This week on the Eye Racing Down Shift. We're back for really it's been
how long, Kevin? I think it's been since December. The boys can't
seem to get their calendars straight. So I'm looking at my phone right now
and I don't have a text. Phone call. Be a team and Greg
Hill gives us updates. We've all been waiting. Rain is quite the project.
It's a whole team initiative, all this morse strapping. Welcome to the
Eye Racing dash It. I'm your host, Greg West. I'm back of
the boys, Kevin Bobbitt and Chris Leoni. Wait, we are back,
like really back as in actually here. It's been how long Kevin. I
think it's been since December. That's been a long time, so not long
enough. Wow, Oh, it's good to be back. We're gonna do
more of these, we promise. We have calendar reminders. We do it
right, but we have to check out a therapy. I mean it was
It's it's been a long time coming, and Chris has been pushing for this,
to be fair, He's been the guy that's let's go and then find
things that get in the way. So yeah, we're gonna do better,
right, Chris. Yeah, well we have a reason to do this because
for for this one, we have a sponsor. Uh. This week's e
Racing Downshift is brought to you by the butt Kicker, Gamer plus, gamer
Pro and hap to connect haptic hardware and software that reproduces accurate and powerful sim
racing effects. Road tires, garsis and more used by professional drivers such as
Stephen Wilson, Tommy Milner and Max Esterson. Buck Kicker can help bring your
lap times down drive better with buck Kicker. Visit www dot thebut kicker dot
com for more information. Yeah, you're right, I did that in one
take. That was pretty good. But that was excellent. I'm excited that
we have a sponsor, so that's cool. That means people are listening,
right, Yeah, thank great, Yeah, thank you. But yeah,
little ego boost for me. But you know, and shout out to Angelo.
We got it in there. We did all right. Well, okay,
we've been gone for six months. What have we been doing for six
months? Besides developing rain? There's been a lot going on. But but
for me, I've been to a couple of races. It's been awesome.
Been back to the track, been to uh amster more Speedway from NASCAR race,
went to Lime Rock for the MS race. Um, and I've missed
going to races. Um, I love races. I've missed going to races
too because I'm looking at my phone right now and I don't have a text,
phone call, smoke signal, email, slack message, discord message teams,
invite teams and then that never works. Yeah, okay, well let's
see. Uh, We've been working a ton obviously. Outside of this,
I've played a lot of golf, been been playing a little golf with Kevin.
He does, he does accept my phone call and invitation to those.
If it's about golf, I'm always avail um. But yeah, other than
that, watching time fly, It's funny when you break a year down in
a three month increments, the years go by really quickly and the hair goes
grave really quickly. Yeah. What about you, Chris, what are you
been up to? Um? Let's see when I'm not playing mobile pinball,
because that's that's my time suck these days? Is that the go to mobile
game? Now? I just like playing pinball. And I'm not going to
spend five thousand dollars to put an actual cabinet in my house because we need
to spend that money on the air conditioner that's been leaking on the wall.
A tough week to have no air conditioning. Yeah, it was. I
was lethargic yesterday. I mean it was Emily and I were just talking about,
you know, those old Sears air conditioning commercials from the nineties. Have
I triggered any memories from anybody of like watching Nickelodeon? No? No,
no, not at all for yourselves? No? Oh well, anyway,
Um, crisis solved. So but on the Eye Racing front, obviously,
those of you who have downloaded the Eye Racing Companion app probably get bombarded by
notifications for me every single week with all sorts of stories. And then of
course my uh my pet series, the Eye Racing off Road Championship Series has
been really competitive on what you You didn't know that I'm the guy. I
know you like dirt? Oh wow, okay, interesting to me. The
more I like off road racing. What can I say? Um? How
about that the Companion app. We haven't even talked about that. And I
lived in Breathe Companion app for like six months and I completely forgot to mention.
Yeah, good job, there's a Companion app. Now. Yeah,
check it out on the iTunes store. Uh and uh Android Store. Yeahs
not actually iTunes store. iTunes doesn't exist anymore, or it's just the Apple
Store lap store. So it's free. It's cool, lots of fun.
