then the 360 comes along and it's "How much power?" And I don't mean its current draw from the mains, either (Grins). (I mean) the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) power.

I had this moment, going back a few years, when we were doing Kameo for the 360 launch, and for a laugh I'd written this particle system. I put a million particles in it to see it grind to a halt, and it was, "How many particles? Oh, it's still going." You look back, and you look at the performance tools and you think, "Of course it is!"

There are these barriers that you put in place yourself where you think, "It shouldn't be able to do that. Let's try it, let's kill it!... Oh my gosh!" You get the rest of the team round and their like "No way!" Then the designers - beard-stroking time - go "Can we do this to it then?"

SPOnG: (Grinning) So, you basically sit in the studio thinking of ways to kill the 360?

Nick Burton: That's what Damiano (Iannetta, graphic programmer at Rare) says, “Atmospheric scattering is computationally very expensive, but my dev kit, I've not killed it yet.”

No, you're not going to write something about killing the 360, are you? When we're talking about killing it we're going "Oh, three frames a second, I see".


SPOnG: The 360's a constantly evolving platform, with all the changes that are made to Xbox Live and so on, and of course you've got the avatars that Rare's doing at the moment. Does that evolution affect you on a programming level?

Nick Burton: It always does, yeah. But sometimes there are challenges that are not barriers. But, for instance, something I was working on the other day; I was writing some particle systems and it was almost back to an N64-like day. It was very, very tight on resources, not tight on computing power, but literally down to the wire on what memory we had because of some things with Live, and the avatars and stuff.

That kind of challenge breeds creativity, as well, and myself and our art director sat down and he said, "Can you make it do that? Can we have more textures?" and I'm saying, "Oh, we can do that through the shader!" But is that going to make it too slow? It doesn't even know it's rendering it, let's face it. It's ticking over, graphic-wise.

So, you get this whole new kind of creativity that restrictions always place on you. That's almost what being a programmer in this industry's about. We always want more memory, always want more GPU power, always want more CPU power.


Even if you gave me a new... (if you gave me) the Xbox 720! I'd say, all right, it's got 32 GPUs, a terabyte of memory and we've got rid of hard disks, it's stored in the cloud. You'd go, "Yeah, it's all very well, but can't we have five audio processors?" It's about analysing what you've got and the new ways you can do things.

That's where the 360's great. It's very flexible (is) the architecture. So, we can take things that in the past we'd have had to have done that way. Now, we can take them and we can (mix) them up and then do seven different things with them here and then put that into this and a completely different thing comes out of it that looks fifty times as expensive as it actually is.

One of the good examples is posture system in Kameo, where there's really only 16 trolls on the battlefield but it looks like there's 4,000 – a bit of creative thinking. You couldn't have done that, realistically. Well, you might have been able to, but it would have been really difficult.

It still amazes me now, we've got guys that (not at Rare, but on the Internet) but they're still programming the Sinclair Spectrum and the Commodore 64, and you look at what they've done with it and think, "How is that even possible?" Because the challenge is that closed system. I find that fascinating! They're going to be really good programmers.

SPOnG: And you must have found a similar thing working for Xbox Live Arcade with Jetpac Refuelled.

Nick Burton: Yeah, Xbox Live is the same in that you've got a memory restriction, obviously. We restricted ourselves with it to an extent, though. We thought, "We want to reach as many people as possible, so we want the smallest package possible." So, again, there was creativity there.

Our package was 32Mb, now it's into the hundreds. But there's a download cost involved. If it's a kid, and they've only got a memory stick for the 360 because they've not got a hard drive, then we still wanted them to be able to play it. To fit a couple of games on a memory card and their saved games.

So, it's like, "We're going to do it for the lowest common denominator. 32Mb." It's a challenge. We wanted sprites, and the sprites are expensive.

In the Xbox Live quality space, they are expensive. So, I was saying to the graphics programmer, "You can write some things like daily Photoshop filters that run real time."

So, I can store the sprites on this weird format and we can do things like change the hue and the saturation and mirror bits of them and join bits together in almost, like, skeletons and things like that, and then get Will Overton (a concept artist on the game) on board.

There are not a lot of assets on there. I think there's about eight Meg' of graphics, and that's with all the backgrounds and the title screens. To get that, yeah, there was compression involved, but it was more creative thinking of how do we put this together or how do we put that together.

With Steve for the audio, his first thought (was) "Oh, I've only got a few Meg', so I'm going to have to do it as MIDI."

Steve hates not having fidelity. MIDI''s great, but it would have made his life harder. So he thought, "No, let's go for streams". He's going, "How many can I have?"

"Well, you've got 8Mb. We're going to be really generous and we're going to have half graphics, half audio", this is unheard of, effectively.

You usually get the arse-end of a megabyte or something – and he managed to get three or four very high-quality tunes out of that just by thinking about how they were layered, how the compression was set, and the kind of music as well. It all came together really nicely in the end.

SPOnG: Was it refreshing, going back to a smaller game?

Nick Burton: Yeah. What happened was – I won't say a holiday, because developing a game's never a holiday, if anybody thinks that then they're losing it – but it's good fun.


SPOnG: I know this isn't something you're specifically working on, but can you talk about how the avatars came about? Were you approached by Microsoft with something very specific?

Nick Burton: I don't know how the inception of it started, I know how the execution's gone. It's pretty cool, and it's very cool to be doing something that's almost, effectively going to be built into a re-wiring of the box, because Microsoft can do that, they call it an "evolving platform".

How it actually started... I'm pretty sure it came out of one of our other products... and they just kept refining... it's like chipping away at the coalface, basically - "It's good, but it could be more', and obviously that was coming from the Microsoft side, as well.

At one point I'd heard, 'Microsoft copies Wii!' And it's like "Well, no". Avatars exist everywhere. (They) just didn't pop in the console space. You go to Second Life, play Oblivion, for goodness sake! They're all there. It's just unifying it a bit, giving people that identity. Yeah, Nintendo found the way and started it, then the refinement process starts. Sony are doing it with Home.

It's that thing: the time is right, the planets are in alignment, so it's inevitable. It's just great that we're right at the core of it, really. It's a cool thing.

It's surprising, actually. It's one of those things – you see it in the studio where you're seeing it and going, "Oooh. Actually that's really good!" It's that thing that I love about Rare, that something just comes straight out of left field, even internally sometimes.

SPOnG: Thanks a lot for your time!

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