Community Outreach – Opening The Pods With Nick ‘PropWash’ Smith Of Virtual World Entertainment

Back when I was but a wee MechWarrior, I remember seeing ads for what seemed like a heavenly place in Chicago where I could hop into a simulator to truly experience what it would be like inside the cockpit of a multi-ton death machine (or at least, the closest approximation to what that could be like). I never did get a chance. By the time I was old enough, the BattleTech Center was long gone.

But I did get the chance to get into the cockpit of one of these ‘Mech simulators years later when they were distributed to various arcades around the world. It’s always been a magical moment from my teenage years and one that’s never been replicated even with the most modern MechWarrior titles. There’s just something about those joysticks, throttle handles, and multi-function displays that you don’t get with a game console or home PC.

Those BattleTech simulator pods are becoming increasingly rare as the years go on, but there’s a dedicated group of hobbyists keeping them alive for future generations. I sat down with Nick ‘PropWash’ Smith of Virtual World Entertainment to reminisce about the old pods and see what can be done to keep them going for years to come.

Sean (Sarna): Well, thank you again for agreeing to be interviewed by Sarna for the second time! We spoke back in 2018, but for people who don’t actually know who you are, give us a brief introduction. Who are you, Nick? 

Nick Smith (Virtual World Entertainment): Brief isn’t my specialty, but here goes. I’m Nick Smith, or as some know me, ‘PropWash,’ and often the “BattleTech Pod Guy.” I currently own Virtual World Entertainment, the original creator of the BattleTech Center and its iconic cockpits.

I’ve been collecting and restoring these BattleTech cockpits since around 1999. Back in 2005, I had the chance to buy into the company, and ever since, it’s been a side passion where I see myself as more of a curator or, as Mort Weisman described it, the “torchbearer” for this piece of BattleTech history.

Sean: And we’ll get into that in just a second. But first, let’s get your BattleTech bonafides. So when did you get into BattleTech and what is your BattleTech story?

Nick: My journey with BattleTech started in the early ’90s. I remember an issue of Nintendo Power offering a competition where the grand prize was a trip to the original BattleTech Center in Chicago. A friend in my neighborhood, Jason Randall, was big into RPGs and introduced me to the BattleTech board game. Jason and his dad also got me into PC gaming, where we’d play the original MechWarrior 1 on his dad’s PC like maniacs.

At that time, head-to-head gaming with the high-fidelity simulations BattleTech offered was completely revolutionary, practically “unobtainium.” I was obsessed with getting to Chicago, even though it was about a three-hour drive from where I lived in West Michigan. But being 13 years old, it just wasn’t an option back then.

Sean: Well, what have you played since then? Have you played the tabletop? Have you done all the video games? What have you got your hands on? 

Nick: I’ve played the video games over the years. Pretty much every generation that was either in test or development or actually released I’ve had an opportunity to play almost all of them in some fashion, including some that never really made it to market or officially released.

My focus has usually been more on the electronic side because of my attention span, however, I have played the tabletop game. The previously mentioned Jason Randall tried his darndest to get me to play with him. And so we built a kind of a hack-and-slash mercenary group back in the day with those cool FASA dossier folders you could have. Built up a whole profile and borderline-legal ‘Mechs for our mercenary unit. 

Never really played the tabletop a whole lot. Stayed connected to that community because I love big stompy robots and love the people in the story behind them. But getting into the tabletop is just sometimes hard because of the way my brain works. That’s not to say people haven’t tried really, really hard. I think Pete Smith has made quite the effort to make sure he witnessed me play at least once, so he ran me through a really simplistic training-type game. And that’s about it on the tabletop side. 

Sean: Let’s get to the all-important question. What’s your favorite ‘Mech? 

Nick: Boy, there are so many babies. The original Unseen Marauder is always going to be huge for me. The original Warhammer is always going to be huge for me. I’ve got little Warammers all over the place in this house, the little Macross vinyl ones. A long time ago, I bought a bunch of them and kind of lost track. The Mad Cat is always the thing that I think of because of that original TRO art. The 3025 Marauder Duane Loose art was really the start, the hook, but because of the OmniMechs and their association with Virtual World and kind of that unique storyline, I’ve got a three-foot Mad Cat model sitting out in the other room here.

It’s going to be one of those three. But my very first miniature—and I still have it somewhere—is the original BattleMaster. That was a big political non-answer. I think the answer to that really is the original metal Ral Partha Assault Lance box. Favorite product and those ‘Mechs in that. 

