Jack Nicklaus 4 - Windows Development History

Windows Development History

Before contracting with Cinematronics (not to be confused with the arcade game developer also named Cinematronics) to develop the game, early development of Jack Nicklaus 4 floated aimlessly around Accolade for years. Accolade had fairly good success with its Jack Nicklaus line of golf games (which itself followed Accolade's popular Mean 18 series of games), but hadn't released a game in the line since 1990. Instead of upgrading its existing game's code base, Accolade decided to start development over. Their previous games were all DOS-based, and Accolade wanted their next Jack Nicklaus game to run on the emergingly popular Windows 3.1 operating system.

The game, like its predecessors, would consist of two applications: the game itself and an editor, with which users could build their own courses or modify the courses delivered with the game.

In 1993, Accolade had one in-house programmer who knew how to program for the then-new Windows operating system, a tools programmer, Gary Strawn. They selected Strawn to develop the course editor and another off-site programmer, an avid golfer himself, to develop the golf game. Incidentally, Strawn was also the only Accolade programmer who knew C++ and understood OO methodologies.

Despite the effort of the two programmers, the project lacked direction. The project was bandied about from producer to producer, all the while the game made little progress. Strawn worked on making the editor import the old DOS-based courses, but lacked direction on a feature set to implement. And the limited communication he had with the off-site programmer of the main game portion didn't help matters.

Eventually, Strawn was joined by another programmer to handle the load of the course editor work. Strawn recruited a tester, Chris Nash, from the QA department. Nash was at the time a software engineering college student and his knowledge of the Windows programming environment and OO methodologies made him a prime candidate for the job. It was decided that Nash would do the GUI work for the editor while Strawn continued to handle the back-end work (such as file reading and course construction).

Though they still lacked a clear design, work on the course editor progressed. However, the state of the actual game was in question. The off-site programmer made infrequent trips to the office and, when he did, the "game" he demoed looked exactly the same each time. While it looked fine for an early prototype, none of the bugs (such as rendering rocks in red, instead of gray) were ever corrected.

Eventually it was determined that the code base for the game had to be scrapped and the off-site programmer terminated. Because of speed considerations, the programmer had developed the game in assembly from the beginning. However, the complexity of the assembly language code eventually overwhelmed him and he was unable to determine the cause of bugs, nor how to fix them. It was evident that it would be impossible for him to ever make much progress on the game, much less finish it.

About this time, in 1995, the game's current producer, George MacDonald, started searching for an outside developer. He eventually determined Cinematronics would be a prime developer for the golf game. Not only did they have a good track-record and a knowledgeable staff, they were located in Santa Cruz, fairly near Accolade's San Jose, California main office.

Originally, it was determined that Strawn and Nash would continue to develop the golf editor while Cinematronics would develop the main game. Eventually, however, Accolade requested Cinematronics develop both portions of the product and development of the editor was also assigned to them.

Shortly after Cinematronics took over the development of the game, Accolade brought in Mike Franco to be the in-house producer. Meanwhile, Cinematronics had moved from Santa Cruz, California to Austin, Texas and the close proximity advantage was lost. In addition, feature requests by Accolade greatly extended the development scope of the project and pushed out the completion date. In the meantime, Cinematronics had been purchased by Maxis, which meant that one of Accolade's major competitors was now developing one of their products. This did not, however, prevent Cinematronics from delivering the product on time—indeed, Accolade's test team was unprepared to receive the product at the end of 1996, delaying code release and putting the developers in a holding pattern for a couple months.

None of the source code from the original game was used in the final Cinematronics produced product.