Lots of interesting info in this that people have been talking about on Discord.

(The live convo that discord allows is great, but it's kind of sad that it's so transient!)

I would highly recommend this as a really enjoyable watch. Mark Lesser gives a few interesting insights into the programming of the game such as passing attributes and how one-timers were done. Also, interesting that more animations were done for fighting in 94 such as pulling jerseys over heads, before fighting had to be ripped out. That I would have loved to see!

My only complaint is not enough about Jim Simmons apart from a few mentions (for us that think NHL93 is better).  It's also interesting that Lesser said Jim Simmons dumped the code on him and he didn't have time to start from scratch (like he wanted to) but only developed the code. Over the years he said he ripped out more and more of the code which may explain why the game went downhill after 94. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

It kind of leaves me wondering if maybe Simmons had continued developing the game how good it could have been?

Yeah I'm not sure why he was so interested in rewriting the core engine... His influence from rod-/table-hockey maybe explains the player motion in 95 that I think most of us dislike (how they feel like they're rotating unnaturally around their front foot). I wish they'd continued with incremental improvements (e.g. he mentions upgrading the hit detection, which always impressed me... I assumed it was sprite-/pixel-based, but he says it's actually 3D-volume-based!). The fighting systems sounds epic, too bad they had to scrap it, and the tester in the doc basically says there are no existing copies of it today.

Looks like Simmons is working on WWE 2K these days https://www.mobygames.com/person/389039/jim-simmons/

31 minutes ago, smozoma said:

Looks like Simmons is working on WWE 2K these days https://www.mobygames.com/person/389039/jim-simmons/

Shame it's not NHL24!

for PC...