Sean: Now let’s talk about Virtual World Entertainment and those BattleTech pods. For me personally, my first experience with those BattleTech pods was actually in Dave & Buster’s in Vaughn when I was in high school; they had those Firestorm pods. I did recognize them as basically MechWarrior 4, which was the most current MechWarrior title at the time, but it was also the coolest thing ever because it was the first time I was really in the cockpit of a ‘Mech.

But for those who don’t know what Virtual World Entertainment is, or what the BattleTech pods look like, could you give us a brief history of where they came from and what they are? 

Nick: Okay, a brief history. If you jump into the Wayback Machine, Ross Babcock and Jordan Weisman were friends at the Merchant Marine Academy outside of Chicago, and they were tabletop gaming nerds. They had this idea of having some type of simulation system on at that time—I think it was Ross’s Apple computer— and they had this idea of creating some kind of simulation system for entertainment purposes. 

The technology at the time and the expense and complexity didn’t quite work out. The stars didn’t align for them then, but they were also in the process of making roleplaying game accessories for other game systems. Eventually, these concepts evolved into what became FASA Games. 

FASA did the tabletop publishing and development, and the money from that then allowed them to come back to one of their early ideas of the simulation system. I think sometimes I get the chicken and egg wrong. It was kind of the early part of Virtual World where they started developing this extra secret project. FASA was doing BattleTech, Shadowrun, stuff with Doctor Who and Star Trek, and they experimented with simulation stuff and other types of technology using these properties.

But BattleTech had legs; it was their property outright. They were able to pick up some money through other ventures—a lot of people don’t know they did laser tag guns for overseas markets using real helium-neon lasers. They also did some car shows in Detroit in the late ’80s to early ’90s, and had some investment through a Japanese contact. And then, lo and behold, here comes the very first version of the BattleTech Simulator around ‘89, ‘90. 

They had a very successful pen-and-paper games business alongside novels, and then they had this new emerging electronics business. They kind of created the whole idea of electronic gaming. The BattleTech Center was the very first major head-to-head, human-versus-human gaming system that was also a high-fidelity simulator. 

Not only did they have BattleTech, but they were developing other properties to work within the cockpits as well. A lot of people know of Red Planet, which is the Martian racing game, but there were also undersea adventures being developed and other kinds of experiences being developed to really turn this into a wide-market product.

At the same time, the internet came out, PlayStation came out, and they were trying to keep their fingers in all of those markets while still trying to develop this core out-of-home entertainment technology. Unfortunately, it’s a very capital-intensive business, and creatives are creatives, and business people are business people, and sometimes they collide a little bit. FASA eventually sold Virtual World to Shamrock Holdings.

This is what they often call the Disney era where Tim Disney of the Disney family and Charlie Fink were running the company at this point. They expanded around the US with a heavy presence in California, but over time, that really didn’t work out. Location-based entertainment was a very, very difficult market, because of some business decisions made.

So then they ended up selling the company to Microsoft. And then Microsoft saw the value in a lot of that development team because they invented so much of the gaming space we know today. They became one of the launch titles for the original Xbox console with MechAssault, and TJ Wagner, who was one of the QA guys for the pods later became the producer for MechWarrior 4 and other iterations of MechAssault. The arcade side of the business, the location-based side, was sold off, and I bought it in 2005. 

Virtual World kind of invented the whole eSports scene, right? They were on the Sci-Fi Channel back in 1996 for the World Finals. They were using ISDN for network connectivity for head-to-head before we had ubiquitous internet and broadband, or certainly online gaming services as we see it today. 

It also gets credit in some circles for the whole gamer tag thing. Your name is on the LCD screen outside of the older cockpits. Not only did you have a live camera technology (that Disney would use at Pixar later by the way), but this whole idea of a procedurally generated narrative based on how you performed within the game with your peers. You got to print out a log with all of the stats, your name, and callsign on the cockpit and on the printouts, and the camera shows replays on your screen. You became the hero of your own story. It was the beginning of interactive narrative. 

Later, Red Planet had a game type that was really well known in very small circles, but a very passionate circle of people played this version of it called Martian Football—a multiplayer, multi-role racing game. People had different vehicle classes for different types of roles and unique scoring systems based on that role, and it all kind of aggregated to a team composite score. I wish I could find the interview, but somebody involved with Team Fortress had acknowledged that he had played this little obscure game known within the development community called Martian Football, and that was kind of the genesis of this wildly popular multiplayer, multi-role, first-person shooter. The tank, the scout, the medic, they’re all aligned with the rock-paper-scissor design elements of Red Planet.

So it’s just been fascinating learning more about that and trying to tell the story about this little fringe game simulator company that, while not a commercial success, I would say has been wildly successful in its influence on contemporary gaming. But it is a hard story to tell in the modern era.