You can watch your I rating go up and down and up and down or
keep the mind down down down. Yeah. That's why I just recently right
now because you can't get any lower than zero. Yeah, but let check
out. But I'm almost there, so uh, check out the I Racing
Companion app. Also check out if you haven't been on logged in the UI
recently. A lot of really cool stuff in the UI, A lot of
really cool stuff, quality of life updates and I Racing. That's kind of
been the name of the game recently. Uh and yeah, a hint of
things to come. So uh, speaking of quality of life updates, we
got a great guest, the guy that's at one of the at the what
is the helm of the ship? One of them is that my not turn
turn correct? Yeah all right. Executive producer I Racing Greg Hill sat down
with Kevin and I probably reluctantly last week. H and we had a really
great chat on projects that are in development. Hints of things to come and
kind of how he got to where he is. Really great discussion, looking
forward to sharing it with everybody. So without further Vice President and executive producer
of I Racing, Greg Hill. All Right, Kevin and I are excited
to have our first guests in a while on the podcast. Vice President and
executive producer of I Racing, also my boss, Greg Hill, made time
to join us today. Greg, thanks for jumping in. Welcome to the
show. Thanks for having me, guys. I am happy to be here
and happy to kind of give people a glimpse on behind the curtain on some
things we're working on, hopefully, and some things that have been going on
in iRacing. All right, well, let's get into it. Let's address
the elephant in the room. During the Spot twenty four events, there was
a situation that pretty much everybody's aware of a lot of people driving with tires
dipped off on the grass finding advantages and lap times and things of that nature.
We are taking that very seriously, though we've already got some initiatives in
place. Right. Absolutely, yes, we're taking that very seriously. Unfortunately,
we didn't take it seriously enough leading up to the event. I mean,
we knew there was an issue where people could gain an advantage, but
we didn't know and we didn't anticipate well enough how much it would be utilized
on that weekend. We could have handled that far better, We could have
done better with messaging, and it really was a lesson for us, an
opportunity for us to learn how to approach these things better. The good news
is, I mean, we've taken measures to make sure that this doesn't happen
again. We've formed a team here at I Racing who are going to really
keep us accountable, keep everybody informed about what's going on in the community,
about upcoming events where things like this might come into play, and to make
sure our developers are doing everything they can to get ahead of these things.
Again unfortunate where we apologize that that happened. The good thing it's coming out
of it, though, is we've got some fixes and improvements that might not
have been made for a while were it not for this. To start the
fix and a patch this week, we're going to be solving or according to
our very intensive testing, solving the issue where an advantage can be made by
dipping your tires. In addition to that, We've learned well through that thought
process, and we all had different ideas on how we can solve this right,
a different approaches, physical rules based, etc. There are a lot
of really cool ideas that didn't necessarily get to the core of fixing the problem
with which we did in the fix that we're patching, but we're more like
product enhancements. So we're working on some product enhancements that we'll be shipping in
our upcoming builds. With the way essentially the tire picks up debris and how
punitive debris is on your racing when you go off track, or for example,
what it feels like to physically go off the race track versus how it
is now in Irishing. It's too smooth and it doesn't feel physical enough.
So between the patch we're putting out now and the improvements will be shipping and
later builds will end up with a better product. And for sure we learned
how to do things better when it comes to working with the community and communication.
Yeah, and I think it's really important for the community to know we
take this stuff incredibly seriously. That was a frustrating weekend for us as well
as it was for anybody else. But the important thing was not to do
anything knee jerk, not to do anything that may felt good during the moment
but maybe not have been felt as good on Monday, and really address the
core issue. And with the updates that we're putting out this patch and the
things that we have, you know, pending in future releases that we learned
from this, it's it's going to make the product, not just take care
of the exploit, but it's actually gonna move the product forward, and that's
really important and a nice side effect for us doing the deep dive. Now,
moving on from things like tire tipping, let's talk about some of the
more fun recent develops, developments that we've had, because we've had a lot
of really exciting projects. You know. The one of the biggest ones that
we've worked on the last year really is the updated Atlanta Motor Speedway and working
with NASCAR and the iterative process where how that track really came to be what
it is now. In reality, it's been a really phenomenal couple of years
when it comes to realizing just how valuable this technology we've built up for the
last twenty years is and how well it can be applied to the real world.
I mean, we built erasing and our track building tech capabilities, our
car building capabilities from the ground up to be as real as possible, authentic
physical simulations of the real world. So over the years, we've built up
technology that has just been perfectly suited to quickly building race tracks that are realistic
and interact with the physics of our race cars and realistic ways. And when
NASCAR and SMI approached us for a number of different prototype projects, we quickly
identified that these tools that we've been building to make real racetracks in the real
world using laser scans could also be used to help prototype potential race tracks.
We were able to take just general ideas that we're being considered verbal ideas and
apply those to some of our tracks, in particular Atlanta, like you mentioned
Greg, where they just through discussion said, you know, we're thinking of
trying a superspeedway. We're thinking, no, let's try thirty two degrees of
banking, but we want to keep the walls in the same spot. We
pushed back a little and said, you know, that's a lot of banking.
