Sleek, black, and mysterious, the Net Yaroze was the shadow-twin of the original PlayStation console. This trimmed-down dev kit allowed neophyte developers to write PlayStation games using tools similar to the ones used by professionals. 

The developers on the Net Yaroze were the vanguard of console indie development as we recognize it today. Whilst every platform up till this point had some form of associated homebrew scene, the Net Yaroze marked the dawn of something bigger: a commitment from the world’s largest console developer to foster future talent by way of building a thriving indie scene.

Nowadays, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about a publicly available, consumer-oriented devkit. But in 1997, it was a revelation. The original PlayStation sold over 100 million units, and ushered console gaming into the cultural mainstream.  Seven years before the debut of XNA, Yaroze offered indie developers the dream of creating something for that kind of massive global audience.

When the Yaroze was released for $750 USD, a close-knit online community of hobbyists banded together  to cut their teeth on console game making. Many of them have since moved on to triple-A development, and some have even founded their own studios. I interviewed several of them recently to get a picture of what this early online dev community looked like.

THE ORIGINAL INDIE CONSOLE DEV COMMUNITY 

“There was lots of banter and camaraderie,” says James Shaughnessy, creator of Gravitation. “People would always take the time to help you if you asked how you might go about implementing something, or for help with bugs or with graphics or audio, and give feedback on the games you made.”

“It was all very vibrant and bristling with enthusiasm,” Chris Chadwick, who made the award-winning Blitter Boy, told me. “It really did feel like a close-knit community of like-minded folk, all feeding off each other’s energy and passion for what we were doing.”

Owners of a Yaroze were given access to an exclusive members-only website run by Sony. They were allowed to set up their own individual pages, which people would use either as blogs or simply to share their games (over agonizingly slow modem connections, naturally).

According to Shaughnessy, the private forums “helped to keep the trolls out.” Communication between devs was vital, because the Net Yaroze was no dumbed-down, user-friendly starter kit. Games had to be coded from scratch in C. though the users had access to certain Yaroze-specific libraries. Still, this meant that the sharing of tools and knowledge was pivotal to getting a full game finished.

Chris Chadwick’s Blitter Boy: Operation Monster Mall won the 1998 Game Developer UK Competition

“There was a core of people that committed to the platform and produced some good games and development tools,” says Ben James, developer of Hotline Miami-style top-down shooter Psychon. “However, there were other people that would suddenly appear announcing they'd just got a Net Yaroze and would soon be releasing the next Quake-beater. Most of the time, you'd never hear from them again. Presumably, they quickly realized that game development takes a lot of time and effort.”

“There were a few people on there that would post questions such as, ‘How do I make a game like Gran Turismo?’ We would have a bit of fun with them!” says James Shaughnessy. “There aren’t really any shortcuts. How many people have bought a guitar and given up because they can’t play like Jimi Hendrix within 5 minutes?”

I ask how much Sony themselves had contributed to this successful dynamic.

“Sony did a pretty good job at creating a community for Yaroze members,” says Scott Cartier, developer of Decaying Orbit, who hails from California . “The only part I felt was lacking was how support was divided between Japan, Europe, and the US. Each region had their own member site and forums. It wasn't until well into its life that I found out that the newsgroups for EU Yaroze members were much more active than the US.” 

This was a common complaint from the people I interviewed.

“We were pretty much isolated from the Japanese Yaroze community, who were producing some amazing stuff!” says Chris Chadwick.

An example of this work from the Japanese newsgroups was the isometric adventure-RPG Terra Incognita, famed for its technical excellence and hilariously shonky translation. It showcased what the Net Yaroze was capable of in the right pair of hands. 

The remarkably polished Terra Incognita was made by Mitsuru Kamiyama, who went on to work for Square Enix

THE LIMITATIONS OF THE SDK

“We were given pretty much all the power of the PlayStation on the Net Yaroze. It wasn’t underclocked or anything like that,” says James Shaughnessy. However, there were still technological hurdles to overcome. A big one was the inability to load files from the CD in real time, like the PlayStation could.

“The main technical limitation was how your entire game had to reside in RAM. While there were methods to stream files from your PC via the serial cable, this was mostly for debug since non-Yaroze members wouldn't have that capability,” says Scott Cartier. 

Ben James says, “Although the PlayStation had 2MB of memory, the Net Yaroze libraries took up something like 500k of that, so you were left with about 1.5MB to play with. I did run out of RAM once or twice and had to curtail the amount of graphics.”

Developers had to think up crafty solutions to squeeze out what they could from the limited space. Scott, who was working on a physics-based space game, came up with one such solution.

“I was starting to hit some limitations of the Yaroze. Each planet was comprised of several frames rendered out from a simple texture mapped sphere in 3D Studio. I could play tricks with having multiple color look-up tables (CLUTs), allowing for several color variations for each planet.”

This type of innovation was widespread in the community. 

“I don’t think the limitations stopped people that much. The creativity was just astounding,” says Scott. He did have one gripe with the system, though: “Debugging on the Yaroze was painfully slow. The unit was connected to your PC via serial cable, and despite running that interface as fast as possible, it took a minute to download and build to the system.”

“Funnily enough, it was actually the limitations of the hardware that appealed to me, in a way!” says Chris Chadwick. “The Yaroze - like all consoles - had a fixed architecture. You had this much RAM, this much processing power, these graphics capabilities, etc. There was no option to fit more memory, upgrade the graphics hardware, or whatever. Consequently, you could be sure that anything you developed would look, sound and perform exactly the same on any other machine. I liked that.

"It meant it was you against the machine (insert "Theme from Rocky"), pushing it to perform as well as you wanted it to. I always enjoyed the satisfaction gained from successful code optimization. I guess this is an aspect of programming that I learned to enjoy, back in my early days. Not that back then I wouldn't have sold a kidney for more RAM and a faster CPU, as standard!”

David Johnston, developer of TimeSlip, expressed a similar sentiment in regard to working with strict memory limitations. “I always quite liked it, because it made you feel like you were really close to the hardware.”

There were a few other ‘quirks’ that were unique to the Yaroze itself, too. “The first problem I had with the system was that the serial port seemed fond of giving me electric shocks and blowing up the serial cards in my PC!” says Ben James.

The Net Yaroze has become something of a collector’s item in recent years, fetching high prices at auction.