Sean: You can absolutely draw a straight line from Virtual World to something like Overwatch or even more modern hero shooters or MOBAs. But where did it start with in terms of software? While the current version of the pod software is based on MechWarrior 4, the pods themselves predate that game by quite a bit. How did the initial software evolve over the years? 

Nick: Well, this is where I get a little bit of trouble. Chris ‘Uncle Lynx’ Chapman has a better command of that technical history, but the original software was on kind of a custom hack of Motorola CPUs, Amiga 500 components, and a combination of Apples for the console and compiling the real-time game ROMs, and then it would send over ARCnet to this custom card cage of boards and CPUs and whatnot. It would receive that over ARCnet, and then the games would execute using that core cage of computers with their own internally developed IO subsystems. Then it would send the positional action metadata back to the Apples, and then those would interpret that for the real-time replays and logs. 

That fundamentally stayed the core system for just a couple of years. The early 1.0-type generation, they were sprite based. The technical team was brilliant in how they pre-rendered all of these sprites from different positions or for different body parts to fit the power constraints for that kind of 3D visualization. 

I think it was around the 2.0 system that a lot of similar core components and interfaces were re-engineered, and that was when actual shaded polygons were introduced—kind of like a hybrid between the MechWarrior 1 and MechWarrior 2 eras, but certainly a lot more full-fidelity. Being early custom GPU technology, there were a lot of limitations on how many polygons you could have out there without utterly destroying your frame rate, which was already pretty iffy in a multiplayer environment.

This is kind of where some of the mad science of the original Clans comes in. I don’t know if it was 1.0 or 2.0, but the original OmniMechs were a byproduct of the limitation on storage for ‘Mech objects. The OmniMechs are comprised of a smaller pool of ‘Mech pieces that could be rearranged kind of like the Taco Bell menu, right? That was really why the OmniMechs were created the way they were; it was because of the technical limitations of the pods in that generation to have enough content in varying ‘Mechs—use the same six or eight pieces for every ‘Mech in the system. 

So that went up to about what we would usually call 3.0. So 2.0 and 3.0 were kind of the black coffin-looking pods that a lot of people saw. There were more subtle variations under the hood related to the CPU or the card cage geometry for the audio systems. Technology-wise, the big leap came between 3.0 and 4.0. So 4.0 which was called Tesla—that’s where the pods were the big round pills. It was a big, big technology shift; the core computer was actually a real PC. 

In the early days that was a Pentium 90, but it was a dual EISA architecture. It was a Pentium 90 running on Novell DOS, and it was custom-written around this video card called The Division card. The Division card was a dual EISA architecture—massive power draw, the thing was absolutely huge, two full-length EISA cards. They had to put additional capacitors in the case just to keep the 12-volt and 5-volt rail from tanking the rest of the CPU and locking it up.

A whopping eight or 16 megs of RAM texture memory. Had its own cooling fan on its RAM. This was true texture-mapping 3D graphics—a huge jump, with all new internals, the cockpit used actual multi-function displays, multiple CRTs, and little VGA monitors all over the place.

It also introduced the Infinity Optic System—which is still pretty unique to this product—where you’re looking through a beam splitter that also doubles as a mirror through one side. There’s also a concave mirror behind it that creates this kind of illusion of a three-dimensional image using a 2D image presented from overhead. That way your focal point is moved out about 15, 16 meters from where you sit, so it’s a cool trick of the eye and the same kind of thing used for holograms. But with all the other displays and the 12-speaker surround sound system, it was really the bee’s knees at the time—certainly way ahead of most things in the consumer space.

But that really wouldn’t last long. I believe that a lot of the core components for the game were actually rendered and developed on SGI machines. The consoles at this time were still Apples, of all things, and they’re still using the customizable card for the I/O. But in this system, real full-color texture map graphics and improved frame rate. 

They were also trying to develop multiple products within the platform. They released Red Planet first, and then BattleTech came along and expanded out. A little footnote of history, but that was going to be the base code for MechWarrior 3, which was in development using that code branch. This was right around the time that ownership transitioned and they decided to leave the Tesla-based engine behind. It went to Zipper Interactive for them to finish developing MechWarrior 3. 

There were some other games that started in the pods. A lot of people are familiar with Crimson Skies. It was initially going to be in the pods as a game called Corsairs, but it didn’t quite make it across the line to release. But luckily, Crimson Skies saw life in quite a few other venues.

Sean: Yep, love Crimson Skies. 

Nick: At this point, we’re now in the late ‘90s, early aughts. The company had repositioned after Microsoft sold off the arcade side of the business. The cockpits then went into mostly Dave & Buster’s locations through revenue share arrangements and these older PCs—these Division cards were like a $7,000 or $15,000 per video card, I hear both stories—were really difficult to maintain and there were significant code limitations.