Maybe we should try a little bit less. But we tried both.
We ultimately ended up around twenty eight degrees and our first kind of prototype modeling,
and this is all just based on like verbal discussions, but we were
able to figure out just basically how to create that right banking profile by essentially
the trigonometry, working our way through the track, the existing track, and
reverse engineering it to match their spec once we got some feedback on how that
drove. Because we're able to instantly drive these tracks using of course I racing,
so we gathered feedback from our testers and our really skilled vpas we call
them Vehicle production associates. They're basically the aliens on staff that we have here,
so we got their feedback, we got it over to SMI. They
incorporated that feedback into an actual, like early CAD model of the track.
We were able to take that CAD model and actually directly import it into our
tools and build our geometry onto it. So this was like a more advanced
stage of prototyping. It's not just verbal. Now we're actually iterating their model.
We found some problems with that, some bumps um, some issues that
didn't create great racing, so we got them feedback. The front stretch I
don't had some issues. Turned two had some issues so they got us another
model and we built it again, and it's just an iterative process. We're
set up so well to do it as well because we have those drivers I
mentioned. We have the ability to broadcast as everybody, so we can show
our partners racing like virtual racing, and they can see how the tracks race,
they can adjust their plans, and it just the process throughout the development
of Atlanta I think was incredibly informative to our partners and ended up factoring in
significantly to their their final products, which everybody saw this past month. That's
awesome, Greg. A couple couple of things that to add to that.
One is that we have an article that personally only did that you know,
really in depth on this process. So if anybody's interested, we probably put
a link in the bottom of this or wherever we can put links, right,
Greg. And the other thing is math. Right. You mentioned multiple
times math in there, and the people ask me from time to time how
do I get involved in in the gaming world or the stim world and math?
You know, study math, take math classes, not something I did.
That's why I work on the market side. But if you want to
be a developer, I think that's super important and worthy of sharing. You
know, we do some programs with STEM and things like that, and you
know people you mentioned trigonometry, and a lot of kids think that in high
school. What they say, when will I ever use that? Well,
you could use it making a cool video game or sim So just something I
found interesting that people may not think of when they think of all, I'm
just going to go play a game. Absolutely, we've got I mean staff
members with all sorts of expertise in various areas. I mean mathematical backgrounds,
mechanical engineering backgrounds, UM actual just race car knowledge from the real world.
Just this really great, diverse group who have come together combined all of our
knowledge to create this great product. And it's certainly true that nowadays UM people
are looking to get into simulation or gaming to eventually become a developer, have
more tools at their disposal than they've ever had in the past. With me
in schools dedicated to these fields, and it's kind of a new age compared
to I mean when I got into the industry. Well, Atlanta is not
the only development project that we've been working with very closely with NASCAR we just
watched last night. Actually from the time that we're recording this. We had
the the E NASCAR Coca Cola Eye Racing Series at Chicago, and that was
a big project for us as well. How amazing was that that was similar
to our Atlanta project and that it was kind of like initially a skunk works
project that we're working on with NASCAR in this case, and it went through
a real iterative design process that led to us honing in on the layout that
you guys saw on the Cooke broadcast last night and people will see next year
in the real world. What was front here is that we actually went and
did some laser scanning before prototyping out the layouts, and we knew the general
neighborhood that NASCAR hoped to run this race in together with the cooperation of Chicago.
We knew some prospective roads that they expect they thought might work well for
racing, but we weren't sure. So what we did was we sent out
a scan crew and we overscanned. We scanned all the roads in that area
because we knew we'd have one shot at it and we didn't want to miss
a road that turned out to be important. And I'm glad that we did
that because we ultimately ended up with something very different than the original proposal and
one and basically the configuration that we ended up with used those roads that wouldn't
weren't planned for initially. I think we ended up with a far more raceable
track and we had a lot of issues to work around once we actually had
the data that led us to make those decisions. It was really hard to
know just conceptually how it would play out until we had that data and we
were running our testers out on the track, getting speeds for the straightaways,
seeing how bumpy the surfaces were, understanding how the cars would navigate those bumps,
or understanding if the city, with cooperation of NASCAR would actually have to
do some some patching of some bumpy areas or maybe some trimming of some curbs.
