Way back in the Christmas 2000 edition of Edge we gathered together eight upcoming developers whose paths down the game-making road had benefited thanks to their association with Sony’s Net Yaroze. This initiative – a £550 piece of tweaked PlayStation 1 hardware along with dev tools and the means to hook it up to PCs/Macs, together with an online support network – is sometimes forgotten in the PlayStation story, but it was a vital tool in the birth of the careers of many console programmers, and its influence is still being felt today through endeavors such as Microsoft’s XNA program. It wasn’t something Sony needed to invent, but few who experienced it would say that their lives aren’t richer because of it.

Today, we’re sitting in an upmarket pie-and-mash joint in Soho to catch up with four of those faces from eight years ago. Together, they have some valuable advice for anyone looking to follow in their footsteps.

How significant was it that Net Yaroze was a PlayStation product?

Robert Swan (Then: programmer, SCEE, Now: lead coder, Nik Nak): When I look back at the Yaroze there were a number of things I wasn’t aware of that made it as useful as it was. The Sony brand was attractive, the fact that there was a proper support system was attractive, and then you had a filter, which was the cost of it, that was really valuable.

Even today, eight years on, with people who are trying to make games at home, they go to the support websites for PC game-makers, for example, and there’s a lot of noise there – you know, 90 percent of the people are saying, ‘I’ve got this great idea for a game – all I need is a programmer, an artist, five designers, all unpaid for two years. By the way, I’m the company owner, and I have nothing to contribute’.

So the cost of the Yaroze filtered people out, and what was left was people who were actually going to really try to make games. Sometimes we didn’t get very far, but there was the expectation of trying to get support and getting it, and that was very valuable.

What are your fondest memories from the Yaroze period?

Charles Chapman (Then: founder, Live Media, Now: founder & tech director, Exient): ECTS was probably the highlight, I think – seeing your game on a major stand. It was a little hidden away but it was something that people were seeing, and it was on two big screens. I’d never seen the game on a TV as big as that, let alone being seen by so many people. And everything that went with it – we all got tickets to the Sony party that night, and there was a feeling that this was the industry; this was kind of what we’re getting into now. I met lots of people through that.

George Bain (Then: engineer, SCEE, Now: developer relations account manager, SCEE): I think it was definitely the start of something special, and it was going to lead to a huge community of new programmers in the industry with console programming experience. It was a first, and I think it helped generate programmers for PlayStation, not just for Sony but for various other companies, so that in itself was a huge success – it literally created hundreds of programmers who could go on and get a job in the industry. It was a huge benefit.

How important do you think it is for Sony and Microsoft to provide platforms today that will help foster the next generation of game-development talent?

RS: I think it makes good business sense for them to do so. I’ve been interviewing so many people and there are not enough good programmers out there. Years ago it used to be that people just didn’t know what to do. Now they go on courses and I’m becoming pretty critical of a lot of the games courses out there. I’m interviewing a lot of graduates who, if they really cared, would have done extracurricular work, but they haven’t. I get a lot of people with a CV that says ‘I’ve done x, y and z’, and it looks good, but you get them in and they’ve done nothing in their spare time. The degree is misrepresenting what is being taught, and the interview is wasted. I cannot hire enough good graduates.

What’s the solution?

RS: There are a variety of issues. There are government initiatives and accreditation and skillsets that I’m getting into. I think university courses need to change, and that’s something that I’m also slowly getting into. I’ve started being in touch with various universities, and they’re fertile places. A lot of them want to be steered in the right direction – they just don’t know where they’re going, so they’re picking a direction and the graduates are unemployable.

They are literally unemployable?

RS: They cannot program.

GB: I think the problem is that Net Yaroze and XNA, etc, are very good and very popular, but you can’t just have a university degree and say that you’ve done something on XNA or whatever in order to get a job. A lot of it is down to self-taught programming. I’m still skeptical whether or not a university can teach you what someone can do at home by themselves with the good resources we have on the internet now. There are so many books you can buy now, and there’s so much knowledge on the web right now compared to how it was in ’97. There were hardly any websites in ’97 which had any information about game programming, but nowadays there are so many resources you can use.

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