Mike Firestorm and some of the other people at Virtual World extended the program—mostly through hacking, frankly—to create new content.

Well, those machines were literally starting to rot—the PCs were just corroding and rotting on the inside. Supporting them was just untenable. And so, circumstances came along where Virtual World was able to work with former partners at Microsoft to get access to the MechWarrior 4 code as well as some other partners overseas at a company called Game Leap.

A deal was struck to produce the 5.0 system, leveraging the existing cockpit platform and most of the guts but with a Windows-based PC running off-the-shelf GPUs and a highly modified version of MechWarrior 4. That transition was around 2002, 2003-ish? All machines out there were replaced with the new Firestorm hardware. It was reasonably well adopted, but a lot of the older-generation players moved on because it was a completely new game. We also lost Red Planet at the time, so it was the only game in the cockpits. 

Then late 2004, early 2005, Dave & Busters wanted to move away from attendant-driven attractions, regardless of revenue, so they terminated the agreement with Virtual World, which then led to my opportunity to just buy it out.

Sean: And since then, has it remained that BattleTech: Firestorm software, or have you done any kind of modifications to it? 

Nick: We’ve continued to do some modifications. When I bought the company, it really became, ‘Let’s just keep them flying as long as we can,’ right? I’m more of a hobbyist enthusiast than a corporate overlord. It’s never been my day job. So after I bought the company, we continued to try to use some of the development resources to enhance the software, but because we weren’t working with the same commercial base/share arrangements and most of the owners were hobbyists and collectors with a couple of commercial operators, they just didn’t have the capital to pay the kind of fees Dave & Buster’s was able to absorb for development. 

So, we kind of did a lot more grassroots development, working within our community, working with our friends the former MekTek guys—who brought a lot of that MekTek content to the Firestorm system—so that our hobbyist players could have new stuff that may not have been appropriate for commercial use but was fine for private use.

A core group of owners and former owners still try to keep the software going. Not a lot of updates these days. It’s a little bit more compartmentalized, but we’ve provided resources to individual owners or people outside of our community that give them a chance to modify it. At the same time, the cat was kind of out of the bag that we were also working with MekTek back in the days of their big free MechWarrior 4 release that was done in a partnership with us, Jordan, as well as Smith & Tinker and Microsoft.

Sean: That was really cool. I remember that. 

Nick: We’ve tried to quietly do things in the background to benefit the community because there was no real financial gain from it. We’re not really in a licensing position to make money from it, but we could do some fun community-centric things for people to check out and hopefully enjoy. So much of that felt like it was cloak-and-dagger because we weren’t super great self-promoters. Like, it was really hard to get the word out of there. 

But, we continued to do that, and eventually, we were able to port Red Planet to Windows working with a group out of Dallas. If I get anything that goes on my resume of all the work other people have done while I did not write a line of code, I will claim to have provided those guys with the materials while they provided the time, skill, and sweat to give us a functional port of Red Planet. There are some unique characteristics because of modern CPUs and GPUs, but at the end of the day, it’s all the original textures and most of the original math. We just now have CPUs that can keep up with the math. That changes a little bit of the game dynamic.

Sean: I’m guessing it runs faster?

Nick: It runs a lot faster. The original Red Planet didn’t bother doing certain collision volume calculations because no CPU could keep up with the math. So things that wouldn’t kill you before while you’re zooming through the caverns of Mars at 1,300 mph, it’s now able to calculate the seam and that collision volume so it says, ‘Oh no, that did kill you.’ So it’s even harder now.

Sean: I believe the last time we chatted was in 2018 when the pods were going to be moved to Grand Rapids at the Virtual Geographic League Underground. What has happened since then? Are the pods still there? 

Nick: Well, since then we’ve moved some of them back to Kalamazoo, Michigan. I kind of got back on the horse and rented a facility that allows us to store them in between conventions. During the colder season, we still do the kind of Open Pod Days as a throwback to what I used to do back in ‘99 with my original cockpits. Those Open Pod Nights are throughout the winter where; one night a month, we try to get the word out, and then people can come to play them for free.

We’ve always done it for free. We do gladly accept donations—rent’s not free! It’s never been a low-cost hobby. But we’re always trying to come up with ways to make it accessible while still trying to figure out how to pay the bills to keep it going. 

We’ve been able to do that for about 25 years now successfully. Most of the rent-paying revenue comes from convention appearances and things like that. Jeff, up in Grand Rapids—Ghost Hawk—he continues to do some convention stuff and I do some convention stuff. We actually share a couple of different sets to the point where I often don’t even know which ones are his and which ones are mine. I have the original Chicago eight—those are the ones I usually keep in Kalamazoo—but we’ll take up to 18 or so cockpits to particular venues.