So first that first iteration, before the smoothing, I was a very
special experience trying to wrestle at one of the next ten cars around where just
you couldn't get grip. You just said you were always losing the rear end
because you're just bouncing everywhere. It was. It was a wild ride for
sure, And for one of the bumpier parts was Lakeshore Drive, which in
the original iteration was substantially longer than what we ended up with, so the
speeds were higher and it was bumpier. So I believe we solved that in
a decent way. And really the end product is awesome. It watching it
last night on the Coke broadcast, it just it looked amazing. When they
run there in the real world next year, it's gonna look amazing. And
we're just so excited to have worked on the project with NASCAR and to see
it finally yield something in the real world that's gonna the benefit NASCAR and motorsports
in general. Yeah. And once again, we've had so many development projects
that have been working in concert with each other. I mean, the one
that I guess the other one that has really been at the front of mine
was the updated Indianapolis road Course. There's an opportunity really to talk about to
talk about how exciting is for that community that's been begging for it, but
also maybe to explain, you know, what's coming down the pipe regarding regarding
that track, right, Yeah, well, um, Indianapolis getting that out
in time for this year's running, the kind of the doubleheader IndyCar and NASCAR
were there last weekend was something we wanted to do, but we didn't have
the the staffing available to really jump on it until Atlanta was shipped. And
as you guys know, Atlanta was shipped recently, and that's a tall order
to turn around Indianapolis, and basically we had a month to do so.
But we we took some strategic approaches that basically gave us the opportunity. We
put all four of our track builders on it, modeling small sections and using
our track tools, we were able to cobble those pieces together into one larger,
comprehensive track model. We selectively upgraded some of the artwork at the track
for the scenery. We entirely upgraded the drivable surfaces and the catch fencing,
things like that, and we were able to pull it off. We shipped
the road course in that build. We really had to focus on that and
from here on out we're going to focus on completing the remaining configs and for
sure shipt the oval in September. Excellent. Well, let's talk a little
bit about some upcoming features. I would not be able to live down Twitter
or the forums if I did not ask you about rain. They would not
let me sleep, So I've got to ask where we at, Well,
how's how are things going in the waterworks at I Racing, Well, Rain
rain is quite the project. It's a whole team initiative. Really. It
touches on every area of the product that you can imagine. Our our dynamic
track engineers are artists, our vehicle dynamics engineers, the tire physics are visual
effects artists, our web engineers who need to develop the interfaces. So really
it's all hands on deck. We've all been working at this for the last
couple of years. That said, of course, we're balancing that with other
projects, but we've made a ton of progress since we last spoke about this,
oh about a year ago, and we're getting really close to having something
great. That said, there's more work that needs to be done to get
it up to our standards. I mean, oftentimes it's it's said at irasing
that we can fall victim to over engineering our features, and that's true certainly
to a degree perhaps with our rain, but we want to make sure that
we do it right and that it's the best rain in leamentation and meets members
expectations, customers expectations, and really that it's a phenomenal experience that it adds,
it's to the racing experience of our customers and creates a new element,
of course that we wouldn't deal with in the past, new strategies, and
it's gonna be phenomenal. So keep keep stay tuned, stay tuned. For
sure, we'll have more updates soon and it's gonna be awesome. Pashtags,
I'm sorry. So to clarify, we're not just grabbing the old grip slider
and pulling it down when it rains. No, no, it's not like
No, for sure, that would have gotten it out the door quite quickly
grip times like point five. But we're physically modeling so much that goes on
in the real world with the weather, the atmosphere, how rain actually is
created, did the mix of humidity and atmospherics that are required, the location
of the track, the altitude of the track, the historical data that kind
of sets precedence for how weather works in those regions. Additionally, how the
race cars handle the wet track, the various levels of wetness, the tire
tread, and how the tire kind of deals with water and expels water through
its channels, how the racetrack itself changes significantly based on whether it's dry or
whether it's wet. I won't dive too much into detail on that. Some
special sauce we're still working on, but for sure, in the real world,
if you go to a race track in the dry, you're not going
to be able to approach it the same way as in the wet, So
get ready for that. Well, nice nice segue speaking of approaching things in
the same way. A new feature that we're planning for release in September,
hopefully I didn't just jinx it, but active reset. This was kind of
your brain child, I believe, and that really Uh, we'll let you
introduce what exactly does that do? Yeah, well you could say that as
my brain child. I thought it was a cool, original idea. But
when I proposed it, I brought it up to this engineer, Grant,
who's one of our key guys, and he's like, oh, yeah,
I designed that in nineteen ninety as a mod for I Forget Grand Free Legends
or something. And then I when we announced it in a podcast the other
week, a bunch of our members were like, oh, yeah, I've
wanted that forever. So regardless, it's gonna be cool. Grant voice.
