Knockout Kings 2001

Hot on the heels of the Nintendo 64 (N64) version, Sony announced the PlayStation 2 (PS2). EA decided the PS2 would be the next platform for Knockout Kings, and the N64 version wouldn't continue. There was a long wait for the development hardware to arrive.

Just before Christmas, eight brand new PS2 development machines showed up. I eagerly opened one and began the process, thinking my experience would make this straightforward.

The Japanese Documentation Challenge

All the documents were in Japanese. Every single one, including all the example code. When doing anything new, I try to fully focus on getting something running first. After a few weeks, Knockout Kings on PS2 was up and running, but it was very rough and slow. At least we could see the game in a rough form.

The next eight to ten months were spent rewriting vast areas of the code to add polish and improve performance.

EA Takes Control

Everything changed at EA with a new team structure. The N64 version's success got EA's attention, and they wanted more control. Anyone in the games industry knows how this goes when power struggles start with the publisher.

What had been a very agile process became process-heavy, and everything slowed down. Lots of new technical challenges came with the PlayStation 2 version, but looking back now, it turned out well.

Technical Upgrades

Pretty much all art and animations were upgraded. Everything looked higher resolution. Play-by-play commentary was added, and a full EA branding pass was implemented. The team at BlackOps stayed the same with the addition of a project manager.

The project manager was mainly required to deal with the extra work coming from EA. Now there was a ton of requirement documentation and a full schedule. These were the days of full waterfall project management, which produces a huge overhead of unnecessary work. The thinking was that all risks could be eliminated by solving every unknown before work started.

Arcade vs. Simulation

The main problem was that the EA team felt Knockout Kings should be a simulation, while BlackOps wanted to stay arcade. The BlackOps team mostly won, but it was a huge distraction and time was wasted. The two teams mostly worked well together after some initial friction.