I couldn’t tell you whose or what because he does so much of the heavy lifting maintaining them. But we still do those through the winter here. Jeff still has some in Grand Rapids—not at the same location. He’s got them back at a private site as well. We just kind of take turns having events or picking each other’s pods up for convention appearances.

For example, I’m going to Cleveland this weekend. My son and I are going to the Cleveland Game Classic and working with Tom and that team over there where people can come play the pods; it’s unlimited use by buying a badge. I think literally the week after that they’re going to be up at a cyber security convention in Grand Rapids. It’s a part of that event there as a free entertainment thing included with your badge.

Sean: Speaking of maintenance, how hard is it to keep these pods operational? I mean, they’re all over 20 years old now. Is it just a lot of lubrication of joysticks and foot pedals, or do you have some real hardware mishaps with these things?

Nick: All of the above! They were originally only meant to be put together and assembled on-site once and then never to be moved again. They really weren’t engineered in a way to be used multiple times. 

Obviously, they moved around quite a bit even before I got my hands on them, but then we took it to the next level because we wanted to take them on the road. We believe that there was interest and demand to take them to things like conventions, but we had to rebuild them because it would take about three hours to take apart each cockpit and then put it back together, and they would take on quite a bit of damage being assembled or disassembled.

Give a guy a welder and a whole bunch of 2×2 square tubing, and he will make something. I ended up making a customized base that the entire cockpit would sit on. And if I lowered the main structural base of the cockpit by a few inches, I could actually roll it under 80-inch doors.

We did that as an experiment with big heavy-duty casters with the idea that all we do is unplug the power on the network and roll them to the next location. That cuts out the time and damage from constant disassembling and reassembling. It mostly worked. A couple of iterations of that mobility platform, but it survives today.

We learned some better care and feeding of these ‘new’ pods when you transport them. We only move them on air ride trucks and we only use the lifts or the docks. We have different ways that we pack them so they’re structurally held together instead of wanting to just fall apart.

But other than road damage, just the usual kind of electronic shenanigans you get with anything that’s old and has a few thousand wires. They were wise enough when they engineered these to use optical encoders instead of potentiometers for all the axis controls in the pedals and the sticks. Those suckers are robust! That kind of stuff holds up. 

The bigger problem is people just being rough with them. Sometimes heat-related issues are just cabling that oxidizes. PCs have probably been the biggest nightmare of them all. About five, six years ago, we were really running into some major problems getting PCs that would play nice with our unique geometry for the software.

Luckily, after about 10 or 20 grand in experiments, Jeff was successful in finding a configuration that was stable. He bought 20 or 30 of those PCs. Later he had Frank in Minnesota—the operator there, the Fallout Shelter guys—engineer some custom-made LCDs to replace the CRTs for the MFDs inside. 

There are times it’s been super stressful and very expensive, especially when you have things crashing at a convention. I remember going through 12 PCs in the early years at one Gen Con.

Sean: Wow. 

Nick: Imagine trying to troubleshoot them and get them up and running when there’s a three-hour line! That was a lot of stress back then. Nowadays things are a little bit more stable, but we’re starting to see a little bit of a tail of interest. Maybe part of that is cause we hate raising the price. Inflation-adjusted, I think you’re paying about a third per game than you would have to pay in Chicago back in 1992.

Sean: Which is a great price. 

Nick: It’s fun. If you’re a tinkerer, you understand networking and more of electronics than PC stuff, it’s a fun little mental challenge to create this whole experience in this dynamic environment. When a new player comes in, all of that goofiness is invisible to them. It’s the Disney-esque effect. Like, they got to go in and have this cool experience, make a bunch of noise, live out the story, and share that experience with other people.

Even with the old MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries graphics, most of the time—I stress most of the time—people come out extremely happy and so thrilled with the experience that they had no thought of the graphics. 

But every now and then someone will see it from the outside and say, “Oh, that’s really dated.” Like, yeah, it won’t matter inside there, but I understand. 

Sean: I think the MechWarrior 4 graphics still hold up, and I think the experience is really just having those MFDs and the crazy controls. If you’re allowed to say, what is the current hardware configuration for your PCs running in the pods right now?

Nick: I couldn’t tell you which generation Intel i5 they are. I mean, it’s a pretty mid-grade CPU from about three or four years ago. The original Firestorm stuff was running on 440 MX series NVIDIA chipsets. Now, I think it’s running something probably still about five, six years old, but 75 times more powerful than those original 440s we were using.