Did you just do Grant Kiwi in there? I think was there? It
was great? Yeah, yeah, Grants from Nick? Sure day job there,
Greg. So I don't know if you're going to do a voiceovers for
anybody. Some of us have been known to try Grant voices, that's for
sure. So what active Reset is essentially is it is a system that will,
in testing mode, allow our racers our drivers to capture a moment in
time and continue along down the track as they might have otherwise, and then
hit another button that will return them to that exact moment of time, with
all the state of their race car in the world around them being the same.
Now, you might ask why would they want to do that, Well,
there's a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is learning.
I mean, to learn a race track is really hard and not all
of us have infinite time. So this feature will give people the opportunity to
practice sections of race tracks over and over again. Imagine you're at the Nurburging
Norche Life for example, do you really want to put in a seven minute
lap when you might only have a half hour to spare for I racing on
a given evening to learn one particular section that you have trouble with. So
this will be a great tool for people to improve. You could practice different
things like getting off onto pit road, getting off of pit road. It
doesn't even have to be sections of the racetrack or even the purposes that we're
thinking of. I'm sure people will come up with purposes and uses on their
own. We figured out how to use it as an internal tool already,
especially with all the iterative stuff that we've been working on. It came to
light for us internally at just the right time. Yeah, that was really
smart, and it's saved some time on the production end, and well that
will result in faster delivery to all our drivers and customers. We are building
this feature not only to be what I described, but also to be the
foundation for a much larger offering. Um. I'm not going to dive too
much in detail on what that might be, but I think people can connect
the dots on some ways we might some directions we might go with, um,
experiences that can be played over and over again, and situations we might
put people through for both learning and entertainment. Well, Twitter is going to
be fun after this, Yeah, that's a pretty good tease though. I
like it. Yeah, that was that was great. But all right,
let's move on a little bit. Now, this is a this is where
we do the like the Diane Sawyer in Deep you know, see if we
can make you cry. No, I'm kidding. Uh, Let's talk about
your story. You know, you and Steve Myers have a really interesting story.
How you got involved with with was was before I racing, even with
Papyrus and whatnot. And you know, you guys started absolutely lowest possible level
and worked your ways up into being you know, a tandem that is really
driven what eye Racing is today in conjunction with some other people as well.
Um, but it's a it's an excellent story of seeing you know, how
somebody can you know, your career and how you've developed is pretty cool.
So let's let's talk through this and just kind of roll with you know,
how how did you get started in this crazy career years? Oh yeah,
sure, Um, there's a lot to unpack there, but I'll try to
try to do it justice. And it was for sure, um, not
just myself, but a lot of people were on this path that really helps
with my growth and the trajectory I took. But really um. From the
time I was a kid, I was a kind of lifelong gamer and simulation
fan. Um and I I mean I grew up um like idolizing, you
know, the big back in that era that we're like game designers that were
like celebrities like Miyamoto and John Carmack and all those guys. So I grew
up wanting to become a game developer. I was super into gaming. I
played tons of games growing up, of all types. I was into racing
games, shooters, some less serious games, some more serious games. I
was like, I don't know if you guys remember Hard Driving, the old
arcade game. I played the heck out of that. M Jaguar x J
two twenty was one of my favorites growing up, all the way through to
the more kind of like Arcady Ridge Racer. On the more simulation side,
I was a big fan of like F one seventeen a Stealth Fighter if you
guys remember that, and the Jane's combat simulations. Yeah, just all all
kinds of gaming simulation. It was a geek for growing up, and I
was lucky my parents gave me the support and the they got me the mac.
They got me the SEGA. It's let me follow that those passions.
UM. When I got into college, UM, I was really into competitive
online gaming. That's the late nineties where that kind of scene was really starting
to blossom with shooters in particular, UM, at least when it comes to
like team competition, and there were like essentially it was the To me,
it felt like the foundation of esports and in many ways with the beginning of
the trajectory for where we are today with esports like competition systems, UM,
ranking systems, UM basically rules to keep people accountable. UM. So I
was involved a lot in that. During that time. I was a computer
science major at BU Boston University, and I also worked at electronics boutique in
the Watertown mall at the time. It was one of those in every mall
across America back in the day. Right for sure, spent a lot of
time in those but in this capacity I was stocking shelves. But it was
a great, really stroke of luck that this location was kind of the hub
for employees of Looking Glass Studios. If anybody remembers them, they made the
Thief games and dou Sax and Impressions games and this company called Papyrus Racing Games.
