70's TV

San Francisco Rush 2049 was the first project I worked on from concept to ship back in 1999 at Atari Games Corp. in Milpitas CA. I was the Lead Designer (only Designer!) at the start of the project coming off the successful completion of Rush The Rock and quickly started prototyping jumps, stunts, and shortcuts during those first few months. One of them would be built into the secret gold coin cache at the top of the 900 foot tall Atari Fuji (pictured below), another 900 foot tall structure, the double-sided 'ski jump' became a dramatic shortcut on the Night track.



I had great fun developing the game and near the end our engineers gave me the ability to animate objects that had simple bounding-box collision. A few ideas went into the tracks as shortcuts - opening doorways, monorail trains, and spinning fan blades - and many of these were activated by driving over an 'STV logo'.

I created the logo for the game as a fictitious company brand; the other developers each had their own logos. I resurrected the logo in an animated 3D project for a 3D Studio Max class at Learning Tree University in Chatsworth several years later.

Here's the link to the animation on YouTube: STV logo

Yes, the background music is from the CBS Special Presentation intro bumper from the mid-70's. Even though I had once heard the Dramarama song "70's TV" almost 10 years before, I didn't choose the name for my fictitious company because of it.

You can visit my dream journal entitled "Seventies Television" here.