It’s not a slouch but it’s grotesque overkill for the engine and graphics load. Luckily, because we’re using all SSDs now and gigabit networks, they stay pretty high performance for our use case. All of the other I/O sub-components are still the original back to 1996.

Sean: And what happens when one of those things goes? Is that something that we ever have to worry about? 

Nick: Yes, we do. And that’s one of the reasons why our owner community is pretty tight. Because when someone wants to buy cockpits, they can buy cockpits if someone’s willing to sell, but the software does not come with them. The software is still technically licensed by Virtual World. You still have to get a license transfer—a seller cannot transfer the software to you. If you’re buying their pods, it still has to go through me. 

We try to leverage that a little bit to ensure that whoever buys into our community is going to be a positive contributor and understands what they’re getting into. Over the years, I’ve managed to find people who can repair our custom boards, but that pool is getting shallower. We’ve maintained a decent supply of unobtainium parts, and most people are pretty careful with it. 

Unfortunately, if somebody was careless and just did a real number on them… I know there was a set that was in Montreal, Canada, that was not really licensed. They bought them from somebody, but we had an agreement with them. It didn’t work out. 

None of the owner community will generally help you if you’ve been blacklisted or blackballed—you’re on your own. And certainly, no one is going to sell their own parts to somebody who is haphazardly damaging or destroying parts because they think they’re smarter than everybody else and don’t want to work with the community to protect them.

We’re a little insular. I’m a gatekeeper a little bit, but it’s been relatively successful. More cockpits are operating today than when I bought the company because of stuff we took out of mothball status.

Sean: This is just a silly question: what are the odds that eventually we will see one of these pods running on just a bunch of interlinked Raspberry Pis? 

Nick: It’s a matter of somebody committing the time to do it right. Over the years, we’ve had lots of people come along and say all you got to do is this, it’s so easy, or whatnot. And I have quietly given source material to quite a few people that seem genuine, they seem trustworthy and willing to work within the box—if you will—of somebody else’s intellectual property for testing and development. 

To this day, of everybody who’s told us how easy it would be to do A, B, and C, nobody has ever delivered anything except for the guys out of Dallas who did the Red Planet port. And they were already in the owner community. They were cockpit owners at the time, so they had a vested interest. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work in our favor for it to be more financially successful for them. 

But yeah, it’s possible. And we have even helped and provided mature people who couldn’t believe that we were providing source code. They were like, “Wait, you’re going to give me the source code for this?” Like, yep. Go ahead. Do it. 

Sean: It’s a really old source code anyway. 

Nick: Well, at minimum, if you can understand the I/O, you can understand a lot of how this works, but there is a good reason why nothing has ever been produced that is anything like the original cockpits. Nothing. I mean, people sometimes compare it to that Macross or Star Wars projection bubble system. Those are great, but those are just regular arcade environmental consoles with a fancy projector. Nothing has come remotely close. Cause it’s hard and very, very expensive. 

Sean: Fair enough. Let’s move on from the hardware and let’s get into a little bit more of the software. So when BattleTech: Firestorm came out, it was basically just the ‘Mechs from MechWarrior 4, but then as time went on and versions were released, you got the ‘Mechs from MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, Vengeance,  and also a whole bunch of other ‘Mechs. Now you’ve got quite the list of ‘Mechs. 

Is there a sort of meta to the current BattleTech pods? As in, are some of them just strictly top-tier choices? And have you done some personal modifications to try and maybe level the playing field? 

Nick: This is a tough one. When we were a bit more organized and had more of an active owner-player community, I tried to continue some of the traditional Virtual World-type events.

Those events were kind of rooted in this community and the idea that the game was centrally balanced and went through a tremendous development cycle to ensure as much as possible that we weren’t breaking the economics of the game. And as time went on, it was becoming more and more important that we had more new content for newer players. That was more important than making sure we were putting out a high degree of balance and quality control. 

At this point, we had kind of lost our ability for it to be economically feasible, and we were at a crossroads: do we maintain extremely high levels of control over what software people have so there’s equilibrium in the balance of the ‘Mechs, or do we give them a little bit more freedom and autonomy to develop their communities as they see fit? It was a big struggle, but we decided that we would end all of the traditional national-level events and ratings in the master system because we no longer had quality control.

There was a good reason to do it, but there was no longer an effective way to manage it and keep things consistent across all of the different operators. So we started focusing more on the quantity of content or variations in content. It was early on when we started empowering certain people to actually develop ‘Mechs in the game or actually get the ‘Mech Bay working.