Those folks all bought their games at this EB Games, and I was
kind of like the PC gaming guy at EB Games, and I became friendly
with, I mean some folks at each of these studios, and I managed
to talk my way into a job doing QA at Papyrus. It's just a
kid, basically, um, but I was fortunate and I got the opportunity
basically like an internship, and spent the summer finding bugs, reporting issues,
passed, pestering people with things I found. I know how that feels.
Yeah. I was really fortunate though, because I think maybe more than I
should have. I really tried to understand game development, and I bugged programmers,
I bugged artists, I bugged the production folks, and really tried to
understand how they do what they do, just beyond QA. And that led
to future opportunities for sure. The next summer, after another semester or a
couple of semesters of college, I came back, tinued pestering people, learning
more and more until I was able to convince them to bring me on full
time, which thank goodness, they did, so I kind of from there,
taking some opportunities fighting for some opportunities finding my way to to do different
things kind of outside the scope of QA. I learned how to like make
race tracks with my computer science background. I mean, I'm not a coder.
I didn't really think I'd end up being a coder, but it gave
me a good foundation to talk with those folks for sure, and I had
some really good guidance from mentors when it comes to design and how to design
a game system or how to document how a technical document essentially. So really,
I had the support of a lot of awesome folks throughout that process.
UM. For we mentioned Steve so Steve is one of my most longest term
UH associates. We go all almost all the way back. He also joined
Papyrus as a QA tester and he also, like myself UH pushed to constantly
try to learn new skills and take on new things. And between the two
of us and some other folks, for sure, UM really QA became the
farm team for for future developers and UM, which is awesome. That's how
a lot of people kind of become developers historically, and now we're seeing it
even at I Racing. UM We're we've got a super talented crew of QA
folk and um some of them have have started to actually become many developers,
uh and full well full on developers, which has been amazing and rewarding to
see. You have to have a good QA Steve Meyer's story. You know,
everybody knows Steve is his Twitter personality and you know the big personality that
he has. You gotta have a good one, oh for sure. Steve
and I are co workers, collaborators, We've we've been in this together since
almost the beginning. We've been through thick and thin, hard times and good
times throughout Gosh, how long has it been? Uh, I'm I think
I'm really old now that I think about this. It's like working with Steve
Mayers will do that to you. Yeah, that's certainly true. I think
late nineties. So Steve also joined Papyrus like I did as UM a QA
tester m. But he was also kind of aggressive, like I was trying
to fight for opportunities to try more things, and we're both lucky the company
was up for it gave us those opportunities. I remember one of his first
really big kind of production projects that wasn't QA but was actually development, was
the design and implementation of driving lessons or track tutorials for NASCAR Racing two thousand
and two. We built this really awesome in sim in game tutorial editor,
and Steve was tasked with basically creating the guides. So we were fortunate enough
to get the participation of Daryl Waltrip and get a basically Daryl to read our
scripts and provide us with the material for those, and Steve's job was to
cut up all those clips into those lessons. Now, we had a lot
of racetracks and that added up to a lot of dialogue. So Steve spent
just days weeks months cutting that up, listening to Darryl every day, all
day. And Daryl was awesome. We were lucky to have him, but
Steve, hearing anybody's singular voice all day, every day for weeks at a
time can kind of kind of drive one mad. And I think it kind
of drove Steve a little mad. He got a little loopy towards the end
there, um, but he persevered and those were really cool. Cool A
Southern draw after that, note Steve, and the Southern draw scares that is
frightening. Um geez. Another one, I think it was NASCAR two thousand
jeez, I'm losing track of time. But the Patriots were in the playoffs
the Snowball game. It also came at a time when we were in basically
crunch towards the completion of one of our box titles, because back then we
worked on box titles. Every year we'd push out a basically a version of
software. And well, we were all Patriots fans, and the QA manager
wanted us to well, this is a little rebellious what I'm staying saying here.
The QA manager wanted us to late at night on a snowy day to
be doing smoke tests. But the freaking Patriots were playing in the Raiders in
the snow Bowl game. And well, Steve said, hell no, We're
gonna watch the Snowball game. So he got our whole crew basically the leverage
or the the ability to go watch that game instead of loading up track after
track after track for four hours until we fall asleep under our desks. It's
pretty awesome. We're gonna happen. Let the rest of the staff here,
there's yeah, they're going to rebel against you and Steve now and be like,
we're not going to test out that edit this out, please but yeah,
that was that was crazy. UM. Now I mentioned that crunch,
Um that was a different era, so well, maybe not for gaming in
general, but for us for sure. Back then we used to exist as
everybody knows, box product to box product, UM NASCAR three, NASCAR four,
NASCAR two thousand two, NASCAR two thousand and three, et cetera,
UM call Nascar legends. And it was rough because we were owned by a
publisher, UH, and that publisher, Opera ran Papyrus essentially like you read
about many publishers run game developers, game development studios these days. They staff
them up in pre production, they work everybody hard, um too hard um,
and then the game drops and they they fire a great number of them.