Some cool stuff about the way the ‘Mech Bay works in our case because a lot of the restrictions that you’d normally have when you build a ‘Mech in MechWarrior 4 don’t exist. Because our balance required quirks that did not fit well in that existing hardpoint system, some of that was turned off. We could do things that you couldn’t do in MechWarrior 4.

On the flip side, it allowed you to do some pretty serious rule-breaking as well. At the end of the day, we put out a lot of fun ‘Mechs. In fact, most operators have more ‘Mechs than you see on the sheet. The UrbanMech is still there, the BattleMaster, the Warhammer… there are a few that aren’t even in our ‘Mech sheets that you can play at most places. And because people had the ability, we also did a 3025 variant version where you could only pick a 3025 ‘Mech, but it was actually kitted out and balanced to the 3025 rules. We learned that within the virtual space, the 3025 builds are wildly out of whack with the dynamics of the tabletop gameplay—anybody who’s been around knows this. But this was just a fun, goofy thing that we did for 3025-only events. 

Some people might have over a thousand different ‘Mechs at their disposal on their set, but 80 of them are way out of whack from a balance standpoint. But we also lost the ability to control the stock ‘Mechs, so if you are playing at one site, you don’t actually know if that stock Atlas didn’t have a couple of artillery strikes on it as well. If you are a defending master traveling from one site to the other, you may be playing a completely different version of the software, and you can’t defend against that successfully. 

So there’s newer content, newer maps, and lots of newer ‘Mechs. Many operators can create their own ‘Mechs if they want. There are even some newer branches of the code out there that came out of one of our owners in Denver. Craig had an active YouTube channel where he goes in and shows you how to maintain, build, modify, and play the Tesla cockpits. He was kind of the first person that we ever really gave the official wink to using a camera inside of the cockpits for putting our content online. Kind of the pulling back the curtain, but he did it in such a cool way. It’d be cool if more people paid attention and noticed the content he made. 

Sean: Okay, so the pods have been running on heavily modified MechWarrior 4 for quite some time, but MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is out and now we have MechWarrior 5: Clans. How possible would it be to create a version of those games that works on these pods? 

Nick: I mean, it’s always possible, it’s just a matter of time, effort, and resources. Back when MechWarrior Online first came out—self-promoting plug—I think I was the first to post on the original MWO forums. I ended up setting up an account because I was having some phone calls with Russ right as he was getting ready to go public. I’m a little shit—I found their domain and posted the first post. That’s lost to the dustbin of history.

I’ve always tried to have a relationship with Piranha and those who are developing MechWarrior, but I don’t think that there’s ever been a compelling reason for Piranha to have that relationship. They’ve always been kind, and back in the Mech_Con days, I kind of pitched the idea of, “Hey, if I ship you some pods that you can keep, you could use those and put your game in it for promotional or convention use. In turn, let me use the software in our other pods.”

Those kind of things just never really gain traction. I don’t know if you ever saw what their ‘Mech pods were but I will leave everybody else to speak to that. 

Sean: I played MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries in one of those ‘Mech pods. They were okay, but it wasn’t up to the experience of the Tesla pods.

Nick: Russ admitted that he had never actually seen a BattleTech cockpit in person, which was a bummer because I think it could have been inspirational for him and a lot of his team. But quite a few people on his team had been in the pods and were very familiar with them. They were always pretty cool to us they always treated me really well when I would join Randall, Brent, and everybody at Catalyst when we got to Mech_Con.

But at the end of the day, they would have to develop it for the pods, or they would have to give us source material and we would develop it within our owner community. I don’t know if that makes sense for them. Source code is very sensitive and we are… not. If it was a singular liable entity they could sue if it leaks, sure, but there’s nothing to get out of this turnip.

If there were an economic or feasible way to run something like MechWarrior Online on individual PCs, we have people who could probably take a stab at it, but most of the energy goes into just paying the rent and keeping these pods from turning into molten husks. While the idea of new software sounds cool, we still sell out with our old game. When we got to Gen Con for BattleTech‘s 40th anniversary, we had eight cockpits and we were still at 96, 97-percent utilization.

The nerd in me would love the newer graphics, and I’d love the new dynamics. I haven’t played a lot of the newer stuff, but when I did, it felt more like a first-person shooter. I’m not sure how well that game would translate into our full simulation environment. I’d love to take a stab at it or resource people who are passionate and have the time and skill to let them take a stab at it. But, I’ve given away all of the keys to the kingdom that I can. 

Sean: Fair. I’ve played a lot of the newer games, and it would require a lot of hacking controls. They do have versions that work with controllers, which means you’ve got something that can map thumbsticks to joysticks. There’s a possibility there. More possibility in MechWarrior 5 than MechWarrior Online, I’d say.