And unfortunately that was actually kind of the last several years of Pyrus were
like that. We would work on these these new products, We come up
with the designs, we do the pre production build up, the staff work
like crazy, and then ship it and then bam, the shoe would drop
and we'd lose a whole bunch of our fellow developers, our friends. And
it was hard and it was demoralizing at times to try to like make good
product while navigating that. UM. I mean, we persevered. Steve and
I managed to nimbly dodge a number of these layoffs. Many of our friends
didn't. But it was really that experience when we formed I Racing and after
Papyrus had been shut down, it was really important to us and to Dave
and to to all of us to create a sustainable culture where we didn't run
iRacing like that like the publishers ran some other game studios. So I don't
we work super hard at iRacing. We're I mean, we're always pushing UM,
but we've what we've built. We knew it had to be sustainable because
the iRacing product, as we all know, is sustainable, and it's something
that's um needs to be worked on by people that really care and who are
passionate about it. So hopefully we've built a good culture here. I think
we have UM, but certainly part of that was informed by previous experience in
the in the industry. Now, I'm not just saying this because you're here,
but iyan, I can I feel like I speak for a lot of
people. The cultured at I Racing is fantastic. It is interesting, especially
coming from my background where people relentlessly pursued excellence on a daily basis, and
I was given some mentorship as I transition from an athletic life into a professional
life that that won't always be the case. And you come in eye Racing
and for the most part it is. And that makes life a little bit
easier because everybody here really cares. This is not just a job to people.
Everybody owns what they're working on, and so it's really cool to see.
So you moved out of QA, You've started to grab some other responsibilities
or skills I should say, not as a responsibilities. And right about this
you're talking about this is about the time, you know, Papyrus was shutting
down and eye Racing was opening up. So what did that look like from
your lens? Well at that point, I Well, the thing is with
iRacing, the foundation of I Racing was with John and Dave's backing, we
were able to successfully purchase the source code for the basically GPL NASCAR racing codebase,
so we already knew that some of the skills that we've been building up
over the years that papirrates would be applicable. So one of my first tasks
was to essentially build up in art department together with some really talented actually moters
that we hired, these Project Wildfire guys who were matters of our product because
of actually a decision Steve made to release and it turned out to be a
great decision to release our sandbox tool, which is our track building tool,
to the community, and through that we learned of some really talented artists and
matters who we later hired, so together with them kind of formed the initial
art department and how we would make tracks and laser scanning and things like that
flowed from that. A lot of what I did also in the year early
years was building on some of the design stuff that I picked up at Papyrus
and actually working with Dave to build out and John and Steve whole bunch of
us. But in terms of documentation, I took on basically documenting what is
iRacing, how does iRacing work, what do the interfaces look like, how
does the user interact with them? I guess if we were to talk about
it in today's terms, it kind of be user experience and systems designed,
and in some shape or fashion that turned out turned into what became the member
site and really the foundation of how iRacing works with competition and how people find
races and all of that, so balancing that with art, which is one
of my passions, and production still involved with that. I mean, those
were the first few years. Really I've always been involved with or try to
stay involved with our programmers and working with them to make sure that. I
meant, tons of these projects that we work on with coders like are overlapping,
like production and coders need to collaborate together. So I certainly evolved myself
a lot and that making sure that our production team had the support from the
coders and the couders understood what the production team needed also in terms of features,
so I kind of put myself in the middle of various departments and making
sure that everybody has what they need to be successful and planning and all of
that. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that, a
lot of people involved in that, but just touching on my experiences, that's
where I spent a lot of time. And then I guess I've fast forward,
you know you have now and most recently got the big promotion executive producer
of I Racing. I mean that's got a I mean, looking back over
the last you know what twenty five years. Like I said at the beginning
of this, even before we went on the air, that is it's a
really cool story about how you know, doing things the hard way and doing
things the right way and can pay dividends. Oh yeah, for sure.
Um, it was a hard road. I'm it is super It's fulfilling to
be working at this company in any capacity and what we're working on is just
so special. But yeah, I'm lucky to be contributing in the role I
am contributing in and surrounded by such talented people, smart people, I mean
smart, artistically brilliant people. It's just awesome. And to be able to
see from the the role I'm in, I get to kind of see a
little bit of all of that, which is really cool because every day there's
a new challenge that people are working on, and every day is fresh,
So it's it's awesome. Like I guess, as you said, Greg,
I mean, it's kind of been a journey and kind of something I hope
to always do and hoping to continue doing as long as I do a great
job and keep things going in the right direction. Well, I'd say things
have been going pretty well. But thank you for making the time for us
today. This has been fantastic to sit down and hear about your journey through
the industry and through you know, Papyrus and I racing and giving us a
glimpse behind the curtain as well. It's been an absolute privilege and a pleasure.
I think we have a patch we have to get ready for now,
though, don't we. That's certainly true. Yeah, we have some laughs
to turn or well, we've got our experts hard at work turning those laps.
But let's hear what they say and get that patch out, all right.
One last question, Greg, will you come back on the show sometime?
I think I have a in your grace period, don't I. I'll
give you a couple months. I'll check your contract. Yeah, well we'll
check it out. Happy to happy to join you guys. There's any number
of other subjects we can touch on that would be cool to just kind of
jam on and explore. And it's really cool what we do. There's always
lots to talk about, and there's never any lack of new things that are
interesting to go over as well. Actually, I do have one last question.
Why does Steve Myers call you the Hammer? Okay? Well, um,
yeah, I guess so sim racing wise throughout the years, I've never
been the fastest by any means. I mean, I think Steve can run
laps around me on the virtual race track. But we did a number of
years ago have a company outing track experienced day at Thompson Speedway and uh,
we're all late models, I think are retired cup cars, um, and
we all went out on the track and I just found it to be something
that was I don't know, it just gelled with me. And I was
turning laps around Steve whereas a kind of turning tables. Uh, he was
wondering, who's this guy who's blasting past me lap after a lap and we
got off the car, out of the cars and he's like, what that
doesn't make any sense. It's Greg. But so he gave me the nickname
the Hammer because I guess my foot was hammering down that gas pedal. All
right, everybody, Uh once again Greg Hill, executive vice president or vice
president Hammer Hill? They Hammer Hill. Yes, Steve. On the business
card, I had the longest job title for a while. I think you're
your your business cards the longest one. Now it's got all all of the
titles on it. But executive vice president I Racing. Um, thanks again
for making the time and uh yeah, let's go put a patch out and
make things better. All right, let's do it all right, back to
the show. We'll always great to have a guest on the show, even
better when it's somebody like Greg Hill, who is just an absolute treasure trove
of knowledge, institutional memory, all of the things that makes I Racing,
you know what it is. And he's an inchcol cog and this big machine
that is I Racing so looking forward to. So we could have talked to
him for hours, but he only had so many hours to share with us.
But I think we'll definitely have him on again. He agreed to that,
and ish right, maybe not the next one, but he'll be on
again. And and you know, the three of us have kind of looked
at the numbers on the podcast and it is clear our listeners like to hear
from from guests, and in particular EYE Racing guests, that we're going to
do our best to have somebody interesting on every one of these episodes. Nobody
do announced yet, but we're working on from good names and there's tons of
interesting people here at EYE Racing, So um it doesn't matter what department.
People have cool backgrounds, how they got into this, what they do here
at Eye Racing, it's all pretty unique, and so look forward to that
in the upcoming episode. Yeah, no doubt. Um, it's gonna be
a lot of fun to hear from all these different guests moving forward. I
will also say, if you're listening to this on release day I Racing off
Road Championship Series, they let me put the plug in the finales at Crandon
to night. If you're listening after release day, it's in the YouTube playlist
anyway, don't forget to rate, subscribe, it's not nice. It's gonna
be a cret race. It's some of the most exciting racing we have on
Eye Racing. Well, we're gonna bang in if flying through the air,
mud, going everywhere. It'll be a good race. We're gonna have some
fun with them. Angela just popped in because apparently I didn't mute my my
Slack notifications. But that's funny since we talked about it at the beginning of
the show. So let's we can leave that. Week thirty, we're doing
a special series of the Pro two trucks on short road courses it is basically
just drifting, not the light. We're doing the full powered version. Didn't
we do that in the staff league a couple of years ago. We did
those at some of the tracks. I'm pretty sure some staff members didn't come
back after that. That's a story for another time. Thanks for listening to
another edition of The Eye Racing down Shift. It just took six months.
But don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,
Spreaker, anywhere else that Chris has put this thing for Kevin Bobitt Chris
Leoni, I am Greg West, and we'll see you in the next episode,
hopefully in the near future.