Nick: And even when you look at what we have in Firestorm now compared to the original, I mean, two vastly different types of games, right? The old system was given this unfortunate nickname of ‘ButtonTech’ because there was so much engineering—the min-maxing capability within that system was absolutely phenomenal. You could do different coolant priority geometries, coolant loops, and coolant behavior if you lost certain limbs. Same thing with energy; you could bump up energy consumption for a particular subsystem, be it weapons or myomers or sensors, to have a particular outcome. But then there was also a consequence, either heat or whatnot. That crazy high-level, real-time engineering where you spend more time configuring your own ‘Mech than fighting on the battlefield. 

With MechWarrior 4, we just took the secondary capabilities and threw them out to the MFDs. You have a pseudo communications panel. You have your weapons with pretty basic controls for link type prioritization and then mapping. If there’s enough meta information within MechWarrior 5 that could go out to these other places, a lot of cool things could be done. You’re taking most of the content off of your main screen because that’s your window to the world and moving most of that to your radar screen. Comms, heat and damage tracking, weapons info, all that could be routed to the MFDs instead of the main GUI. I’m sure there’s enough there to do it.

Sean: Even just discussing it, you get the idea of how monumental the task would be of adapting something like MechWarrior 5. You’d have to reroute the entire UI along with remapping all the controls for the cockpit. 

Nick: There are seven monitors and over a hundred functional controls, and in the Tesla 4, each button in the MFD had two or three sub-functions. One button could illuminate three different ways to indicate a different status indicator and eight of those per MFD. There was just so much input/output going on that was important in those advanced modes. Even with MechWarrior 4, there was only so much you could harvest to be important during that type of advanced real-time combat. MechWarrior 5 would be cool, but I would let people way more creative and smarter than me figure it out. I’m just the enabler. 

Sean: If you had a magic wand and could do anything to the Battletech: Firestorm pods, what would it be? What would you add? Would you give them magical preservation powers? 

Nick: To be honest, what I would like to do more than anything before I am done with this is get the original Division card-based ‘Tesla BattleTech’—the ‘ButtonTech’ I was talking about—ported to work in the Windows environment as we did with Red Planet. Because it is a unique, important part of the history of BattleTech.

I have source code for it, and we have comparative code in the Red Planet port, but it doesn’t solve everything. But if there’s anything that I could do for my legacy, hopefully, these will end up in a museum and get properly preserved. That’s what we’re going for; keeping them alive long enough for a museum to understand the importance and tell the story and care to preserve it.

If I could get our MechWarrior 4 ported to Windows (and if I wouldn’t get sued), I would be happy if it went out to the world for free. That’s always the constraint. Microsoft and Topps take very seriously how their intellectual property rights work. Virtual World is a very narrow sliver and I always want to be on the right side of the law and lawyers when it comes to that. 

That would be my thing. Even if only five of us play it, I want the world to be able to see what was the Tesla BattleTech pods and how special and cool it was for BattleTech fans.

Sean: Talk to the Europeans. They’re the ones working on game preservation right now. 

What does the future hold for Virtual World Entertainment? What do you have going on in the near future? 

Nick: This winter we’re going to continue to run our pod events here in Kalamazoo. We continue to work with our other cockpit operators, trying to help them keep them flying. Of course, we have one commercial operator still down in Houston, and that is our friends at Metcorp.

I’m gonna keep trying to ride the convention train with Catalyst Games as long as we can because these events are actually how we pay our rent. When we stop appearing at conventions, it’ll mean the end of Open Pod Nights and a lot of that type of preservation effort will probably come to an end.

And then, well… then it’s the end game of can we get them in a museum to be successfully maintained and preserved and presented? To tell this story of this brief moment when video games were something physical, and tell that pivotal story in gaming history.

The focus is always to keep on flying, trying to jump over that hurdle immediately in front of us and we’ll keep going as long as we’re having fun. And people care. 

Getting the word out there is hard. It’s a very noisy environment. Thankfully, you, Nic, and Sarna have always been a part of that. I remember doing an interview 10, 15, 20 years ago about our relationship with Catalyst and the things that Jordan and Ross are doing. We really try to tell their story and, hopefully, we earn a place in that history.

Sean: I think you have, and I will do everything I can to continue that preservation work. Thank you so much for hanging out with me this afternoon and talking about Virtual World. 

Nick: Well, thank you so much, and thanks for being a part of that and helping make it happen. 

Sean: Anytime. 

Thanks again to PropWash for taking the time to talk to me about his BattleTech pods and the challenges of video game preservation. If you’d like to learn more, head to Virtual World Entertainment’s Facebook page, or head to the MechCorps Discord server here.

And as always, MechWarriors: Stay Syrupy.